When I first heard about Lollapalooza, I was 15 years old, with the morning show on Atlanta’s 99X alternative rock station announcing the news through my clock radio. After a years-long hiatus, the legendary alternative music tour with a funny name was coming back. Jane’s Addiction headlining! Audioslave! Incubus! Queens of the Stone Age! This was Lollapalooza 2003 (presented by Xbox), and this was a big deal.

The few interesting reminiscences of the 2003 revival tour make up the epilogue of Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour’s otherwise detail-packed oral history, Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival. It’s an appropriate end to a story that was already over, the rise and fall (and rise and fall again) of a wild, eclectic traveling stage show that brought live alternative entertainment to every corner of America in the 1990s. It was a time when all parts of the music industry, from record labels to MTV, were getting hip to this whole alternative rock scene.

Bienstock and Beaujour lean heavily on interviews with more than 225 artists, organizers, crew, and journalists, many of whom ponder the broad question of how much Lollapalooza did to usher in the "alternative revolution" in popular music. Was Lollapalooza the catalyst for bringing this music to the masses? Or did the organizers simply see what was happening and ride the crest of an inevitable wave? Whatever it was, Lollapalooza is inextricably linked to the mainstreaming of alternative and itself became a symbol of the market power of this new brand of rock. As Jim DeRogatis, the music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, told the authors, "Who wouldn’t welcome the dump truck full of cash that would arrive at your doorstep in those heady, nutty nineties alternative days?"

The authors only occasionally offer their own pronouncements about What It All Meant. In their introduction, Bienstock and Beaujour declare Lollapalooza created a moment "perhaps the last of this sort—where people believed that music might just have the ability to change the world." Some of those involved, particularly founder and Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell, may have sincerely believed that a traveling rock show could affect some kind of social change, but what’s clear from Lollapalooza is that it helped changed the world of popular music and in particular the business of live performances and music festivals.

This is hardly what Farrell could have imagined when he came up with the idea for Lollapalooza, though commercializing the alternative scene may have been more top of mind for Farrell’s "brain trust," which included Jane’s Addiction manager Ted Gardner and agents Marc Geiger and Don Muller. Originally conceived as a farewell tour for the splintering Jane’s Addiction, the 1991 Lollapalooza already had most of the pieces in place. The tour would hit most of the major media markets but would take place outside of the urban cores, at outdoor amphitheaters and parks in exurbia. Below the headliner was a collection of truly alternative acts, from the veteran Brits Siouxsie and the Banshees to the recent moderate hitmakers Living Colour to the up-and-coming industrial rockers Nine Inch Nails to the unmarketable Butthole Surfers.

"The perception was that none of the bands on that first Lollapalooza were supposed to be able to play to the size of crowd that we would be playing to in the sometimes tertiary places that we were going to," Eric Avery, the bassist for Jane’s Addiction, told the authors.

That would begin to change as early as the second Lollapalooza in 1992, when Farrell’s friends from the L.A. rock scene, Red Hot Chili Peppers, headlined following the release of their mainstream breakout album Blood Sugar Sex Magik. But further down the bill that year was evidence of how fast alternative rock was taking over, even more quickly than the tour’s organizers could anticipate: a little band from Seattle called Pearl Jam.

Represented by Muller, Pearl Jam had been put on the tour against the wishes of Farrell. Their spot was early in the afternoon, sandwiched between the opener, English shoegaze band Lush, and the Scottish noise rock group the Jesus and Mary Chain. But just before the start of the tour, MTV placed the music video for Pearl Jam’s "Jeremy" in heavy rotation. The band blew up.

Stuart Ross, Lollapalooza’s tour director, described to the authors how the intense demand to see Pearl Jam’s afternoon sets challenged organizers’ expectations for getting people into the show efficiently. Rather than a steady stream of ticket holders coming in anticipation of the evening’s headliners, the fans came in all at once. "If we didn’t get people in efficiently, and the kids heard Pearl Jam starting to play while they were still in line, there were times they tore our fences down," Ross recalled. "It was mind-blowing," said Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready, "because you’d see these kids just rush the stage at, like, four o’clock sharp, in a frenzy and jumping over the seats."

