Festapalooza

Why tour packages are dominating
the summer sheds

by Matt Ashare

It didn't take a genius to realize that Perry Farrell was on to something promising when he put together his first Lollapalooza, back in '91. Modeled on giant European outdoor extravaganzas like Glastonbury, Reading, and Roskilde, Farrell's festival took emerging alternative artists who weren't quite ready to headline the big summer sheds, put them on a traveling bill with a dozen other artists in the same position, and, well, filled the big summer sheds. But even Farrell couldn't have predicted the extent to which Lollapalooza would become a model for the concert industry. With the music biz still reeling from last year's downturn, heavy hitters like Aerosmith and U2 reportedly having trouble selling out arena dates across the country, and artists as diverse as Ozzy Osbourne and Sarah McLachlan mounting 'paloozas of their own, 1997 is shaping up to be the summer of the festival tour.

The 'palooza proliferation started in '92, when John Popper and Blues Traveler put together their first H.O.R.D.E (Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere) tour, a multi-stage event aimed at the hippier element of the alterna-rock audience. In the past three years the phenomenon has grown to include the Warped Tour, which caters to the punk-, ska-, and skateboard-loving all-ages crowd; the urban and hip-hop-oriented House of Blues Smokin' Grooves tour; and the post-Grateful Dead Furthur Fest. Last summer Farrell broke off from Lollapalooza and seemed to be seeding the cultural clouds for the emergence of electronica with his techno-heavy ENIT festival. But the winds hadn't yet shifted in his favor, and he was able to stage only four ENIT shows.

The absence of ENIT and the abortion of the Chaotica festival, which had aimed to bring digital dignitaries the Chemical Brothers, the Orb, Orbital, and Prodigy together for a package tour, may not bode well for electronica. But the presence of McLachlan's Lilith Fair -- an all-women, singer-songwriterly undertaking -- as well as Osbourne's Black-Sabbath-reunion-fueled Ozzfest and genre-specific, corporate-sponsored festivals like the Zenith Blues Music Festival and the Fruit of the Loom Country Comfort Tour and Experience suggests that the logic of Lollapalooza has been widely embraced.

Farrell, who's back playing an active role in this year's Lollapalooza, isn't so much threatened as intrigued by the competition. "I thought Lollapalooza would go on for a long time. I didn't see it developing like this, but it doesn't set me off course very much. It's kind of fun. It's like having offspring. I look at the other tours the way someone would look at a new person in the room they haven't met yet. I look them up and down, and I know that if there's only so much air in the room, eventually I'm going to have to find new ways of breathing. Let's be frank. The blueprint is very simple: you put a long list of bands together and hopefully the cumulative effect will be to sell a package to the public."

After a Metallica-headlined Lollapalooza '96 that was widely criticized as too conventional, the tour is back to sporting a more diverse line-up this summer, with everything from techno (Orbital and Tricky) to garage punk (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) to hip-hop (Snoop Doggy Dogg) to worldbeat (Julian and Damian Marley and the Uprising Band) joining the Britpop of James and the modern rock of Tool and Korn on the main stage. But Lollapalooza's alternative ascendancy is facing its biggest challenge to date from H.O.R.D.E., which, true to its name, has developed broadened horizons. For starters, Blues Traveler won't be headlining H.O.R.D.E. -- for the first time ever in its six-year history. Instead, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, who turned down a Lollapalooza offer two years ago, top the main stage, which also features Lollapalooza alums Beck and Primus, plus up-and-comers Kula Shaker and Soul Coughing. In what might be the most telling sign of the changing times for H.O.R.D.E., the hippie-ish jam band Widespread Panic recently withdrew from the tour. Rumor has it they were unhappy with the financial arrangements coupled with the fact that they would have had to go on before Beck.

