Imagine a hardcore black gangsta rapper going toe-to-toe with a wild white indie rock freak in makeup and shiny black leather pants as the two repeatedly, gleefully refer to each other using racist slurs. Then imagine these two men shaking hands and giddily performing a same-sex waltz on stage in front of 15,000 screaming suburban kids to celebrate their delinquent tango.
This is one of the first images — and the last — you'll see in the new three-part Paramount+ documentary series Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza, which premieres today (May 21). The sprawling doc, directed by Michael John Warren (Free Meek), uses the electric stage of Jane's Addiction singer (and Lolla co-founder) Perry Farrell singing Sly and the Family Stone's incendiary 1969 anthem “Don't Call Me N-er, Whitey” with gangsta rapper Ice-T of OG during the tour. the 1991 opening acts as a framing device to explain how and why Lolla changed music festivals in America forever.
It's one of Farrell's favorite moments from the festival's wild three-decade run, during which it blossomed from a multi-act touring anomaly into the industry standard for touring festivals, before shrinking, faltering and finally relaunching at the turn of the decade 2000 as a stay in Chicago — with tentacles now reaching across South America, Europe and India.
“I wasn't thinking [about a] documentary at all,” says the eternally bright-eyed, forward-looking Farrell, 65, during a Zoom call. “Because I feel like our best work is ahead of us … people usually do documentaries at the end of things and I feel like Lolla is just getting started.”
It's a classic Farrell spin for the festival that originally started in 1991 as a swansong for genre-defining alt rock band Jane's Addiction. After falling in love with such established multi-day English festivals as Reading, Farrell and his partners – the late promoter Ted Gardner, agent Don Muller and SAVELIVE managing director Marc Geiger – hatched the idea for a traveling festival that would bring the best of indie rock to the masses.
Before the commercial internet, before cell phones or texting, freaks and geeks could only go to their hometown rock clubs or find each other at their local record store as they browsed the shelves and browsed casinos like e.g. Maximum Rocknroll. After launching with an original 1991 line-up atop Jane's and featuring Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T & Body Count, the Butthole Surfers and the Rollins Band, Lolla quickly became a safe haven for the indie diaspora.
For a generation of misfit musicians who loved art, nature and peace, it was the place where no one judged you by what you looked like, who you loved or what you listened to. Goths sat side by side with metal heads, grunge moppets shared space with indie nerds and hip-hop heads, and everyone realized they weren't the only outsiders in their town.
Lolla's full story is incredibly extensive, and director Warren says that distilling it into a three-plus hour documentary meant trawling through 20,000-30,000 hours of footage, much of it courtesy of MTV News, which covered the festival for years. . Fortunately, there was no one on the planet who looked better for the job.
“Every morning [my research team] he'd send me an email that felt like Christmas,” Warren says of his difficulty discerning what to keep in the project, given his bewilderment at taped riches. As much as he wanted to include Pearl Jam's incredibly full sets from 1992 — during which lead singer Eddie Vedder climbed dangerously high on stage and jumped into the crowd — Warren says he had to remind himself to put the fan of the hat boy on the side, despite the huge impact the festival had on his life and later on his career.
“It was personal for me, since I was at the first Lollapalooza when I was 17 years old at [my hometown of] Mansfield, Massachusetts,” he says. “I hadn't seen the world at all, and me and my weird friends in an avant garde jazz band thought we were the only ones who felt the way we did about things we were outraged about.” But it wasn't until he walked Lolla's lands, he says, that he found his tribe.
“There were thousands of us there—and if there were thousands there, there must be millions across the country and the world!” Warren recalled. It's a sentiment repeatedly directed at the film by the pierced, punk-haired, black-clad masses who may have turned out in the early years for Alice In Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys and Dinosaur Jr., but who left open. to Fishbone, Sebadoh, Royal Trux, A Tribe Called Quest, Stereolab, Shonen Knife and dozens of other less radio-friendly alternative acts.
Undeterred by the mountain of material, Warren set out to tell a roughly chronological story of how Lolla grew from an ill-advised idea for a traveling carnival, using only a handful of basic voices instead of the sometimes overwhelming barrage of heads talking to others. music documents. Pharrell and co are key players, of course, with the former Jane frontman acting as a spirit guide for the entire journey, in which they are joined by artists such as Ice-T's tango partner, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, Chance the Rapper, Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, Living Color's Vernon Reid and L7's Donita Sparks.
