Lollapalooza
Lollapalooza is an annual American four-day music festival held in Grant Park in Chicago. It originally started as a touring event in 1991, with Chicago becoming its permanent location beginning in 2005. Music genres include alternative rock, heavy metal, punk rock, hip hop, and electronic dance music. Lollapalooza has also featured visual arts, nonprofit organizations, and political organizations. The festival hosts an estimated 400,000 people each July and sells out annually. Lollapalooza is one of the largest music festivals in the world and one of the longest-running in the United States.
Lollapalooza was conceived and created in 1991 as a farewell tour by Perry Farrell, singer of the group Jane's Addiction. The first Lollapalooza tour had a diverse collection of bands and was a commercial success. It stopped in more than twenty cities in North America. In 2020, Spin rated the first Lollapalooza as the best concert of the preceding 35 years. Lollapalooza then ran annually until 1997, and was revived in 2003. From its inception through 1997 and its revival in 2003, the festival toured North America. In 2004, the organizers expanded the dates to two days per city but canceled the tour after poor ticket sales.
In 2005, Farrell and the William Morris Agency partnered with Austin, Texas–based company Capital Sports Entertainment and retooled the event into its current format as an annual festival in Chicago. In 2014, Live Nation Entertainment bought a controlling interest in C3 Presents.
In 2010, it was announced that Lollapalooza would remain in Chicago, while also debuting outside the United States, with a branch of the festival staged in Santiago, Chile, on April 2–3, 2011, where it partnered with Santiago-based company Lotus. In 2011, Geo Events confirmed the Brazilian version of the event, which was held at the Jockey Club in São Paulo on April 7–8, 2012. The Argentine version started in April 2014 in Buenos Aires and in November of that year, the first European Lollapalooza was held at the former Berlin Tempelhof Airport.
Etymology
The word—sometimes alternatively spelled and pronounced as lollapalootza, lalapaloosa, or lallapaloosa —dates from a late 19th-century/early 20th-century American idiomatic phrase meaning "an extraordinary or unusual thing, person, or event; an exceptional example or instance". Its earliest known use was in 1896. In time, the term also came to refer to a large lollipop. Farrell, searching for a name for his festival, liked the euphonious quality of the by-then-antiquated term, which he claimed he had heard in a Three Stooges short film, though a search of their catalog turned up nothing related. Paying homage to the term's double meaning, a character in the festival's original logo holds a lollipop.History
Creation
Inspired by events such as Britain's Reading Festival—which Lollapalooza cofounder Perry Farrell had been due to play in 1990—Farrell, Ted Gardner, Don Muller, and Marc Geiger conceived the festival in 1990 as a farewell for Farrell's band Jane's Addiction.Unlike previous festivals such as Woodstock, A Gathering of the Tribes, and the US Festival, which were one-time events held at single venues, Lollapalooza toured across the United States and Canada from mid-July until late August 1991. The inaugural Lollapalooza lineup was diverse and made up of artists from alternative rock, industrial music, and rap. The premiere in Phoenix, Arizona, on July 18, 1991, was covered by a report on MTV, which ended by journalist Dave Kendall saying "Lollapalooza could be the tour of the summer". The tour ended at King County Fairgrounds in Enumclaw, Washington, near Seattle, on August 28, 1991.
Another key concept was the inclusion of nonmusical features. Performers such as the Jim Rose Circus Side Show, an alternative freak show, and the Shaolin monks stretched the boundaries of rock culture. There was a tent for display of art pieces, virtual reality games, and information tables for political and environmental nonprofit groups, promoting counterculture and political awareness. "Basically, I'm bored", Farrell said at the time. "I just want to see things that are unexpected and slightly bizarre. The way Barnum & Bailey perceived putting on a show...well, they had a different angle."
Success and decline
The inaugural edition in 1991 was a surprise massive success. For Dave Grohl of Nirvana, who saw it in Los Angeles, the festival helped change the mentalities in the music industry. The Butthole Surfers opened the day, playing in front of a big audience, and Siouxsie and the Banshees "were like the Led Zeppelin of that scene". "It felt like something was happening, that was the beginning of it all". In an interview filmed on the opening day in Phoenix, rapper Ice-T stated: "I know it is gonna be a tour people are gonna talk about for a long time". That year, Farrell also coined the term "Alternative Nation" when talking about the festival. In 2020, when rating the first edition as the greatest US tour in 35 years, Spin wrote that it "changed the trajectory of the '90s, helping usher the alternative era into the mainstream. Lollapalooza provided a common home for artists on the mainstream periphery. Lolla became the template for what became the modern American festival."The explosion of alternative rock in the early 1990s propelled Lollapalooza forward. However, MTV noted that the second edition was organized in a different way and included bands who had achieved commercial success. Journalist Kurt Loder commented: "By 1992 the music that had once been trumpeted as alternative was quickly becoming mainstream and the second Lollapalooza reflected the shift. The 1992 headliners included acts such as Soundgarden and Red Hot Chili Peppers, bands that were hardly strangers to the mainstream pop charts". The 1992 and 1993 festivals also leaned heavily on grunge and alternative acts, and usually featured an additional rap artist. Crowd behaviors prominent at punk rock concerts such as mosh pits and crowd surfing became regular parts of the shows. These years also saw marked increases in the participatory nature of the event, with the inclusion of booths for open-microphone readings and oratory, television-smashing pits, and tattoo and piercing parlors. After 1991, the festival included a second stage for up-and-coming bands or local acts. Attendee complaints of the festival included high ticket prices as well as the high cost for food and water at the shows. The event took place at the Alpine Valley festival in East Troy, Wisconsin on August 29, 1992, and also at World Music Theater in Tinley Park, Illinois, where concertgoers ripped up chunks of sod and grass and threw them at each other and at the bands, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in damages to the venue. The same summer, patrons at Great Woods in Mansfield, Massachusetts had torn up the venue's fencing and burned it in bonfires throughout the show. The tour then relocated its New England stop to the naval yard at Quonset Point for two years, until Rhode Island officials vowed to keep it out, and in 1995, the tour returned to Great Woods.
