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REBECCA AVERY: The Universal Amphitheatre was near the end. I just remember that they were great shows but that something was different. Everyone seemed unhappy. It just wasn’t the same. They weren’t having fun on stage anymore.
STEPHEN PERKINS: We’d come to L.A. to do shows, but wouldn’t sleep here for more than a week. We did three nights at the Palladium and kept touring. Came back and did four more at Universal Amphitheater. More touring. Came back and did three at Irvine for Lollapalooza. All in support of Ritual. It may have broken the band in a great way recognition-wise, but it may have also broken the band’s spirit.
“ALTERNATIVE NATION” READING, THE GATHERING OF THE TRIBES THE PROTO-LOLLAPALOOZAS
Circa August 1990
PAUL V.: Jane’s Addiction never really got their due as the impetus for “alternative” music coming to the mainstream. Perry Farrell, Jane’s Addiction, and Lollapalooza finally found a key that unlocked that door and cracked it open a hair and Kurt Cobain stuck his boot through it. He couldn’t have without Jane’s Addiction and Lollapalooza. Who knows what it would have taken for that music to finally break through without them?
MARC GEIGER: We went to England for Jane’s first festival run at Reading during August 1990. Reading and the other European open-air music festivals were the templates for what would become Lollapalooza. . . .
TED GARDNER: We were due to play the Reading Festival. But Perry lost his voice and we couldn’t play but Perkins and myself still went to the site to hang out and we met up with Geiger. We were sitting around talking and we were lamenting that America did not have a music festival along the lines of a Reading or a Glastonbury. . . .99
PERRY FARRELL: I lost my voice the night before. . . . I got too fucked up. So I didn’t make it to Reading. My voice was just shot. When you’re on heroin, you can’t really sing, your voice kind of clamps down.
MARC GEIGER: Not only did those festivals put on a lot of bands but they had a lot of exhibits and they demonstrated other performance pieces with an all-day carnival atmosphere. Perry never made it down to the festival grounds, he got a sore throat. It was Stephen, myself, and Ted.
TED GARDNER: Marc brought the idea up of why don’t we invite a bunch of our friends to play on the American leg of the tour and try to create something like a Reading Festival, but taking it on the road? The inspiration was a number of people, but Geiger was really the seed-planter. I thought it was a good idea and took it to Perry who watered the seed and came up with the name Lollapalooza.100
PERRY FARRELL: Marc Geiger encouraged me to be creative. He said, do whatever you want on this summer tour, get whoever you want to open for you. I just went to him with this wish list of groups that I liked . . . and came up with a name. . . . I think I got it thumbing through the dictionary. Lollapalooza is someone or something very striking or exceptional, number one. And number two, it’s a giant swirling lollipop.
MARC GEIGER: It wasn’t truly European, because Europe is more like Coachella where you just go to it, versus a traveling thing. We felt we could book multiple bands across multiple genres. Whether you’re talking about the Cocteau Twins and Metallica . . . or Nick Cave and George Clinton on the same bill, that diversity was sadly missing from this country.
TOM ATENCIO: There were lots of other precursors for Lollapalooza in North America. It wasn’t just about replicating Reading as a traveling tour. It’s a huge myth that this idea just popped out of nowhere in Perry’s head with no precedent. Geiger knows that very well. He and I had already done touring packages with New Order and other alternative acts back in ’87 and ’89. Quite big venues. Amphitheaters across the country. That really was the beginnings of the idea that Marc took up with, now reinforced by his experience at Reading. We’d already done Echo and the Bunnymen, co-headlining with New Order and Gene Loves Jezebel. Two years later we did New Order, PIL, and Sugarcubes, which was even much more successful.