“It felt like a revolution,” says Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor documenting the receptive, electric atmosphere that saw audiences embrace his then-new band's industrial earthquake of sound and chaotic vision.
All tell the story of how Lolla not only captivated minds with music across three stages, but expanded them by providing space for a wide range of social, environmental and political voices.
With an early focus on providing information from a variety of interests—from PETA to the National Rifle Association, the pro-choice group NARAL, Greenpeace, vegetarian groups, and petitions to overturn Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court, Lolla seemed to he shivers. with information as well as audio. “I didn't realize we were so ahead of the curve on gun control [and abortion rights],” Farrell says, adding, “It's an ongoing process to blow people's minds from year to year.” Farrell continues to believe that the purpose of the festival is to expose the public to the young, new revolutionaries in music and spread their message across the globe: “We never thought about the status quo, we only thought about the truth, what I consider radical fun with my friends.”
The film elegantly transports you to a first year that no one was sure would hit, to a sold-out second line with the Chili Peppers, Lush, Jesus & Mary Chain, Pearl Jam, Ice Cube and Soundgarden. It chronicled the registration of thousands of voters each day, adding the Jim Rose Sideshow Circus to the mix, as well as a second (and later third) stage that exposed audiences to such then-up-and-coming acts as Rage, Tool and Stone Temple Pilots.
Throughout, as well as focusing on public attitudes and gratitude, the doc weaves in elements of the wider culture of the time, from Tipper Gore's PMRC slapping profanity stickers on albums (and Rage's full protest against this movement from the Lolla stage), about the missed opportunity to cover Nirvana in their prime and the constant criticism that the event had become “too mainstream”.
It traces the path of more and more mega lineups, a return to punk's roots and a 1996 line-up topped by Metallica that was not only controversial, but the first sign that just five years later, things might be looking up. slanted for the festival as a host of other touring acts — including Ozzfest, Smokin' Grooves, HORDE and Lilith Fair — took flight. After a final run in 1997 with a mostly techno/electronica focused lineup of Prodigy, Orbital, the Orb, Tool, Tricky and Korn, Lolla left and went silent for several years.
But throughout, Warren says his footage showed that — as Morello says in the film — Lollapalooza was like a “Johnny Appleseed,” spreading the word about hip-hop and alt rock and how big it was. the world outside your city. . Elsewhere in the film, Morello calls the journey from the underground to suburban theaters across the country the “alternative nation's Declaration of Independence.”
“It was very important to tell the story of the cultural context, which is what happens in the first episode,” says Warren. “What I'm proud of in our film is that you really get a sense of what's going on in America — not just about music, but about the cultural revolution in youth culture. How kids used to get pissed off about the environment, gun safety, and those things that are so painfully relevant today. It was almost unbelievable to go through these things and see that the things we were so upset about are as bad as ever today.”
Warren points to this first taste, which saw Ice-T and his hardcore band perform their then-controversial anthem “Cop Killer” and his fear of being arrested for indecency, along with a barely-naked Farrell and her Jane. Warren says his impression from that inaugural tour was how “extremely dangerous” the whole prospect felt to him at the time. This narrative line of crossing boundaries and connecting the dots between formerly unconnected musical tribes is the critical line of the film and the festival.
After collapsing in 1997, episode three focuses on the revival of the phoenix-like festival in Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan, where Lola put down roots in 2005. Taking the show off the road allowed it to grow wings and to grow into a massive annual event in the Windy City, as well as satellite locations in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Paris and India.
“I think so [Farrell] He wanted it to be real, and I know when he started seeing cuts, he was blown away—this sounds self-serving—how good it was, and he was really relieved,” Warren says of the journey through the highest highs, lowest lows and almost unimaginably eclectic compositions over the years. This year's Chicago event will feature headliners SZA, Tyler, the Creator, Blink-182, The Killers and more.
With one eye always on the next adventure, Farrell takes a long, considered pause while pondering the question of what Lollapalooza has changed in the larger culture, and whether the film comes any closer to capturing that change.
“I don't think I can take credit for anything that Lollapalooza does,” Farrell says with a smile before unleashing a perfectly Lolla idea of what it all has or means. “I work, I serve [Rastafarian God] Jah, Jah makes the decisions… I'm just trying to follow Jah's instructions.”
Watch the trailer for Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza below and watch it on Paramount+ now.