Grunge band Nirvana was scheduled to headline at the festival in 1994, reportedly being offered nearly $10 million to do it. However, frontman Kurt Cobain turned it down, and the band officially dropped out of the festival on April 7, 1994. Cobain's body was discovered in Seattle the next day. His widow, Courtney Love, made guest appearances at several shows, including the Philadelphia show at FDR Park, speaking to the crowds about the loss, then singing a minimum of two songs. Farrell worked with rock poster artist Jim Evans to create a series of posters and the complete graphic decoration for the 1994 event, including two seventy-foot-tall Buddha statues that flanked the main stage.
In 1996, Farrell, who had been the soul of the festival, decided to focus his energy to produce his new festival project, ENIT, and did not participate in producing Lollapalooza. Many fans saw the addition of Metallica in 1996 as contrary to the festival's prior practice of featuring "non-mainstream" artists, and described the crowds attracted by Metallica as being singularly focused on the headliner without respect for the other performing artists. Moreover, festival cofounder Farrell felt that Metallica's macho image violated his peaceful vision for the festival, as the alternative culture of the early 1990s was generally against macho behavior. Farrell quit the tour in protest.
Responding to the controversial Metallica incident, Lollapalooza made efforts to revive its relevance to audiences. The festival booked eclectic acts such as country superstar Waylon Jennings in 1996, and emphasized heavily electronica groups such as the Orb and the Prodigy in 1997. 1997, however, would prove to be the final tour from the initial series of Lollapalooza events. The festival failed to find a suitable headliner in 1998 and therefore announced Lollapalooza's cancellation. The cancellation served as a signifier of alternative rock's declining popularity. In light of the festival's troubles that year, Spin magazine said, "Lollapalooza is as comatose as alternative rock right now."
Revival
In 2003, Farrell reconvened Jane's Addiction and scheduled a new Lollapalooza tour. The festival schedule included venues in thirty cities through July and August. The 2003 tour achieved only marginal success, with many fans staying away, presumably because of high ticket prices. Another tour scheduled for 2004 was to consist of a two-day festival taking place in each city. Despite a bill with Morrissey, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, Pixies, and the Flaming Lips as headliners, the 2004 edition was canceled in June due to weak ticket sales across the country. In 2005, Farrell partnered with Capital Sports & Entertainment, which co-owns and produces the Austin City Limits Music Festival, to produce Lollapalooza. CSE, Farrell, and the William Morris Agency—along with Charles Attal Presents—resurrected Lollapalooza as a two-day destination festival in 2005 in Chicago's Grant Park, with an even greater variety of performers than that of the touring festival. The event was generally successful, attracting over 65,000 attendees, despite a 104-degree Fahrenheit Sunday heat wave.It returned to Chicago on August 4–6, 2006. On October 25, 2006, the Chicago Park District and Capital Sports & Entertainment agreed to a five-year, $5 million deal, keeping Lollapalooza at Grant Park in Chicago until 2011. Lollapalooza ran August 3–5 in 2007; August 1–3, 2008; August 7–9, 2009; August 6–8, 2010; August 5–7, 2011; August 3–5, 2012; August 2–4, 2013; and August 1–3, 2014. After a successful 2008 festival, another deal was signed to keep Lollapalooza in Chicago through 2018, guaranteeing the city $13 million.
The 2016 iteration of the event was four days long, from July 28 to 31, to celebrate the event's 25th anniversary.
The 2020 festival was initially scheduled to occur July 30 – August 2. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was officially canceled on June 9. The festival postponed the sale of tickets in March as a precaution to the possible shutdown of live music events. In order to keep the spirit of the festival going, the city of Chicago announced that they would offer a livestreamed event occurring the same weekend as the initially planned event. The livestreamed version featured acts such as A$AP Rocky, Brockhampton, Lupe Fiasco, Outkast, and many more performing on a free YouTube broadcast.
On May 18, 2021, festival organizers and the City of Chicago announced that Lollapalooza would return at full capacity from July 29 to August 2, 2021. In May 2022, it was announced that Hulu would exclusively stream the festival, alongside Austin City Limits and Bonnaroo.