The only woman on the first Lollapalooza tour: “A kind of monarch”
Back in 1991, Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell hatched a plan to turn his band’s farewell tour (the first of many, it turned out) into something a bit more grand. It would be one of the world’s first proper touring rock n’ roll festivals, with eight or nine bands joining Jane’s at more than 20 pit stops across the USA. Farrell called it “Lollapalooza.”
The idea was ambitious not just as a gargantuan logistical undertaking; Farrell also wanted to put together a line-up of acts that would reflect the increasingly open-minded alternative scene of the era. Rather than catering to a specific type of audience (i.e. metal, grunge, punk, etc.), he hoped to bring a more diverse group of artists and fans together and let them mingle in a sort of Utopian travelling show.
The line-up that ultimately came together for that first Lollapalooza tour doesn’t exactly look wildly eclectic by today’s standards. Still, it was fairly groundbreaking for its time, with a headlining Jane’s Addiction joined by two African American-led rock acts (Living Colour and Ice-T & Body Count), a hardcore hero with Rollins Band, a ska-punk pioneer in Fishbone, a couple of weirdo off-beat art bands Butthole Surfers and Violent Femmes, and an up-and-coming industrial act called Nine Inch Nails.
What you may have noticed is one glaring sameness across all of these otherwise dissimilar artists: a complete absence of women. The lone exception on the ‘91 Lolla tour—representing not only the festival’s only female-led band, but also its only British one—was Siouxsie and the Banshees. At this point, Siouxsie Sioux was 34 years old, making her also one of the older participants on the largely debaucherous tour full of horny male twenty-somethings.
Was Siouxsie Sioux happy ot be at Lollapalooza?
“Siouxsie’s position in that tour, below the headliner — she was a kind of monarch, whether that was intentional or not,” Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid recalled to Spin magazine in a 2011 Lollapalooza retrospective. “She was around in the earliest days of punk, so it was awesome to have her. This whole thing could’ve been completely ageist, and that didn’t happen.”
“It wasn’t like, ‘It’s a girl band, so put them on’,” added Ted Gardner, who’d co-founded Lolla with Farrell. “A lot of people threw that accusation around.”
Banshees drummer Budgie, also interviewed in 2011, made a critical point about the band’s own perspective on the gender dynamic. “We never thought of ourselves as female-fronted,” he said. “It was just like, all of us are in the band. I think the only ‘girls’ onstage were the strippers with Jane’s Addiction.”
In the middle of the ’91 tour, Siouxsie Sioux was interviewed by MTV, giving her the opportunity to express any potential grievances, but instead, she seemed quite pleased with her Lollapalooza experience. “We just think it’s great that there’s such a diverse collection of bands,” Sioux said. “The audiences that would go to see one type of band will be seeing another type of band, whether they like it or not. It’s really different to what’s been done in England before, where they tend to lump similar types of bands together; where you’ll have a heavy metal festival or an indie festival. This is, well, it’s potentially a good idea.”
As an added layer to the Banshees’s Lolla experience, Siouixsie Sioux and Budgie were newlyweds, having tied the knot earlier that spring. “It was quite a honeymoon,” Budgie said. “It was an all-around adventure, the kind of thing where you’re sitting around with Dave Navarro at a hotel reception at two in the morning, him with a feather boa around his neck. And everybody’s thinking was, ‘There’s nothing around here. If we go out like this, we’re gonna get killed.’ There was no uncertain sense of danger.”
Everyone survived in the end, although stories of who either slept together or tried to murder one another during the tour are the stuff of legend. Lollapalooza would carry on as a touring festival for another decade before settling in as a single weekend event in Chicago from 2005 to the present.