Like Farrell, who thinks there's more than enough consumer interest to feed the festival fever, H.O.R.D.E. organizer/part owner David Frey isn't worried about ticket sales so much as about pulling together an appropriately diverse line-up. "One of my frustrations this year," he admits, "is that all the good female acts are on Lilith and all the good urban acts except Jamiroquai are on Smoking Grooves. I'm afraid people will look at us and think we're the white-guy tour. I think the greatest challenge for some of the newer festivals is going to be keeping people's attention. If all the bands on a tour are of the same genre, then that's going to be tough to pull off. Maybe not this year, but at some point down the line."

Frey raises a good point regarding the difference between this year's H.O.R.D.E. and Lollapalooza on the one hand and tours like Lilith and Smokin' Groove on the other. While the former aim to break through genre barriers by drawing large diverse audiences from smaller, segmented demographic contingents, the latter seem to be based on the old logic of putting together a marketable package of similarly styled artists. It's a tendency that doesn't surprise Farrell, even though he's tried to avoid it in Lollapalooza.

"I don't want to put the other festivals down," he emphasizes, "because there's a natural need on this planet to feel that you're part of a social system, whether you call it a gang, or a government, or a country. People like to feel tied to those things. I just don't think it has to end there."

For Canadian songstress Sarah McLachlan, however, putting together a touring festival of women artists and female-fronted bands is the means to a noble, or at least well-intentioned, end. "Last year's Lollapalooza was really dominated by men. It was a great line-up, but it was male-dominated. And I just felt there was so much great female talent out there that wasn't being represented that it would be fun to do a women's tour."

McLachlan was also motivated by personal experience. "Four years ago, when my record Fumbling first came out, I wanted to have Paula Cole open for me. I got a lot of flack from promoters who said I couldn't put two women on a bill. But I did it and everyone thought it was great. There was also a battle between myself and Tori Amos on radio. Stations would pit us against each other by saying things like, `We added Tori this week so we can't add Sarah, or we added Sarah this week so we can't add Tori.' That attitude has changed due to public pressure, and it has gotten a hell of a lot better. They've been forced to reckon with the demand in the public for these women artists. But there is a reactionary element to my reasoning. I want to do Lilith and I want it to be a success."

As you might expect, the idealistic vision embraced by McLachlan -- not to mention Farrell, who likens Lollapalooza to "a big party" -- is supported by practical concerns that have made festival tours a popular option. "The situation," H.O.R.D.E.'s Frey outlines, "is simply that in the summertime there's this shed circuit, and the sheds have a three-month season to pay all their bills. So they get corporate sponsors, they get concessions, they get Ticketmaster kickbacks. That's all based on the venue's having a certain number of shows. So to keep their Coca-Cola millions, they've got to do, say, at least 50 shows in three months.

"Unfortunately, right now there is a lack of legitimate headliners. I mean, where are the new bands coming from? It seems like most of the bands on commercial-alternative or modern-rock radio are getting built up on one song. They're burned so hard on that one song and then it's over because people are sick of them. So where are the Allman Brothers of the future? Or the next Rush or Metallica? How many of those are really being built? It's scary how few there are. That means the sheds are willing to do a UB-40 show on a Tuesday night and lose some money because the loss is balanced out by the money they're making from their Coca-Cola sponsorship. And that makes a potentially lucrative festival tour even more important to the industry."

Whether there really is a big enough audience to support more and more festival tours remains to be seen. (How many eight-hour days of nonstop music can the average consumer afford and/or endure?) But the fact that Ozzy Osbourne, who used to command arena-size audiences all by himself, is hitching his wagon to a multi-stage blowout suggests that we may be seeing just the beginning of the proliferation of Lollapaloozas this summer. And to the extent that, in spite of commercial necessities, the trend represents an attempt to recapture the idea of a concert as an event or gathering that transcends the meaning of the music, it's really not such a bad thing.

In the immortal words of Perry Farrell, "When you add it all up it's pretty damn healthy, because all people are saying is, `We want to party.' "