Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival

An oral history traces the metallic legacy of the 1990s alternative rock circus.

Summer 2025 kicked off with CNN declaring that the American music festival is on the decline, news that arrives on the heels of the March publication of Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival. Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock don't waste much time in their oral history dwelling upon the festival's latter-day incarnation as a destination event in Chicago's Grant Park, and why would they? Lollapalooza transformed from a traveling circus into a stable summer institution, reliably entertaining crowds who wouldn't know or care that it started as a trumped-up farewell tour for Jane's Addiction at the dawn of the 1990s.

The first Lollapalooza rambled across America in the summer of 1991, months before Nirvana released Nevermind, the album that's generally acknowledged as ground zero in the alternative rock revolution. Beaujour and Bienstock suggest that Lollapalooza softened the ground for Nevermind, and argue that the festival had a deeper cultural influence. They posit in their intro that "If Lollapalooza didn't single-handedly inaugurate what came to be known as 'alternative nation,' it went a long way toward codifying its ideals for generation of teens and twenty-somethings via a diverse mix of boundary-pushing musical acts, outsider fashion and art, political activism, and straight-up performative weirdness." It is undeniably true that the festival's heyday coincides precisely with the rise and fall of alternative rock within the mainstream, to the extent that it's difficult to determine whether it was a catalyst for change or merely a mirror.

Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival doesn't spend much time grappling with that question, preferring to depict business machinations, onstage antics, and offstage debauchery. Often, garden variety rock'n'roll decadence degenerated into drug dependency. Every year had at least one act crippled by hard drugs. Heroin was there at the start, when Perry Farrell conceived of the festival as a farewell for Jane's Addiction. It's there at the end, when Failure somehow stumbles through sets on the main and second stages during the 1997 installment despite their bassist Greg Edwards being in the throes of addiction. It's there everywhere in between, providing a refuge for creatures of the night being stuck playing afternoon sets in amphitheaters across America.

Years of consciously-curated festival lineups in the 21st Century have eroded the memory of just how odd it was to see either Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds or the Butthole Surfers in the blazing midday sun. Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story underscores how so much of the alternative rock was a nocturnal underground culture coming into the light. The survivors are the ones that could adapt to the new circumstances, such as Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails, who figured out how to feed off the energy of a massive audience. how to harness the excitement of a massive audience, becoming a symbiotic being that fed off each other's energy.

Of course, the circumstances on the ground changed after the first festival became an unexpected success. Lollapalooza's sequel arrived in 1992, after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" climbed into Billboard's Top Ten, a combination of events that ushered the alt-rock goldrush of the '90s. Those next three years of Lollapalooza are where the music biz figured out if it was possible to package and sell the underground, taking a chance on weirdos as they tried to find artists willing to play the game. Some bets didn't quite pan out but enough did for the chaos to chatter along until 1995, when Sonic Youth headlined a year that illustrated the commercial limits of the fringe.

Although the Sonic Youth year is the one that's commonly cited as the death knell for the festival, Chicago area promoter Andy Cirzan claims in the book, "The real drop-off, the crazy scary one, was '97. That's when the bottom fell out." By that point, Lollapalooza had credible competitors—Lilith Fair, the Warped Tour, HORDE—and, worse, they ran through all the potential headliners. The acts they could pull already knew the game: when Tool agreed to come back for another round, they asked to not close the festival, since they realized the crowds started to leave during the last act.

Tool was the defacto top-liner in a year where Orbital, the Prodigy and the Orb were the nominal future-minded headliners but the cast of characters that populate Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story illustrates how the festival always had one foot firmly planted in metal. The line between punk and metal could be blurry. A good portion of the '80s underground listened to the same heavy rock as metalheads—R.E.M. covered Aerosmith's "Mama Kin" in 1986, the same year Guns N Roses covered "Mama Kin"—and Jane's Addiction, Rage Against the Machine, and Soundgarden were all propelled by guitarists who specialized in some kind of six-string theatrics. All three acts keep popping up again and again through the oral history, acting as a chorus and returning to the bills that were also populated by bands who attempted to be louder than heaven.

Strip away the Sonic Youth year and maybe 1994—Smashing Pumpkins topped a bill that occasionally echoed the tastes of Nirvana, who were scheduled to headline until the last minute—and the Lollapalooza mainstage of the '90s was always dominated by aggro acts. During those first few years, the occasional hip-hop or woman artist gave an illusion of balance, but after the festival was rattled by the soft sales for Sonic Youth, they agreed to participate in Metallica's modern-rock makeover, conceding to a bill filled with loud guitar acts. By 1997, the fest cut loose the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion—who were signed and ready to go—because Korn refused to appear before the indie-rockers. Korn also got pissy when second stage headliners the Eels were elevated to the mainstage after Tricky left the tour without warning: the nu-metal kings made it clear there was no way they'd play before alt-rockers of any stripe.

Brad Tolinski argues in Lollapalooza that "With [Korn's] use of dissonant seven-string guitars, bagpipes, and funk-inspired bass lines there was very little to connect them to traditional metal. And Jonathan Davis's damaged-antihero lyrics were certainly closer to Perry Farrell's than say, Ozzy Osbourne's or James Hetfield's." Fair point but Korn also always read as a metal band in a way that, say, Soundgarden did not. Perhaps it was the dour imagery, perhaps it was the adolescent angst, perhaps it was their Jägermeister sponsorship, but Korn tapped into an ugly, primal energy: James "Munky" Shaffer remembers that "every three or four nights someone would set a fire out in the grass or the kids in front would start tearing out the seats," behavior that pointed toward the riots of Woodstock 99.

Korn played Woodstock 99, as did Metallica, a pair of Lollapalooza veterans who represented a strand of '90s culture that ran parallel to the alternative nation Perry Farrell intended to set into motion with the first Lollapalooza. What began as a cacophony of differing cultures reduced into a din of diffuse rage, a transition Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story that provides the book its unifying thread. Maybe this sour undercurrent is why the book doesn't provide much of a nostalgic kick or perhaps the structure of Lollapalooza itself didn't generate great gossip. Every year, a new round of misfits had their initial enthusiasm diminish as they realized they were stuck in the sticks, playing to the same number of diehards that could fill a club. That repetition focuses attention on the larger cultural shifts that happened over the course of the 1990s, how metallic threads are how a ragged, unruly subculture evolved into an efficient corporate festival.