A Lollapalooza for the Other Guys : Three Years Ago, the Alternative to the Alternative Music Fest Found Itself in Debt After Its Debut Tour. Now, It’s Outselling Its Famous Predecessor.

It has been called the alternative to the alternative: a Lollapalooza look-alike for the tie-dyed-shirt-sportin’, Birkenstock-wearin’, pot-smokin’, extended jam-lovin’, ‘60s-rememberin’ crowd.

And in this period of heightened fondness for hippie nostalgia, which has only escalated since the Aug. 9 death of Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia, this year’s fourth annual H.O.R.D.E. tour is enjoying unprecedented success.

The traveling rock festival, featuring a main-stage lineup of the Black Crowes, Blues Traveler, Ziggy Marley and Wilco, supplemented by a shifting roster of other acts, has outsold the more ballyhooed Lollapalooza in several cities this summer as H.O.R.D.E. winds its way toward Saturday’s stop at the Olympic Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

“We’re totally and utterly surprised,” said Blues Traveler frontman John Popper, co-founder of the tour along with the band’s manager, Dave Frey. “We weren’t expecting this at all.”

From humble beginnings in 1992, when Popper and Frey brought together several like-minded bands for an eight-city trek that drew about 7,500 per show and left organizers some $2,200 in debt, the tour has grown to the point where this year’s 23-city jaunt is expected to gross about $6 million, drawing more than 16,000 per date.

With tickets priced about $5 less than Lollapalooza’s, H.O.R.D.E. has played to about 90% of capacity this summer, according to figures provided to Poll-star magazine, a trade publication that tracks concert business. Lollapalooza, using many of the same venues and featuring a lineup headed by Sonic Youth and Hole, played to less than 80% of capacity.

“From a commercial standpoint, [H.O.R.D.E.] probably has a more popular lineup,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar. “I think the acts that are playing the H.O.R.D.E. Festival have seen more airplay than many of the acts that were on Lollapalooza.”

Surprisingly, it’s not only old hippies and disenfranchised Deadheads who have been attracted to the H.O.R.D.E. extravaganza, which, like Lollapalooza, includes a concourse featuring counterculture lifestyle vendors, forums for social action and political organizations, multiethnic concession stands and arts and crafts booths.

Some who are drawn to Lollapalooza’s more cutting-edge lineup--even Popper called the rival fest “more ballsy” because of its diversity--are also attracted to the H.O.R.D.E. bill, which is heavy on bands with an allegiance to the jam traditions of such ‘60s and ‘70s forebears as Traffic, the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers.

“It’s not just a new crop of kids who never liked alternative music,” said Andy Cirzan, a Chicago-based promoter whose Jam Productions worked with both tours this year. “Part of it is a crossover, with kids looking for more diversity in their listening, maybe looking for a piece of the whole ‘60s thing that they’re not getting out of the alternative--the whole idea that, in the convoluted and congested ‘90s, there is still this kind of conceptual thing about freedom and music and peace.”

Chris Robinson, singer for the tour-headlining Black Crowes, has a simpler reason for H.O.R.D.E.’s success: “It’s the best afternoon of music this summer.”

Robinson, whose band played under an assumed name at a Lollapalooza show in Atlanta last summer, said that the H.O.R.D.E. Festival is more about music and less about scene-making than its more celebrated cousin.

“Lollapalooza just didn’t translate to me as a musical thing as much as an MTV thing,” the singer said. “It just seemed more fabricated, more manufactured. It’s like McDonald’s counterculture. You’re not going to get much culture hanging around the mall, and Lollapalooza seems like a big mall--but with more piercing stands.”

Marc Geiger, co-founder of the Lollapalooza tour and vice president of marketing and new media for American Recordings, laughed when told of Robinson’s assessment, dismissing talk of a rivalry between the nation’s two most prominent traveling festivals.

“Anything that is good for music and exposing artists is a good thing,” said Geiger, whose label’s roster includes the Black Crowes. “The more people that are innovative and are willing to give consumers more value for their money--how could you not support it? Anything other than that is just petty [expletive] and jealousy.”

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The high visibility of the Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E tours has spawned this summer’s Warped Tour, a skateboarding exhibition/punk rock extravaganza featuring Quicksand, L7 and Sublime, which has drawn upward of 4,000 per show as it snakes its way toward Monday’s finale at the Irvine Meadows Concourse.

And the H.O.R.D.E. tour might never have come into being if not for the success of Lollapalooza, which started a year earlier.

Several bands that had built regional followings but rarely drew more than about 2,000 per show--Blues Traveler, Widespread Panic, Phish and Spin Doctors among them--joined forces for the first H.O.R.D.E. tour.

“We hated playing indoors in the summer, and the only way to play outdoors was to play a big shed,” Popper said. “So, we all kind of spontaneously came up with the idea of, if we pull together, we can combine our draws.”

As for the name, Frey said: “We’ve just usually used the dictionary definition [for horde ], which is: a disorganized group moving in the same direction.”

Each band was supposed to come up with a different meaning for the acronym, one suggestion being Hippies on Recreational Drugs Everywhere. Officially, though, H.O.R.D.E. has come to stand for Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere, which was Popper’s definition.

By any definition, the inaugural H.O.R.D.E. had a hard time getting started.

“Basically, I begged, borrowed and stole to get promoters to even do it,” Frey said. “They were thinking maybe 3,000 people would come.”

Instead, five of the eight shows that summer showed a profit and the exposure helped vault the Spin Doctors to mainstream success.

Still, said Frey, “the first two years were real grass-roots. I didn’t even get guarantees when I cut the deals. We were playing for the door [receipts].”

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After two years, Frey said, H.O.R.D.E. profits totaled only about $800. The addition last year of a more established headliner, the Allman Brothers Band, helped H.O.R.D.E. turn the corner.

Average attendance was 8,100 for a lineup that also included Blues Traveler, Big Head Todd & the Monsters and Sheryl Crow, and profits reached five figures.

This year’s tour, of course, has been more successful than anyone ever would have imagined three years ago.

“We weren’t even sure it would work,” Popper said.

It has worked so well, Popper added, that he is convinced that it could continue to prosper without Blues Traveler, which is thinking about pulling out after this tour.

“We’re a good band,” he said, “but the point of the H.O.R.D.E. tour is, there are a whole lot of good live bands out there.”

* H.O.R.D.E. Festival, with the Black Crowes, Blues Traveler, Ziggy Marley & the Melody Makers, Wilco, Joan Osborne, Jono Manson and Mother Hips, Saturday at the Olympic Velodrome, Cal State Dominguez Hills, Carson, 4 p.m. $ 25. (310) 516-3300.