Lollapalooza-Jewish influence, last analog pop phenomenon

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When I hopped in my buddy’s rusty Volkswagen 33 years ago and headed to a field in Stanhope, New Jersey, I had no idea I was part of history.

But after reading “Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Rock’s Wildest Festival” — a new oral history compiled by Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour about the innovative touring carnival that began in 1991 and still exists today — I’m happy to pat myself on the back and say I was a participant in a massive shift in popular culture. But I’ll also admit I had no clue about the mayhem going on backstage.

Bienstock and Beaujour, two Jewish-American music journalists with years of magazine credits under their belt, came to this project after the 2021 publication of “Nöthin’ But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the ’80s Hard Rock Explosion,” a look at “hair metal” bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison and Bon Jovi.

This picks up where that leaves off,” Beaujour tells me via Zoom. But by focusing on the Lollapalooza phenomenon, “it was a manageable way to talk about ‘90s rock. You have all the main concerns: credibility, selling out, and not being able to control who your audience is.”

If you are reading this and don’t actually know what the Lollapalooza Festival was, have no fear. Beaujour and Bienstock’s book collects over 200 new interviews from most of the musicians that were there during the initial 1991-1997 run (like members of Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, Rage Against The Machine, Metallica, Hole, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins and so many more) as well as the producers, promoters, stage managers, drivers and assistants that put it all together.

The zeitgeist was one of positive change — the recent collapse of Soviet Communism, this new thing called the internet on the horizon — and a culture that put a premium on authenticity. That meant the rise of handmade zines in publishing, the strengthening American independent film movement, and the massive success of so-called alternative rock.

While all of this existed underground in the 1980s, suddenly it was commercially viable, best expressed by the unexpected sales of the Nirvana album “Nevermind.” Importantly, this was achieved with deliberate resistance to (if not animosity toward) corporate sponsorship. The Instagram-branded pop stars of today could never understand.

At the tip of the spear — some would argue actively creating the “alternative nation” ethos — was Lollapalooza.

It was the brainchild of Perry Farrell (born Peretz Bernstein), the ringleader of the genre-defying, Los Angeles-based band Jane’s Addiction. Farrell remains a polarizing figure (go to YouTube to witness him have a violent breakdown on stage last summer), but he’s undeniably a visionary. Jane’s Addiction’s first era was on its last leg in 1991, so he wanted the farewell tour to be special. His group had played plenty of all-day festivals in Europe with phenomenal bills (think Glastonbury), but no such thing existed in the United States.

He and some daring partners decided to put something together — an eclectic program that mixed hard rock like Jane’s Addiction, plus hip hop (Ice-T), techno (Nine Inch Nails), psychedelia (Butthole Surfers) and at least one band that had an elder statesmen quality (Siouxie and the Banshees). Throw in Living Colour and the Rollins Band for that first year and you had a bizarre list of acts that somehow still made sense.

“The connection was that everyone was from outside of the mainstream,” Beaujour reminds me. But within a year, the mainstream would move to them.

Importantly, unlike the European festivals, Lollapalooza would travel around the country.

“We spoke to booking agents involved and for something like this to happen today, it would be like $2,800 a ticket,” Beaujour says with a sigh. I think I paid 30 bucks in 1991.

Farrell was also insistent that there be a midway — a spot at the venue for tents with artists, local food vendors and political activists — and no sponsors.

“Today we’d call them activations,” Beaujour explains, and they’d all be branded.

In those early days, Farrell sought out both left and right-wing causes and invited them to duke it out — something else you’d probably not see now.

This openness to free speech manifested itself during a performance in the Deep South. Some of the more aggressive rock acts attracted a skinhead crowd, and a loud neo-Nazi started causing a ruckus. Farrell stopped his performance, as recalled by Richard Patrick of Nine Inch Nails, and called out, “I’m Jewish. If you want to say what you want to say about me, go ahead — here’s the mic.” (This shut the kid up.)

How much Farrell’s Jewishness informed the show is open to debate. In the book, he speaks a little bit about the fabled year of 1991 — when “Nevermind” came out, and grunge rock became commercial.

He told us how 1991 was the year [Chabad] Rebbe [Menachem Mendel] Schneerson published his best writings, that was the funniest thing,” Beaujour remembers. “That and Michael Jordan won the NBA title.”

Lollapalooza’s other big innovation, now common at festivals, was having a second stage for up-and-coming acts, and also poetry readings and a freak show. In fact, it’s this section that is probably the most shocking — detailing how Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and Chris Cornell from Soundgarden would try to one-up each other by participating.

“The Jim Rose Circus was a Seattle phenomenon, so they were in the circle of trust with those bands,” says Beaujour. That meant the singers would put their faces in glass and (I’m not kidding) eat vomit and drink bile to roars of the crowd’s approval. This is not something a corporate tour’s insurers would allow today.

Indeed, the book does not hold back in describing many scenes of bad behavior. Some of it is harmless — bored rock stars stealing golf carts and driving them around an amphitheater — and others are quite sad, depicting intense drug dependencies and psychological breaks, some of which ruined the lives of the performers.

Sinéad O’Connor famously vanished from the tour in 1995 — just went to the airport and flew home without telling anyone — and then there was the year Courtney Love was there, right after her husband Kurt Cobain killed himself.

“There’s no conceivable way that a person in that mental condition, with those problems, would be allowed to tour today. Our sense of mental health and of liability are so different now,” says Beaujour.

In addition to the sex and drugs, there are a great many stories about the true heroes: the stagehands that improvise and make magic happen under impossible conditions, often at the behest of demanding performers who spend every night getting loaded and screwing around.

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked reading a book about rock ‘n’ roll from before the time of cell phone cameras, but all I know is I didn’t see anything scandalous when I visited that New Jersey field. I did air guitar along to Vernon Reid of Living Colour, drank a warm Pepsi and tried (and failed) to get a girl’s phone number.

I didn’t crack out my abacus to see “how Jewish” Lollapalooza was, but during its traveling years, a good number of Jewish performers were on various bills. In addition to Farrell at the head there was Joey Ramone of the Ramones one year, two-thirds of the Beastie Boys another year, members of Luscious Jackson, Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, the band Pavement (I don’t know precisely which of those guys are actually Jewish, but they all can pass as far as I’m concerned), Beck and, perhaps most importantly, a sizable percentage of the promoters, agents and managers.

Lollapalooza fell apart in the late 1990s for a number of reasons, but it was revived in the mid-aughts as a standalone weekend event each summer in Chicago. It’s still a big deal, but it isn’t really capturing an alternative spirit.

“The central tension of the 1990s,” Beaujour says, “is that if you become that famous, you cannot pretend that you’re an outsider anymore. Your audience isn’t just the kid getting thrown in the locker, it’s also the kids throwing the kids in the locker. You can’t choose