Looking Back at Lollapalooza 1995

Dear listeners,

Hi, I’m David Malitz, an editor on the Culture desk who has been writing or assigning music coverage for almost 20 years now. As summer festival season kicks into high gear, I’m thinking about the best music festival I ever attended: Lollapalooza 1995. Unlike today, when there’s seemingly a different mega-festival each weekend, 30 years ago there was really only one major player. Lollapalooza was both a mainstream touring behemoth and the embodiment of alternative culture that ruled the ’90s.

When people (like me, often, I’m sorry) speak of the glory days of the ’90s, Lollapalooza 1995 was both the peak and the end of the road. We still had it plenty good for a while, but this tour did feel like a last gasp. Looking at the lineup now, it seems like a great college radio playlist, but not exactly a shed-filling financial success. The festival pivoted away from underground rock the following year and went on hiatus after its journey into electronica in 1997.

To celebrate 30 years of this inspired collection of bands, here’s a playlist of songs from the acts that performed on the tour’s main stage, with a couple of bonus tracks from the not-to-be-missed second stage.

Time takes its crazy toll,

David

Listen along while you read.

1. Sonic Youth: “The Diamond Sea”

If it seems weird now that a famously iconoclastic band without even a single gold record to its name headlined a festival playing to upward of 25,000 people at each stop, it was weird then, too. Chalk it up to something of a lifetime achievement award for the New York legends who influenced acts down the rest of the bill.

The band reliably ended each night’s set with “The Diamond Sea,” the sprawling (and then some) closing track from its 1995 album, “Washing Machine.” It’s dreamy, jagged and features one of Thurston Moore’s most sing-songy vocal lines before it wanders off into jam territory. (The 1996 festival had a slightly different vibe when the headlining act played its regular set closer — that was “Enter Sandman” by Metallica.)

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2. Hole: “Asking for It”

Courtney Love was basically her own tornado-like sideshow on this tour, onstage and off. In Kathleen Hanna’s recent memoir, the Bikini Kill singer recounted a tale of being a guest backstage and having a run-in with Love. Hanna claims Love clocked her in the face, which led to Hanna challenging her to a debate at the college of her choice. (To be fair, I too would probably spout something ridiculous if Courtney Love sucker punched me.)

Hole’s performances on this tour featured Love getting into arguments with the audience, stage diving with reckless abandon and creating a general sense of unease. They also featured plenty of songs from “Live Through This,” the 1994 album that remains one of the defining and perfect LPs of the alt-grunge moment.

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3. Cypress Hill: “Insane in the Brain”

Cypress Hill was the easy tour leader in albums sold and contact highs caused. Lolla 95 also led to a moment that would stick with the group for the rest of its career. The “Homerpalooza” episode of “The Simpsons” in 1996 featured the L.A. rap group (as well as Sonic Youth and the previous year’s headliners, Smashing Pumpkins) and an unlikely cartoon collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra. It was an enduring joke that eventually became reality when Cypress Hill and the orchestra shared the stage at Royal Albert Hall 28 years later.

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4. Pavement: “Fight This Generation”

My colleague Dave Renard gave Pavement its due in his excellent edition of this newsletter just a couple of weeks ago, so we can be brief here. I am part of the Pavement fandom that considers “Wowee Zowee” its crowning achievement, and this anti-anthem, with its “you’re referencing what?” lyrics and chug-a-lug call to arms, represents the best of it.

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5. Sinead O’Connor: “Thank You for Hearing Me”

The outspoken Irish singer was an inspired choice to play between slacker generation poster dudes Pavement and Beck, but it wasn’t to be. She dropped off the tour after only a few dates when it became too difficult to perform while pregnant. This closing track to her 1994 album, “Universal Mother,” felt very much in tune with the emerging trip-hop boom of that time.

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6. Elastica: “Stutter”

Even outside the stadium-filling Oasis reunion, the Britpop revival is in full swing. How full in swing? Pulp and Supergrass are playing separate shows in New York on the same day this September! Elastica sometimes gets overlooked in this cohort because there’s never been a hint of reuniting after its 2001 breakup. But the group’s self-titled debut is a jolt of energy, with most songs (including this banger) not even sniffing the three-minute mark. Elastica stepped into O’Connor’s slot shortly after she left the tour.

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7. Beck: “Rowboat”

During the time between the 1993 single “Loser” and the 1996 album “Odelay,” people weren’t exactly sure if Beck was a one-hit wonder or a budding genius. He performed ramshackle main-stage sets in the middle of the day and would sometimes pull double duty playing an acoustic set on the side stage. Those sets would usually include a handful of songs from his mostly acoustic 1994 album “One Foot in the Grave” alongside other folky early cuts, including this one that was covered by Johnny Cash just a few years later.

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8. The Jesus Lizard: “Fly on the Wall”

If Sonic Youth was a surprising headliner, it was maybe even more surprising that this Chicago foursome managed to get a main-stage slot at all. This was a band known for ugly music (complimentary) like this lead track on its 1994 album, “Down.” It was also known for full-contact live performances that sometimes featured the frontman David Yow exposing himself onstage. Alas, Yow did just that at a tour stop in Cincinnati and was arrested and charged with public indecency after the band’s set. He made bail and was able to play on the tour’s next stop.

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9. Mighty Mighty Bosstones: “Hell of a Hat”

One way to make sure you don’t get charged with public indecency? Wear full suits while onstage, even as the brutal noonday sun is beating down and you’re playing to small crowds that are just filing in the gates. That’s what the Boston ska stalwarts Mighty Mighty Bosstones did as the main-stage openers on this tour. A couple of years later they would ride the wave of the third-wave ska boom they helped usher in and get a much more plum performance slot on the insurgent Warped Tour.

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10. Helium: “Pat’s Trick”

The second stage of Lolla 95, which rotated acts every couple of weeks, was where the tour’s embarrassment of riches was really apparent. The list of bands reads like an aspirational mixtape of the era: Yo La Tengo, Brainiac, Built to Spill, Superchunk, Dirty Three and many more.

I didn’t get to see Helium on my stop, but I can only imagine what it must have been like to watch Mary Timony lead her band through songs that alternated between grimy sludge-pop like this one and the sweetly hypnotic fare that made the 1995 album “The Dirt of Luck” one of the best of a loaded year.

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11. The Pharcyde: “Drop”

The 1994 festival featured a larger hip-hop footprint on the main stage with Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest, plus George Clinton (whose deep catalog provided the foundation for many rap songs of that time). There was plenty of hip-hop on the second stage of the 1995 tour, though, with performances by Coolio, the Roots and the Los Angeles group the Pharcyde. This single was released during the summer of ’95 and features a staple of the alternative ’90s — a video directed by Spike Jonze.

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