Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lolla: The Story Of Lollapalooza’ on Paramount+, An Oral History Of The Music Fest’s Origin, Growth, And Legacy

In Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza, a three-part docuseries now streaming on Paramount+, the annual destination music festival has its three-decade-plus history told by those who birthed it, built it, played it, and covered it. And if you know anything about Lollapalooza, you know Perry Farrell has had a lot to do with it. As a producer and featured interview, the former Jane’s Addiction frontman drives the narrative in Lolla, which also includes commentary from musicians like Flea, Trent Reznor, Donita Sparks of L7, Ice-T, and Tom Morello, people on the business side of Lollapalooza, music journalists, and media personalities who covered the event.       

LOLLA: THE STORY OF LOLLAPALOOZA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: The neck of an electric guitar in the foreground, and a crowd gathered before a stage. “In 1991, Lollapalooza became the most influential music festival since Woodstock. But..that was never the plan…”

The Gist: It wasn’t the plan because back in 1991, America didn’t do music festivals like we do now, where the biggest ones – today’s Lolla, the two weekends of Coachella, et cetera – are monoliths that feature hundreds of tentpole and undercard acts and their own ecosystems of hype and social media influence. But the marketplace for fests as they’ve become is floundering, or if you’re being more charitable, evolving. And maybe that’s the impetus for this docuseries, which draws on new interviews and Paramount’s vast media archives to explore how Lollapalooza came to be both the biggest early influencer on the emerging US music festival scene and one of its longest lasting survivors.

Lollapalooza began as Jane’s Addiction was ending, when Farrell’s band of LA rock weirdos were enjoying the exposure that came with Nothing’s Shocking, their 1988 Warner Bros. debut. “Perry was the greatest frontman I ever saw,” Flea says in Lolla, and the blurriness of an ancient piece of VHS footage cannot contain how monstrous  “Mountain Song” sounded back then. But the band was imploding, and the inspiration Farrell and his business partners derived from the music festival scene in England – Reading and Glastonbury and the like – manifested in the concept of a traveling circus of a Jane’s farewell tour, complete with sets from all of their favorite bands. Siouxsie and the Banshees were alternative music royalty. A Pretty Hate Machine-era Nine Inch Nails would end up watching their gear melt on stage. (“We didn’t have our shit together,” Trent Reznor says of his younger self.) And Ice-T and Body Count challenged the establishment and fired up the crowds with their shoutback anthem “Cop Killer.”

“I want the greatest musicians to be heard and seen,” Farrell says in Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza. “But not if we’re gonna sell out. Money doesn’t always help art. In fact, too much money destroys art.” And the titles of each episode in the docuseries – “Fuck the Man,” “End of the Underground,” “Surviving Success” – back up Farrell’s sentiment. But hard cash as a saturation agent of culture and creativity is still a consistent presence in the Lolla story, as is controversy, which as writer Jessica Hopper notes, Farrell and Jane’s Addiction actively courted. They both stimulated the censorship debate led by people like Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center and inspired curiosity, all of which made the debut touring incarnation of Lollapalooza both a magnet for kids seeking inclusion – the goths, the punks, the skaters, the surfers, the heshers – and an event that thrived on a particular type of fucking with the status quo energy.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Woodstock 1969 is namechecked a few times in Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza as another example of the music festival as a cultural sharing point. But Woodstock ‘99, as discussed in a 2021 documentary for the HBO anthology series Music Box, became a very different animal. Three Days, a chaotic quasi-documentary about Jane’s Addiction from 1999, is streamable on YouTube in bits and pieces. And over on Apple TV+, Glastonbury: 50 Years and Counting, about the landmark British music festival, includes appearances by Thom Yorke and Billie Eilish. 

Our Take: If docs are going to tell a festival’s story, it’s usually because that story has the makings of a dumpster fire. (Remember, the Fyre Festival fallout spawned at least two documentaries of this type.) But the current version of Lollapalooza, well-funded and with a global presence, is not necessarily on fire. So why is Lolla: The Lollapalooza Story happening now? Is it because Perry Farrell’s Porno for Pyros, his post-Jane’s Addiction band, is making noise about new material and a big tour? Maybe. It might also be because Paramount has a ton of performance, interview, and MTV programming footage sitting in its vaults, footage well-suited for crafting somewhat static, easily watchable documentaries around archival material and a handful of new interviews.

A lot of the archival stuff does stand out, though, especially as part of the perspective from artists who performed. The Reznor interviews in Lolla are particularly interesting – in the present, he offers his take on how it felt to be part of such a radically new tour format, while in the past, he has to patiently explain to interviewers how NIN incorporated computers and four-track tape machines into their performance.

Sex and Skin: Nothing here, really. Instead of anything salacious, Lolla includes a few “person on the street”-type interviews with attendees of the very first and very hot Lollapalooza, in Chandler, Arizona. In 115-degree heat, a proud goth clad in head-to-toe black admits to sweating “a little,” while a punk rocker guy credits the cooling power of his tattered denim jeans as hands reach to touch his head full of long, slicked-up spikes.

Parting Shot: “You’re asking me to build the party again? Sure, let’s start there…” With its earliest, foundational moments established, parts two and three of Lolla: The Lollapalooza Story will explore the festival’s ensuing chapters, which included economic and philosophical growing pains on the way to sustained success.

Sleeper Star: It’s typical in documentary material of this type for the archival footage selected to really shine as a storytelling device. Lolla is often at its most revealing in grainy, jumpy, VHS-sourced images, as well as the wealth of MTV stuff, from news breaks and band interviews with Kurt Loder to B-roll captured by the network’s roving onsite camera crews.

Most Pilot-y Line: Here is Perry Farrell’s original, ideological template for Lollapalooza, as described to Stuart Ross, tour director for the traveling show: “‘Summer tour, seven opening acts. I wanna have giant burritos, and art, and I want political booths. The NRA next to PETA.’”

Our Call: STREAM IT, especially if you want to have something on while you’re scrolling your phone that includes some cool live footage and lots of time capsule MTV stuff. And sure, Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza explores the nuts and bolts of the festival’s thirty-year history, too, if that’s something you’re interested in. 

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.