LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival, lives up to that promise

LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival
RICHARD BIENSTOCK & TOM BEAUJOUR
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The definitive, no-holds-barred oral history of 1990s alt-rock festival Lollapalooza―told by the musicians, roadies, and industry insiders who lived it. From the New York Times bestselling authors of Nothin’ But A Good Time.

Through hundreds of new interviews with artists, tour founders, festival organizers, promoters, publicists, sideshow freaks, stage crews, record label execs, reporters, roadies and more, Lollapalooza chronicles the tour’s pioneering 1991-1997 run, and, in the process, alternative rock’s rise – as well as the reverberations that led to a massive shift in the music industry and the culture at large.

Lollapalooza features original interviews with some of the biggest names in music, including Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Ice-T, Rage Against the Machine, Green Day, Patti Smith, Alice in Chains, Metallica and many more.

Conceived by Farrell as a farewell tour for Jane's Addiction, Lollapalooza’s inaugural outing across the US in the summer of 1991 helped to coalesce an ideology and aesthetic that not only washed over popular music but seeped into fashion, film, television, literature, food, politics and more. Throughout the decade, Lollapalooza offered a vast and diverse ensemble of bands, breaking barriers of genre and creating the template for the modern American music festival and the scores of other contemporary destination events.
Unorthodox not just in music, Lollapalooza also spotlighted visual arts, nonprofit organizations, political outfits and even the occasional freak show, offering a tantalizing cocktail of culture, art, and activism that, taken together, defined the alternative mindset that dominated the 1990s. Today, Lollapalooza remains one of the world's largest music festivals, cemented by annual sellouts at destination events all over the globe and an estimated 400,000 attendees at the flagship Chicago fest each summer.

A nostalgic look back at 1990s music and culture, Lollapalooza traces the festival’s groundbreaking origins, following the tour as it progresses through the decade, and documenting the action onstage, backstage, and behind-the-scenes in detailed, uncensored, and sometimes shocking first-person accounts. This is the story of Lollapalooza and the 1990s alternative-rock revolution.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: People who get famous are,it seems, still just peopl...racist, homophobic jerks, divas who "think who they are," the run-of-the-mill addicts and freeloaders.

May be more information in here than is comfortable to know at thirty years' social and societal change. Many things were uttered aloud, recorded, and transcribed, that would get the speaker in a lot of trouble nowadays. You the reader have been warned.

Lots of names get bandied about, so stay on your toes! Bookmark the cast of characters in the fromt or it will get confusing. One anecdote you won't forget: Rage Against the Machine protesting Tipper Gore's foolish music-censorship stuff by doing their 1993 set naked! Socks over their cocks was all that stopped them from getting unwanted legal attention. Pity there were no cameraphones in 1993, isn't it....

Because it's so anecdotal, it's more a browser's book than a read-right-through binge machine. I don't know if there are photos in the finished books, but there were none in the DRC, so I have no comment to make about thm (assuming there had to be some).

A treat for your 90s-nostalgia giftee, your music fan giftee, and anyone who was there in any of the years...it's a long, long time now and it's still goin' on, so...everyone's bound to know SOMEone who's been to at least one.

I took a lovely, fun, often funny and always instructive wander through my last thirty-plus years with the performers, the reporters, and me. I'm not as fascinated as some are by bands and their personnel. I still found myself downing a festival or two a week. Pretty good going to keep an old guy that interested!