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

Lollapalooza didn't begin as the only annual rock festival that mattered. It was to be nothing more than Jane's Addiction's farewell tour, with, at Perry Farrell's behest, the added novelty of several genre-spanning guests, booths with political activists of all stripes, and burritos. It was only after that first tour bucked all logic to become an actual financial success that Lollapalooza became a brand. In came Pearl Jam,  the freak shows, The Smashing Pumpkins, Courtney Love,  a highly unpopular Ferris Wheel, Sonic Youth, and eventually, people like Metallica and Korn.

The history of Lollapalooza, as related in Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour's new oral history, kind of functions as a nutshell version of the whole nineties alternative rock phenomenon. It goes from being genuinely dangerous, with that first tour's sex and drug orgies and Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes firing a shotgun into the audience, to the legit horrifying vomit-drinking, penis-piercing gross outs of the second tour, before wallowing in some of the more embarrassing sties of nineties alt-rock culture (spoken-word slams, smart drinks, cyber-punk bullshit), and finally ending up in the head-scratching mainstream with Metallica headlining before petering out with a positively awful line up of which the wretched Korn were the stars.

But what keeps Lollapalooza going, what makes its pages so impossible to stop turning that I wouldn't feel like a pathetic hack to declare it "a page turner," is the non-stop parade of weirdness and wildness. This book is jammed with amazing stories that could only result from an alt-rock chemistry experiment that slammed together acts that probably never would have shared air otherwise. So Siouxsie Sioux gets to attempt to wrestle said shotgun from Gibby's hands on stage, a member of the Jesus and Mary Chain comes to blows with a member of Ice Cube's crew, and Pavement crash a Cypress Hill pot party.

For me, Lollapalooza only slows down when Bienstock and Beaujour choose to fixate on groups that don't strike my fancy (no amount of gushing will convert me to a Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, or Rage Against the Machine fan, and I could barely bring myself to skim the twenty-five pages that Korn hijack), but such stretches are easily balanced out by all of the great artists the authors interviewed—members of Guided by Voices, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Breeders, Living Colour, Devo, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Helium, Elastica, Luscious Jackson, Shudder to Think, and of course, Jane's Addiction. Much like Lollapalooza the tour, there will definitely be something for everyone in Lollapalooza the book.