The first-ever Lollapalooza tour took place in the summer of 1991, and while Nine Inch Nails weren’t the headliner, there’s a consensus among the band’s peers that the industrial band stole the show on the inaugural edition of the traveling festival.
In the new book LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival (available here), fellow musicians assert they were blown away by Trent Reznor and company’s live performances that summer.
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That year’s lineup was headlined by Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell’s band Jane’s Addiction, and also featured Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, Ice-T & Body Count, Butthole Surfers, and Rollins Band.
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NIN were still promoting their debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, at that point, and hadn’t yet experienced the mainstream breakthrough that would soon come with their 1992 EP Broken and 1994 album The Downward Spiral. As such, they were slotted in the middle of the lineup, playing around 4 p.m. in broad daylight at each stop.
Tom Morello, whose band Rage Against the Machine would play a couple dates on Lollapalooza ’92 and the full traveling festival in 1993, attended the first Lollapalooza as a spectator.
“That first Lollapalooza? Let’s not mince words: Nine Inch Nails kicked everybody’s ass,” recalled Morello in the aforementioned book. “I never heard of that band. Would unreservedly never buy a cassette that had keyboards on it other than Pink Floyd.”
The RATM guitarist continued, “And let me say, I went to the LA show, and I ran out the next day to buy Pretty Hate Machine. They did the thing that concerts are supposed to do — create converts. And I was one.”
Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro concurred, declaring, “Watching [Nine Inch Nails] on Lollapalooza was one of the most exciting things I’d ever seen, probably up until this day.”
He added, “Here you’ve got this brand-new band, this brand-new sound, and they went on at four in the afternoon, in broad daylight … so every day I was t the venue at four.”
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