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.