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| A fan surfs the crowd at the 2005 Lollapalooza in Chicago's Grant Park. (Photo courtesy of Cambria Harkey/Lollapalooza) |
A Senior Moment for Gen X: First Lollapalooza Was 15 Years Ago
BY MICHELE M. MELENDEZ
Posted on 07/24/2006 7:14:47 PM PDT by Incorrigible
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A Senior Moment for Gen X: First Lollapalooza Was 15 Years AgoBY MICHELE M. MELENDEZ
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[Chicago, Illinois] -- It happens to everyone: Some cultural moment makes you "feel old." For Generation X, now in their 30s and 40s, this is one of those times.
Beneath the buzz for next month's Lollapalooza music festival lurks the jarring realization that the first one was 15 years ago.
"Jeez. Really? Fifteen?" asked Kristen Palmer, 32, of New York City, who braved the mosh pit as a teen at the show in northern Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. "Are you sure?"
Yep.
Back in 1991, music critics called Lollapalooza that generation's Woodstock. It had a similarly youthful, anything-goes spirit, even if body piercings had replaced love beads.
Lollapalooza -- originally a touring show -- has evolved into a three-day event settled into Chicago's Grant Park. It's Aug. 4-6, with roughly 130 acts topped by high-energy funk-rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers and the "Louis Vuitton Don," rapper Kanye West. Nine stages. Even a "Kidzapalooza" area for children.
The first Lollapalooza traveled to 21 cities with just seven acts: Jane's Addiction, Rollins Band, Butthole Surfers, Ice-T with Body Count, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails and Living Colour. Late in the tour, Violent Femmes and Fishbone replaced the last two.
The word itself -- lollapalooza -- was a curiosity, and started people using "palooza" as a suffix.
The dictionary definition: something extraordinary.
That's the vibe Perry Farrell, the iconic frontman of Jane's Addiction, sought in creating the festival. Farrell considers himself an alchemist of sorts, pulling different types of music and energy together.
"It's about revolution, and it's about rebellion, and all those things that young people still believe in and have faith in, that they're going to change things," Farrell, now 47, recently told Henry Rollins, an original Lollapalooza performer, on Rollins' Independent Film Channel show.
"That moment in the early 1990s was where alternative or independent rock started," said Steve Waksman, assistant professor of music and American studies at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. It had its own set of values, Waksman said -- experimenting with sounds and words, rejecting the music business establishment.
The first Lollapalooza mixed rock with rap with punk with funk with industrial.
Today, rap and rock artists routinely collaborate, by design or at the whim of DJs who blend the genres. But the concept was a baby when rapper Ice-T and Body Count, his accompanying heavy metal band, took the Lollapalooza stage and belted out "Cop Killer," a song describing violent revenge for police brutality. They would release it on an album the following year, sparking a national furor. (Ice-T now plays a cop on TV's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.")
The inaugural show was the year before a presidential election in which many fans would be voting for the first time. It was about more than music. Concertgoers strolled among issue-oriented booths with information about voting, AIDS, gun control, abortion, the environment.
"The original tour broke new ground in packaging rap, metal and alternative in one show, but it also broke new ground in including a wide range of progressive political organizations on the tour ... at a time when popular music was only making headlines for getting censored," said Reebee Garofalo, professor of community media and technology at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Reviews were mixed. Some critics wished there had been more interchange among the bands, a wider variety of political viewpoints and a more diverse audience, which was largely white.
Regardless, for alternative music fans, Lollapalooza was THE show.
"This was the first time I remember there being an opportunity to see a bunch of alternative bands all at once, something different and special," said Anna Villines, 36, of Portland, Ore., who caught Lollapalooza in Enumclaw, Wash., near Seattle.
Brett Burmeister, 35, also of Portland, saw the same performance. "I spent 14, 15 hours in the rain," he remembers.
At a show in Clarkston, Mich., near Detroit, "Sod wars had been breaking out through the day as the people up on the lawn ... realized that the grass on the hill was easy to rip up in large, dirty clumps," recalls Michael Absher, 40, of Flint.
Christopher F. Smith, 35, of San Francisco, remembers feeling awestruck after the northern Virginia show: "I was still glowing -- energized and very, very alive. I knew that I had been to something important -- historic -- and didn't want to lose the feeling."