TED GARDNER: The U.S. festival planted the seed for all of it.101
TOM ATENCIO: Ian Astbury from the Cult did the Gathering of the Tribes pre-Lollapalooza. Ian certainly put alternative rock and rap together on the same big stage first. The Gathering of the Tribes had Ice-T, Queen Latifah and Soundgarden, Iggy Pop, the Cramps, the Indigo Girls . . . experimentation with the diverse bill concept was already well under way. . . .
Dubbed “A Gathering of the Tribes,” the all-day pop smorgasbord at the Pacific Amphitheatre on Sunday attracted 9,000 to 10,000 people. This gathering sprang from British rocker Ian Astbury’s idea of creating a festival of contrasting stylists ranging from hard rockers to folkies to rappers. While at least 95% of the audience was white, listeners’ enthu- siastic embrace of the lineup’s two rap acts, and their willingness to sample and enjoy the 10-hour day’s full range of performers, showed that diversity has a constituency. Queen Latifah, Michelle Shocked, the American Indian Dance Theatre, Ice-T, Soundgarden, Public Enemy (no-show), Tower of Power, The Indigo Girls, Crash Vegas, Charlatans U.K., The Cramps, Mission U.K., Steve Jones, Iggy Pop.
—Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1990
IAN ASTBURY: During 1990 I was hanging out with bands like Mother Love Bone, before they became Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. I knew the scene in Seattle was going to happen. Nobody believed me. I did the Gathering of the Tribes festival in 1990, which became Lollapalooza the next year. All my energy went into it. I probably lost $50,000 of my own money. Hip-hop’s going to explode as well. I saw this coming, too. There was a bit of an agency war over the bands who wanted to be involved. Oddly enough, the guy who wouldn’t let his groups be on our bill was at the forefront of Lollapalooza.102 A premiere alternative rock agency got wind of the festival and they had so much envy because they weren’t involved, that they tried to destroy it. I had Iggy Pop calling me at home saying, “I can’t do the festival.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “People have said it’s going to be a failure, it’s not going to be good for my career.” I said, “We need you, don’t listen to their shit.” I was ripped off. I never got the credit. We didn’t do it for the money, we did it for the community.103
TOM ATENCIO: Lollapalooza became the business codification, it was a consolidation, a new collective brand name for many new marketing and promotional opportunities that were already out there. They just needed a credible spokesperson, a PR figurehead to front the package. . . .
PETE WEISS: An agent came up with this, but they needed someone for people to believe. Who would be the perfect mouthpiece for it? They got Perry Farrell, who influenced almost everyone he met.
TOM ATENCIO: What really set Lollapalooza apart was that it expanded on the idea with more bands and the second stage concept, a much more complex set of logistics. Nobody had ever tried to build a stage that could accommodate that many bands. Nobody had ever toured that many bands. Lollapalooza was such a major undertaking. There was no existing infrastructure. When you have eight or nine bands, coordinating between seven different record companies, that’s a lot of information.
ADAM SCHNEIDER (agent, manager Porno for Pyros, producer of the ENIT festival, another former Jane’s Addiction manager): The blue-print for many future touring festivals was the second stage, touring performance artists, touring social and political activist groups, artwork vendors.
MARC GEIGER: We proposed that Jane’s Addiction’s last tour become a traveling Reading festival and Perry’s piece of that was to explore the pleasing of the senses and to add more than just the music. Don and I were the programmers in terms of the artists and the mechanics, and the business structure, but Perry and his band members were also directly involved in the selection process for which bands participated.
TED GARDNER: We all put our heads together to assemble this package and it was up to Don Muller to sell it to promoters. Muller, myself, Geiger, Stuart Roth [Jane’s road accountant], and Perry.
