Lollapalooza Finally Gets Its Top Bands

As expected, veteran alternative rock icon Sonic Youth will headline Lollapalooza ’95. And late last week, after much negotiation, Courtney Love signed on her band, Hole, to take the No. 2 slot.

The formal announcement should come as a relief to the nation’s fans and concert promoters, who had been waiting to hear who would finally sign on to headline the fifth edition of the boisterous caravan. Even tour co-founder Perry Farrell privately wondered whether Lollapalooza ’95 would come off at all.

“I actually called the whole tour off about three weeks ago,” he says, noting that the process of finding a solid headliner had proved particularly frustrating this year.

“We’d gone through Neil Young and Snoop Doggy Dogg and the Clash and two others that will remain nameless because they were unacceptable to me,” he says. “It was looking like (Lollapalooza) was out of gas, and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

Young withdrew, in part to focus on a recording project with Pearl Jam. Negotiations with Snoop Doggy Dogg were hindered by concerns over his upcoming trial on murder conspiracy charges. And members of the Clash couldn’t be talked into a reunion at this point.

But just when hope was all but lost, Farrell says, the chips fell into place. Joining Sonic Youth and Hole will be rap trio Cypress Hill, rock band Pavement, the always-controversial Sinead O’Connor, the confrontational Chicago group Jesus Lizard and L.A. iconoclast Beck. Opening the shows will be the ska-rock act, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. The tour will likely run from early July through late August. (Specific dates will be announced soon.)

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Hole’s addition to the roster comes one year after Love’s late husband, Kurt Cobain, and his band Nirvana were to headline Lollapalooza ’94. The band pulled out just days before Cobain’s suicide last April, and some of Love’s first public appearances after his death came during the tour as she made several unannounced solo performances.

While none of this year’s acts seem to have the drawing power of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Alice in Chains or Smashing Pumpkins--bands featured the last few years--Farrell believes this year’s tour more closely lives up to the spirit of the inaugural 1990 Lollapalooza. That was headlined by Farrell’s own Jane’s Addiction, accompanied by mostly lesser-known acts, many of whom (notably Nine Inch Nails) got their first real large-scale exposure on the trek.

“This is back to the roots,” he says. “I think there’s going to be a lot of unity (among the acts) and a lot of collaboration, back to the way it was the first time.”

It’s also going back to the kind of facilities that were used on the first two tours, a mix of fixed-seat amphitheaters and general admissions “festival” sites, all geared to crowds between 10,000 and 20,000. The ’93 and ’94 tours focused on larger “field” settings often accommodating 30,000.

But Farrell, who is finishing a second album with his current band Porno for Pyros, says this year will see expansion of other Lollapalooza features. The biggest plan is to make this a “24-hour” event with a multimedia rave-like environment continuing long after Sonic Youth has finished its set.

Other non-musical plans are a traveling art gallery to be set up at each tour stop and an auxiliary stage called “The Ring,” in which Farrell says there might be anything from a boxing match or fashion show to an interactive session featuring the image of physicist Stephen Hawking. Farrell also says there will be an expansion of the computer facilities available for concert-goers, tied into Lollapalooza’s new Internet World Wide Web site and a related CD-ROM project called “Teeth.”

It’s just what Farrell was hoping for.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll throw something out there that I’m not proud of,” he insists. “I’ll wait a year or two if necessary to make it right. But from having the courage to say I was going to cancel it until we came up with something worth doing actually worked tenfold in the positive. It scared . . . everybody and what ended up happening is a Lollapalooza the way it really should be.”