Bienstock and Beaujour's Lollapalooza is a wildly self-aggrandizing, heavily varnished look at the 90's rock festival. Consisting entirely of firsthand accounts from artists and promoters with little editorial context, the text has very little interest in recounting what actually happened.
Early chapters read like (excuse my crudeness) a Perry Farrel circlejerk. Artists gush over Jane's Addiction, fawn over their music and artistry and envelope pushing ways--while chuckling through overt assholery and heroin addiction. A lot of truly horrible behaviors are waved away with a 'boys will be boys attitude.' 'It was a different time.' At one point the text unironically credits Farrel with creating music to "save the world." It's almost too much to bear.
If there was any fact-checking or editorial oversight, this book might be acceptable, but wildly untrue statements are left to stand. If the text is to be believed, Lollapalooza...invented touring festivals (they in fact did not), ...invented cultural music festivals (hello, Woodstock?) ...is responsible for Nirvana's success (lol), ...sparked the Free Tibet movement, etc. etc.
The heavy subtext--was Lollapalooza the wave of 90's Alternative culture or merely a surfer?--is danced around but never addressed. I'm inclined to more the latter than the former. It's clear, despite organizer's grandiose statements, that Lollapalooza's success was a combination of luck and good timing. Early successes were pure happenstance, opening acts like Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam and Green Day exploding during each summer's tour. And the festival was never so "indie" as the text likes to purport. The whole thing was basically backed by the biggest talent agents in LA.
It's one thing to look back on the past with rose-tinted glasses, but the book's complete and utter lack of hindsight or accountability grows galling quickly. In recounting Lolla 1995, headlined by Hole, concert organizers gush over how difficult it was for Love to perform so soon after the suicide of her husband Kurt Cobain, and how brave she was in soldering through the tour (even if chemically altered at times). But... these are the people who booked Hole. They knew exactly how difficult it would be to grieve and tour, but were all to willing to ride Courtney Love's tragedy to bushels of cash. To listen to those who added to Courtney's suffering call her brave for enduring it is bullshit. Brave would have been letting the woman grieve in peace.
The book earns its wordcount only when interviewees pull back the curtain on touring life and tell "inside baseball" stories about the various bands and their crews. There is a story to tell about Lollapalooza, its origins, and where it fits into "alternative" culture of the 1990s; sadly, this book isn't it.
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