The creepy old Butthole Surfers are now one of my 15-year-old son's favorite bands. That, and the recent release of a surprisingly good live Nine Inch Nails CD, All That Could Have Been, reminds me of hairy experiences at the first Lollapalooza, way back in 1991. Ah, the musty air of nostalgia and vomit.
The Lollapalooza juggernaut rolled over Blossom Music Center (an outdoor venue located between Cleveland and Akron) for its only Ohio show August 5, my 33rd birthday.
I was still young enough to enjoy a birthday, but old enough to start calculating the percentage of my theoretical life span already squandered. Actuarial tables insisted that I had more ahead of me than behind, but I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Life is a gamble and offers no guarantees other than BP gasoline will not clog your intake valve.
My brother and I flew through Hudson, City of Lights, one light at a time and then made real time through the cool-guy backroads until we nearly rear-ended a station wagon of such width, breath, and stateliness of movement that aircraft could have landed upon it were it not for the moss and lichen that rested comfortably upon its top deck.
We dislodged ourselves from the dash and returned to our seats. My brother's attempts at circumnavigation were repeatedly repelled by oncoming vehicles and sideward drift by the mothership.
We screamed into the side entrance of Blossom - the car wasn't screaming, we were - at 2pm on the nose. (The development of the phrase "on the nose" to denote "exactly" is curious. The sense receptors of the body are concentrated within the face, of which the nose is the most prominent and central feature: rather prominent on me, really prominent upon my friend Bilbo, for whom the nose makes up a notable portion of his body weight. Unless a man is in a state of amorous agitation, when he walks into a wall his nose strikes first. He strikes the wall "on the nose." This is all just etymological speculation, however.)
The line to enter the hallowed grounds snaked back youthfully to the bridge - the bridge that symbolically and literally linked the mundane real world with the encompassing otherness of the Lollapalooza: a "Festival of Arts and Music," conceived, delivered and diapered by Perry Farrell, leader of Jane's Addiction, and another fellow with a prominent proboscis. Is there a link?
Article comments
1 - James Russell
I don't know, Eric, somehow I think Throbbing Gristle might take issue with your characterisation of industrial music as a response to rap...
2 - Eric Olsen
Good point James, but remember they started at about the same time in the late-70's, they were using the same tools.
3 - Nigel E. Richardson
No, Throbbing Gristle were around long before then - as COUM Transmissions they were performing in 1971.
But I think your point is correct in many cases - some of the more pantomime forms of industrial music in the late 80s were basically dysfunctional white boys who would have tried rap if not for the example set by Vanilla Ice....
As for Trent Reznor - I still think of him as a Rocky Horror Show version of Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel, J.G. Thirwell gothed up for MTV.