Observers note that Lollapalooza uncovered an appetite for eclectic music festivals, after the big "arena rock" shows that marked the 1970s and '80s.
"It's a touchstone," said Murray Forman, assistant professor of communication studies at Boston's Northeastern University. "It really did change the character of what we've come to expect from our (live) summer music."
Some who have seen Lollapalooza change over the years note that "alternative music" has become mainstream and that the show increasingly relies on corporate backing.
Daniel Goldmark, assistant professor of music at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, recalls a 1996 episode of Fox's long-running cartoon, "The Simpsons": Homer takes his kids to "Hullabalooza" to prove he's still cool. His daughter, Lisa, observes, "Wow, it's like Woodstock, only with advertisements everywhere and tons of security guards."
"At what point do people say something is authentic and real, and when does it become commercial, a sellout?" Goldmark said.
That's a challenge for show producers, who have to keep ticket prices low enough to attract a crowd.
"We've really made conscious decisions not to go too far (with corporate sponsorship) with Lollapalooza, because we feel the fans that are coming out don't really want that in their face," said Charlie Jones, partner and executive producer with Capital Sports & Entertainment in Austin, Texas -- one of the event's current producers.
After 1997, Lollapalooza took a five-year break. It returned in 2003 only to be canceled in 2004 due to weak ticket sales. Jones' firm and Charles Attal Presents, also in Austin, reshaped it last year as a two-day show in Chicago.
The 2006 edition adds a third day. There'll be an art market. Organizations devoted to stopping global warming, getting out the youth vote and other causes will spread their word. Children will get the chance to play music and dance in their own activities area.
Unlike the first Lollapallooza, this is a family-friendly show. Do the math. Gen X has kids now.
"One thing that's consistent with this generation ... they've been concertgoers since day one, and they're still music fans," Jones said. "They're just a little older."
July 21, 2006
(Michele M. Melendez can be contacted at michele.melendez@newhouse.com)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
Ignored it then, so unlike the folks who brag about being at Woodstock when they actually weren't, I guess my memories will be about how I DIDN'T go to Lollapalooza.
Trent used the smoke machines and the strobes--at three in the afternoon. Looked like he was having one hell of a cookout on stage. Sigh.
It had been built up as this great, enlightened gathering of progressiveness, but all I saw were drunk frat boys and dumb hippies with dreads and piercings.
Oh... and vendors selling burgers for $8 bucks. That was so progressive.
Phoebe Cates will always be 18 and beautiful!
Well said.
OMG! Twenty years already! Now I feel old.
Twenty-nine ain't nothing. Talk to me when you hit your mid-30s! ;)
How was "Jane's Addiction"?
LOL!!!!
Caught Lollapalooza in Nashville and Atlanta. Did anyone catch the HORDE shows that followed the next year I think?
Students entering college this year were probably born in 1988. They were born the year the films "Beetlejuce", "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", "Rain Man", "Die Hard", and "Big" were made.
When they were born, the TV show "Family Ties" was in it's final season. Dallas had already fallen out of the top twenty TV shows, and Highway to Heaven was in it's final season.
George Bush was elected the year they were born. Pete Maravich, Heather O'Rourke (the little blonde girl in Poltergeist), Louis L'Amour, Andy Gibb, and Pappy Boyington died the year they were born.
FWIW, as a baby boomer, my critical moment came in 1987, when they re-released the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" album as a CD, and put up banners in the store, with pictures of the Beatles that said "It was twenty years ago, today..."
I'd be there in a second. I saw Poison twice and Sebastian Bach (solo) Great shows!
Did anyone go to "Monsters of Rock" in '88.
Van Halen, The Scorpions, Metallica, Dokken and someone else I can't remember.
I could tell you a story that would make you cry!
Hmph. I never considered myself a part of generation x.
I always wondered about that. I was born in a few days after Reagan's inaguration in '81, graduated high school in 1999 (the infamous "Class of '99") and I was all of 10 years old for the first LollaPalooza. Based on that, I simply figured I was too young to be considerd a "GenX'er".
yep. Chris Cornell continues to impress me even today.
I went to one back in 1991.
Ice T
Butthole Surfers
Jane's Addiction
plus a bunch of other bands I have forgotten....
My first rock concert was the 1983 Texxas Jam in the Houston Astrodome. The line up included Styx, Sammy Hagar, Ted Nugent, Triumph, and Uriah Heep.
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