Music Book Review: "Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story Of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival"
There is dirt. There is sex and drugs. There are internecine squabbles.
Authors Richard Bienstock & Tom Beaujour have assembled a 400 page oral history of Lollapalooza (Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story Of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival) and what they’ve put together is exhaustive. That’s both fantastic and overwhelming, in about equal measures. There is dirt. There is sex and drugs. There are internecine squabbles. No one is being conciliatory here, or sympathetic with the benefit of time and distance. There is a metric fuck ton of serious dirt in here. I guess I never stopped to consider how much sex was going on during Lollapalooza, but damn there was a lot. (There were also a lot of drugs, but given the various bands that were on the bill, none of that came as any kind of surprise.)
There is as much intricate technical detail here about the music business and the business of putting on concerts as there is gossip and juicy stories, and that is both this book’s strength and its potential downside. You hear from the crew and the production staff almost as much as you hear from the musicians and that is either a plus or a minus, depending on what you’re hoping to get out of the book. They also do a very good job of bringing in journalists and industry experts to offer commentary from that side of the business.
The book’s unquestionable strength is that the authors talked to absolutely everyone who would talk and gathered what seems like every single written word about the festival and did the hard and very painful work of threading the narrative together. It’s organized chronologically, which is pretty much the only way they could have done it, I realized after I’d spent some time with it. Each year gets an introductory chapter, and then various breakout chapters that tell the story of the festival that year, which are of course different from year to year.
I had to completely skip the chapter devoted to the Jim Rose Side Show, but I appreciated that all of it was in one chapter and I could therefore easily do that, and not have to keep skipping random pages because they’d interspersed their story amongst the rest of the year. That was an obvious editorial choice and it was the right one.
People who are interested in this book are likely to have the same impulse I initially had, which was to immediately flip to the chapters for the two Lollas I went to (1994 and 1996, if you care). That approach ends up being deeply unsatisfying, because it means you’re missing all of the history that preceded it. I read 1994 and then realized that there was no point in moving on or jumping around because I wanted all of the back story.
They explain who everyone is -- every single chapter identifies every person the first time they speak (in addition to an alphabetical glossary in the front) which is annoying on one hand but very helpful on the other -- but this is a history of the festival, not a feature about the 1992 or 1996 Lolla, for which the narrative would have been constructed in a completely different way. (I have a personal level of intensive knowledge and understanding of the 1992 Lolla because of my years spent in the Pearl Jam mines, so I was very very interested in that year.)
While I am absolutely the target market for an oral history about Lollapalooza, I am not an average reader. I was as entranced by the side history of the second stage (did you know that all of those bands got to keep what they made on their merch?) as I was about the various negotiations with the different bands and promoters, billing and artist fees and discussions with venue security. And there is a lot of this because as the festival became more successful, the economic and artistic stakes were higher, and the challenge is that that is exactly where they are going to lose a less engaged reader. All of it is important, and it is providing color and texture. But someone who went to the 1992 Lollapalooza to see Pearl Jam who wants to read more about what went on behind the scenes will likely begin to lose interest when it comes to production details.
But the other reason this book is important is because it illustrates the rise of alternative music as a genre in America. It’s second wave alternative, what happened before Nirvana and then of course what happened after Nirvana (and of course, how Nirvana were supposed to be the obvious headliners of the 1994 Lolla before Kurt left the planet). That element of the book is critical because it contextualizes the rise and fall of these bands and this music in a clear and easy to understand way, and if you were a teenager going to those shows or buying those records it pulls you up into the stratosphere for the 30,000 foot view. That’s something that most oral histories should do but one that many treat as an afterthought.
Overall, Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story Of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival is a book that can be a fun, easy read that you hop around or it can be an intense lesson in the 90’s alternative wave and the touring and music business. It’s actually very fitting that a book about Lolla would be an adult-level choose-your-own-adventure. But for most folks, this is probably a library borrow and not something they need to own.
Caryn Rose