We had Siouxsie and the Banshees, one of Dave’s favorite bands. NIN Perry knew about. Ice-T because we knew him and his band Body Count as a
labelmate at Warners. Henry Rollins was a friend of mine. Convincing regional promoters was slow. Everyone at first was a little like, “We don’t know. What does this mean?” Those that got it right away were Jam Productions, Chicago, and Bill Graham Presents in San Francisco. Others were skeptical, but they saw potential. We naively thought this would be cool as a one-off. We had no intention of doing it again.104
TOM ATENCIO: Perry was over in Europe during Desert Storm ’91. He called me up and said, “Tom, it’s incredible because we’re being lied to so much. The news over here is very different to what we’re getting in America.” I said, “Perry, we’re planning this Lollapalooza thing; you have all these feelings about politics and welfare. Now you have a platform. We used it on MTV, let’s use it on Lollapalooza, too. The homeless, the political aspects, bring it all in. Let’s do Greenpeace. Let’s do Heal the Bay, gun control, and all the shit you’re concerned about. Make MTV deal with it.”
PERRY FARRELL: I want to see what happens with a major exchange of information. I don’t like the idea of the world being controlled by the news media. We need to exchange ideas somewhere else, another forum. The cafes aren’t being used anymore, so let’s try it at a festival. Everybody’s all of a sudden aware at a different level.105
PAUL V: Perry thought, “OK, if my name and my band can get 20,000 people here, maybe I can inspire a hundred of them to go vote or twenty of them to join Greenpeace or whatever it was that he believed in. He invited both gun control activists and the NRA people to come down and set up their booths. . . .
PERRY FARRELL: I’m not declaring myself left wing or right wing, I’m actually bringing both sides into it. It would be way too easy for me to take everything that’s obviously politically correct and have this hip, left-wing event. But I don’t want to make out I have the answers, all I want to do is pose the questions.106
PETE WEISS: Perry and his business people knew there was a large group of people out there—living like us—who were not represented by mass media. There was this huge swollen underbelly, this underground scene that had been fermenting for a decade since the early punk days that was already living like that. What Perry did with Lollapalooza was say, “You stick your flag up and say ‘Here we are’” and everyone comes and rallies around the flag. Then they realized there’s this huge number of people willing to participate. That was culturally where Lollapalooza really hit the chord.
ERIC AVERY: We didn’t know if the concept was even going to work; having this eclectic mix of bands and people coming together like NIN and Ice-T with the Butthole Surfers, Henry Rollins. . .
MARC GEIGER: Over the next seven years some of the pairings and some of the groups that played were historic milestones in the careers of a bunch of extremely diverse artists.
DAYLE GLORIA: Perry approached me and Mike Stewart about doing Lollapalooza with him—when he’d just had the idea. We had dinner at Tommy Tang’s, and me and Mike were looking at him like he’s a total nut. Of course, millions of dollars later. . . .
STEVEN BAKER: Perry very luckily had people around him like Don and Marc on the agency side who so totally loved and believed in him.
JON SIDEL: Perry called me one day strung out of his brain. He was going on and on, super high talk. He was editing Gift and he was like “Dude I wanna meet with you. I got this idea and it’s kinda like Powertools, and I’m calling it Lollapalooza, and it’s like I wanna do this fucking circus review thing, and I want you to do it with me.” I thought he was out of his tree, but I guess he obviously wasn’t. I was like, “Perry, call me back later.”
MARC GEIGER: At Lollapalooza Don and I were flat salaried employees with no share of profits.
PERRY FARRELL: I cut Ted Gardner in because I wanted to work with him because I liked him.
MARC GEIGER: The first tour was Jane’s Addiction’s tour. They made so much more money than they ever had made before as a group. But everybody was very cognizant of ticket price. Did anybody gouge consumers? No. Tickets were, like, twenty, twenty-five bucks for seven bands, and then ultimately seven bands on the side stage over time, that’s cheap by today’s prices. . . .
ERIC AVERY: Lollapalooza was able to transcend the sum of its parts. That was the idea. When you look at that lineup, nobody was a stadium draw at that point. We certainly couldn’t have done the kind of draw that Lollapalooza did.
DAVE NAVARRO: I think of Perry as the godfather of alternative rock. I call him “The Don.”
