On a swelteringly hot day in Chandler, Arizona, in July 1991, Jane’s Addiction was set to take the stage on the first date for Lollapalooza, a new traveling alternative music festival that the band’s frontman, Perry Farrell, has conceived. There was just one problem.
The band’s lead guitarist, Dave Navarro, who had been trying to get clean but struggling amidst the debauched atmosphere of the tour, couldn’t move.
“I had gotten too high on heroin,” Navarro recalls in the book “Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival” (St. Martins, March 25). “So then I was given cocaine … took a handful of pills and drank a bunch. By the time I got onstage, I didn’t know which way was up.”
According to a number of witnesses, once Navarro and Farrell, who was also using hard drugs, were both on stage, the two got into a fight and started attacking each other in front of the audience. But Farrell doesn’t remember it that way: “I thought we were off the stage. I didn’t know that we were on the stage. Were we?” he says in the book.
The new oral history from writers Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour is a raucous tour bus ride that features interviews with some of the biggest names in music of the 1990s — Trent Reznor, Eddie Vedder, Billie Joe Armstrong, Ice-T and more.
“Any situation when you put a bunch of young people on a tour with probably just fully formed prefrontal lobes … things go awry,” Beaujour, who grew up in New York, told The Post. “There’s lots of drinking, there’s lots of drugs, there’s lots of tomfoolery.”
When Farrell cooked up the concert series in 1990, he was inspired by traveling festivals that were big in Europe. Jane’s Addiction was on the verge of a split and Farrell envisioned Lollapalooza — replete with outsider music acts, out-of-the-box food vendors and booths from activist groups ranging from PETA to the NRA — as a last hurrah that would cement the Los Angeles-based alternative band’s place in rock ’n’ roll history.
Farrell told his agent and Lollapalooza co-founder Mark Geiger that “‘I’m out of here after the tour, so let’s do something good.’”
According to Farrell, Geiger told him, “‘Perry, you can do whatever the f–k you want.’”
“‘I’m going to hold you to that,’” Farrell said.
So, in the summer of ’91, Jane’s Addiction hit the road with musicians including Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour and the Butthole Surfers. Things fell apart immediately. Nine Inch Nails arrived with crusty old equipment that was held together by duct tape and rubber bands. As temperatures reached triple digits, desert sun melted it, and the first Nine Inch Nails set failed spectacularly.
Reznor was furious and trashed the stage. In an interview with MTV that first day, he blamed an “incompetent crew” for the mishap, leading to immediate tensions between the band and Lollapalooza’s roadies.
The chaos continued across the country, through 20 tour dates. Gibby Haynes, lead singer of the Butthole Surfers, was known for using props, such as fake Jack Daniels bottles to smash over his head. At one show, he terrorized everyone by shooting a shotgun loaded with blanks out at the fans.
“You have a lot of wild characters,” Bienstock, who grew up on Long Island and attended multiple Lollapalooza dates as a teenager, told The Post.
Miraculously, the festival made it through the summer and Farrell started planning for 1992.
By then, Jane’s Addiction had broken up and alternative music had gone fully mainstream thanks to Nirvana. Instead of scoffing at Lollapalooza, promoters were actively courting the show for their cities. Headliners that year included Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Ice Cube and Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam’s handsome, flowing-haired frontman Vedder quickly proved himself to be a big draw — and an enormous liability.
Temporary outdoor theaters need scaffolding, and Vedder developed a taste for climbing it during his sets. He’d take his wireless mic and tear up the side of the stage and, oftentimes, dive straight into the crowd.
“Over the gigs, it got higher and higher,” Vedder recalls in the book. “You’d do one, and then you’d notch it up because you survived the last one.”
He was never seriously injured but his adrenaline-fueled antics left marks. “I’d take a shower and realize I had, like, a thousand deep scratches on my back,” Vedder says.
Vedder isn’t the only one who narrowly avoided catastrophe. That same year Haynes, who was performing that summer with the band Ministry, bought a bunch of bootleg fireworks at a local Southern gas station.
He and Ministry’s lead singer, Al Jourgensen, thought it would be fun to set them off on their tour bus. They tried it — and the seats caught on fire. The furious driver called the police.
Shockingly, the cops were nonchalant, as Jorgensen remembers. “I’ll never forget, [the police] just went, ‘Well boy, what’d ya expect! This is s’pposed to be rock’n’roll, not Moat-zart!’”
By 1994, the tour was attracting big audiences and even bigger personalities, including Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan.
The Pumpkins had a mega-hit with their 1993 album “Siamese Dream.” That summer, they were joined on the ticket by the Beastie Boys, who invited a group of Tibetan monks to travel with them, bless the stages and promote the cause of a free Tibet.
Unfortunately, the peaceful vibes only went so far. Corgan had a knack for pissing people off. According to the book, he antagonized audiences by spewing verbal abuse, bullied his tech crew and threw animated temper tantrums during sound checks.
“Billy Corgan was such a raging a–hole,” Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, who were also on the bill that year, says in the book.
Corgan, openly vying for stardom, triggered his fellow musicians. “Billy Corgan embraces the big rock gestures and the big rock idea,” Bienstock said. “That was not really what these other bands were doing at that time.”
The next year, in 1995, another performer made life on the road miserable for her tourmates.
Courtney Love — Kurt Cobain’s widow and the lead singer of Hole — had a reputation for being wild, and, by all accounts, the characterization was more than deserved.
On opening night, Love was watching Sonic Youth’s set when she flicked a cigarette — or threw a bag of candy, depending who you ask — and then took a swing at Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, a longtime rival, who was there as Sonic Youth’s guest.
Throughout that summer, Love’s behavior devolved even further. She repeatedly got so high she had to be carried out on stage. At an afterparty one night, she asked the bartender for a bag of ice and started pouring it on people’s heads. She would lock herself in hotel rooms and haunt AOL chat rooms, where she got into public disputes with everyone from anonymous teenage music fans to Trent Reznor.
“Courtney was the spectacle,” says Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth’s guitarist.
Lollapalooza’s ticket sales dropped in 1995, to the point where the festival only brought in half the revenue of the previous summer. The tour lasted for two more years by featuring big-money metal acts, including Metallica and Korn, but they didn’t embody the alternative spirit and Farrell disapproved.
Meanwhile, various other music festivals with more specific niches — the Warped Tour, HORDE, Ozzfest, Lilith Fair and others — emerged.
Lollapalooza ended in 1997 with an electronic music-heavy lineup that included Orbital, the Prodigy and Devo.
It was resurrected in 2005 as an annual four-day long event in Chicago’s Grant Park, but Beaujour said that the moment in music and culture that the original tour defined was fleeting. (For Jane’s Addiction, on the other hand, history repeated itself with another on-stage brawl between Farrell and Navarro last fall, leading to them cancel the remainder of their recent tour.)
“There was this weird magical alignment in the 90s where the music that was critically acclaimed and acknowledged was also the music that was popular,” Beaujour said. “It coexisted for this really short period … and then it sort of disappeared.”