These logistical stories, about how the crew and organizers managed and adapted to these wild and unwieldy tours, are far more interesting than most of the backstage antics from the artists themselves. We get it: Billy Corgan was a difficult prima donna. Courtney Love and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna got in a physical fight on the first day of the 1995 tour. There was plenty of drinking and drugs and behind-the-scenes hijinks—the typical touring stuff that revealed that for all of the posturing of alternative artists as nonconformists, a lot of them were all just looking for their own chance to act like rock stars.

But what’s fascinating is how much Lollapalooza’s organizers created the roadmap for the modern music festival industry, even if the commercialization of the tour helped hasten the end to its original run in 1997. The year before, with Farrell no longer directly involved, promoters brought in heavy metal superstars Metallica, who at the time were affecting an alternative sound via their Load album. But the 1996 Lollapalooza did not do well enough to justify the immense cost of producing what was essentially the Metallica North American tour. Farrell returned the next year, pulling it back to his original vision but looking now toward the next big thing by leaning into electronic music acts like Orbital and the Prodigy. Red Hot Chili Peppers or Smashing Pumpkins they were not, and once that tour was through, so was Lollapalooza.

There’s no doubt that at its best, Lollapalooza was on the bleeding edge while capturing the zeitgeist of popular alternative rock. The lineups from the 1990s feature both some of the era’s biggest stars playing on the same bill as the most alternative of alternative acts, for which Lollapalooza would end up being the peak of their popularity. There was Smashing Pumpkins alongside Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1994, Hole following the Jesus Lizard in 1995, Soundgarden sharing a stage with Psychotica in 1996. Those who caught the smaller shows going on at Lollapalooza’s side stage often caught bands and performers just before they hit it big, such as Stone Temple Pilots, Rage Against the Machine, Tool, Beck, and Ben Folds Five. Alternative rock kids across the country were able to see all their favorite bands along with hip-hop and legacy punk acts and the extreme gross-out antics of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, all for a pretty reasonable ticket price of $27.50.

But by its 2003 revival, there was nothing bleeding and no edge about Lollapalooza. The authors note that the corporate sponsorship was front-and-center, quoting from a press release from Microsoft at the time: "Both Lollapalooza and Xbox draw on the same key audience of 16-24 year olds (Gen Y), making the Xbox sponsorship and strong presence at Lollapalooza venues an added value to the festival experience." The press release from another sponsor, Verizon, is even more cringe-inducing: "This 2003 tour is one of the most exciting young adult events of the year and provides an incredible venue where we can interact with one of our most important market segments."

Despite Lollapalooza’s status as one of the, um, "most exciting young adult events," the 2003 tour turned out to be a one-off. After 2004’s tour was canceled, Lollapalooza returned once more in 2005 as a stationary, two-day event in Chicago’s Grant Park, where it has pretty much remained every summer for the past two decades. Across four days this July and August, Lollapalooza-goers will be able to see headliners like country singer Luke Combs, rapper Tyler the Creator, k-pop girl group TWICE, and pop singers Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo.

These days, Lollapalooza has lots of competition from the dozens of major music festivals and tours, the offspring of Lolla in a world shaped by it. By the time of its first revival in 2003, copycat touring festivals like the Warped Tour and Ozzfest were themselves institutions. Annual festivals featuring eclectic musical styles and multiple stages, such as Coachella and Bonnaroo, were coming into their own as local festivals and outdoor concert series flourished. And all of this was starting to generate lots of money for artists and the corporate organizers. Big companies like Anschutz Entertainment Group and Live Nation began to acquire large stakes in festivals. In 2024, live music festivals were a $2 billion business worldwide. That’s the real legacy of Lollapalooza.

Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival
by Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour
St. Martin’s Press, 432 pp., $32

Michael Warren is a senior editor at the Dispatch.