MARC GEIGER: Perry was the front man, the spokesperson, as well as the guy we all tried to please in terms of creative ideas. Perry would come up with 10 ideas of which the mechanics could only produce three. . . .
CHARLEY BROWN: Perry was a showman and a great Barnum and Bailey ringmaster. He loved putting on parties and special events, from the earliest club days onwards. Lollapalooza was just the perfect gig for him. . . .
MIKE WATT: Perry is just one of the all-time best frontmen. He’s the bridge between the kids and the stage. They become him. He becomes them. He makes the thing human, not like fusion or the ’lectronic thing watching too-cool nerds operating machines and laptops. He is the flesh and blood of it. He’d sing and dance with them. Perry excels in this role.
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Perry doing his thing, the fucking shaman, guy’s a madman. He’s not afraid to say whatever he wants to say or do whatever he wants to do. And he’s got this wail. It was pretty intense and pretty awesome. It was an amazing time to live in Los Angeles if you loved music to be around those guys.
PERRY FARRELL: I enjoy loving people. I enjoy bonding. I enjoy amalgamations. I enjoy attraction. I like having a good time and being flamboyant and I like to throw parties, that’s my forte.
STEVEN BAKER: Perry is a guy with a big heart who believes in himself and actually loves people.
PERRY FARRELL: The Lollapalooza concept . . . just throwing a party with you as the host. So what are you going to have for the people there? You have one day of their time. And you have a field or some place that will allow you to rent it. It’s really no different from any of the other parties we would throw in Los Angeles, except it’s now a macrocosm of them. Same attitude. I liked walking the grounds of Lolla. Passing through the art gallery and seeing the chair that was made out of nails. Then I’d go through the film tent or watch people listen to poetry. I remember bungee-jumping while Soundgarden was on. And, of course, having sex during the day is always exciting.
HENRY ROLLINS: My band was asked to be on the bill while we were on a string of dates opening for Jane’s Addiction. We gratefully accepted. I didn’t know if the shows would work but there was no pressure on us other than to play well. If the tour tanked, it was more Perry’s thing to deal with. I had a great time.
INGER LORRE
Circa October 1990
ERIC AVERY: Inger Lorre was the anima to Perry’s animus. The female version of Perry. She was very theatrical, a real show person. They were cut from the same mould . . . magician, shaman, that kind of witch doctor ability for live performing.
INGER LORRE: Me and Dave and Eric Avery used to hang out. It was definitely a drug thing first before I even knew their music. Eric was well-read and one of the smartest people I ever met. We’d just get super-high and lie around his apartment discussing dark art and all this macabre, dopefiend literature that he’d boned up on. We talked constantly about Burroughs, who wrote about drugs. We were just kids making excuses for our own drug use because people like him, these amazingly talented, literate people used drugs to get to other levels for their art. The Nymphs were sort of like Jane’s little sister band and they let us open these humungous shows like John Anson Ford Theatre and Universal Amphitheatre, and that really gave us a core audience because our music was similar in some ways, although very, very different in others. Jane’s audience instantly got it. Voilà, we had a huge number of fans.
PERRY FARRELL: There was “a particular girl in a particular band” and I’d rather not mention her by name, if you’d do me th
e favor, because she’s apparently been diagnosed. Said “particular little diagnosed girl” was excluded from this Halloween party we were playing up at this fellow’s house in Bel-Air by the name of the Colonel.
INGER LORRE: Josh Richman introduced the Colonel to Jane’s Addiction and they ended up playing a party at his house. It was really surreal; it was a kitschy 70s Shampoo movie scene, this huge mansion, and all these beautiful cro-people there. Our friend the Colonel was a ragin’ freak on fire with a saggin’ butt mid-life crisis. He had all the money, the big mansion, the cocaine, the champagne . . . oh, and this testo red Ferrari . . . and now’s he’s King of Cool Hill with Jane’s Addiction playing his birthday party.