{"id":3576,"date":"2025-04-10T20:11:01","date_gmt":"2025-04-10T20:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/10\/green-day-was-a-boy-band-and-other-lessons-from-lollapalooza\/"},"modified":"2025-04-10T20:11:04","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T20:11:04","slug":"green-day-was-a-boy-band-and-other-lessons-from-lollapalooza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/10\/green-day-was-a-boy-band-and-other-lessons-from-lollapalooza\/","title":{"rendered":"Green Day Was a \u201cBoy Band\u201d\u00a0And Other Lessons From Lollapalooza"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A crowd surfer at Lollapalooza in 1992. John Storey\/Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During each of Lollapalooza\u2019s seven years as a touring festival in the \u201990s, someone or something inevitably stole the <\/span>show<\/span>\u2014sometimes by sheer force, sometimes by dint of controversy, and often by an admixture of the two.<\/span><\/p>\n

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That becomes abundantly clear while reading Richard Bienstock & Tom Beaujour\u2019s zesty new <\/span>Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock\u2019s Wildest Festival<\/span><\/i><\/a>. Speaking with dozens of musicians, agents, promoters, stage workers, and journalists who covered the events in real time, Bienstock and Beaujour\u2014also co-authors of another oral history,<\/span> Nothin\u2019 But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the \u201980s Hard Rock Explosion<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u2014have constructed a snappy narrative of the touring festival in its first seven years. (Lollapalooza\u2019s most recent iteration, as a destination fest in Chicago, is relegated here to an outro.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Taking off in the summer of 1991, Lollapalooza was unprecedented\u2014a traveling circus, inspired by the UK and European festivals that founder Perry Ferrell<\/a>\u2019s band Jane\u2019s Addiction played every year. Pointedly, the U.S. military declined to offer their wares to a youth segment more likely to skateboard and experiment with hallucinogens than not. This was a new counterculture, and Farrell and his festival co-founders, Marc Geiger and Don Muller, had divined that \u201calternative\u201d wasn\u2019t just a musical direction but accounted for a lifestyle.<\/span><\/p>\n

As you\u2019d imagine, Bienstock and Beaujour have gathered way more great stories than there\u2019s space to recount here. But here are ten of the best.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails onstage at Lollapalooza 1991 at Waterloo Village in Stanhope, NJ. Steve Eichner\/WireImage<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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  1. Nine Inch Nails out-rocked their tour-mates even with backing tapes.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The biggest act by far to emerge from the festival was Nine Inch Nails, billed fourth out of seven, playing all summer at 5 p.m., in the blazing midday. This was not typically to the advantage of an industrial act. But NIN\u2019s onstage intensity was second to none that year; their T-shirts outsold the Lollapalooza festival shirt itself. People harped on NIN\u2019s use of backing tapes, but nobody who saw them forgot their sheer intensity. \u201cWe were absolutely dedicated to total mayhem and anarchy,\u201d says NIN guitarist Richard Patrick. \u201cTrent would tackle me several times during the show. I would throw beers at him, I would throw beers at the audience.\u201d Within a year, Reznor was on the cover of <\/span>SPIN<\/span><\/i>; in the fall of 1992, the <\/span>Broken <\/span><\/i>EP would make<\/span> Billboard<\/span><\/i>\u2019s album-chart<\/span><\/a> Top Ten; and Nine Inch Nails was well on its way to nineties rock royalty.<\/span><\/p>\n