While there were some technical difficulties at Phoenix’s not-at-all lamented concert venue Compton Terrace that day (including Nine Inch Nails storming off the stage as the heat melted their electronics), today marks the twentieth anniversary of the first stop of the 1991 Lollapalooza tour, with headliners Jane’s Addiction, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, among others. MTV’s 120 Minutes was there to speak to some of the bands, but they didn’t really capture the absurd heat, cognitive dissonance of seeing some of these bands perform in the middle of the afternoon, and the eventual overwhelming wave of body odor. While the festival transitioned to a multi-day event held only in Chicago, there isn’t much left from the early heyday of alternative music and the current incarnation is impeccably run, so it’s nice that the brand still has some value.
This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2011.
I was at that show in Phx it was crazy. People passing out from the heat, a downright vicious set by body count, the NIN debacle, the crazy set by jane’s addiction (I recall men on stilts it was like the nightmare before christmas before the nightmare before christmas).
20 years!? sigh.