August 3, 2012, 3:00 PM ET
Perry Farrell Takes Us on a Tour of Lollapalooza
By Barbara Chai
When Perry Farrell hosts his musician friends at Lollapalooza, he tries to create a warm, familial atmosphere.
“I look at Lollapalooza as my family. The business itself is a family business. I’m not a corporation, and one day I intend to leave this business for my boys,” says the festival founder and Jane’s Addiction singer.
“But my partners are my family as well, and all the people that are working for me, and so are the artists,” he says. “So that part of my family, I’ve really taken care of this year.”
Artists who will play Lollapalooza this year are invited to stay in quaint, white bungalows that have been built on an adjoining field. While headliners such as Red Hot Chili Peppers will be housed in a separate compound, the majority of artists will be housed in the bungalows – built to resemble the types of cottages found in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, where Farrell used to go every summer with his family.
The bungalows, lined up like a picturesque neighborhood, are also near an Adidas Airstreamer, where artists can pick up free sneakers (they can also get free clothes and free booze). Farrell is driving my photographer and me around in his personal golf cart (labeled “Peretz” with a yellow smiley face) and he’s as enthusiastic as a young boy, excited to show off the Lollapalooza grounds. Friends of his run over, leaping in the air, to greet him with a hug. He brakes hard next to the Adidas Airstreamer and asks for his friend – Farrell himself wants a pair of colored Gazelles, size 10 ½.
Earlier, we sat with Farrell at “Perry’s Compound,” a special area of the festival reserved for his family and friends. A bouncy castle stood outside his trailer, his son’s shoes on the grass by the puffy door. Farrell, who is based in Santa Monica Canyon with his wife and two sons, has been on tour with Jane’s Addiction for their latest record, “The Great Escape Artist,” and on Saturday night, the band will play a special after-show at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom. After Lollapalooza wraps up Sunday, Farrell will move on to Cleveland with Jane’s Addiction.
Speakeasy caught up with Farrell to discuss this year’s Lollapalooza, the growth of electronic dance music, and what’s next for Jane’s Addiction.
You have sold 100,000 tickets per day for three days. What can festivalgoers expect to be different at Lollapalooza this year?
We’ve got this area that they call Perry’s, and it’s basically the electronic dance music area. It is now going on its fifth year but it has grown and grown. It was an area that had two turntables and – I don’t want to call it a cheap PA [speaker] but it definitely wasn’t enormous. They had no idea that people would love dance music as much as they do and have come to. Last year they thought to bring in the country’s biggest tent. That tent held 15,000 people but it wasn’t big enough. Kids still were dying to get into this tent, so I said look, we’ve got to blow the roof off. Let’s have it under the heavens, let’s dance under the night sky this year. So now it’s bigger and better, we’ve souped up the jumbotrons and the video mixing. And it’s even grown out of the Perry’s area. Now two out of the six headliners [on the main stages] are dance artists, which is big news: Avicii and Justice.
Some critics say that as it becomes mainstream, electronic dance music is changing, not necessarily for the better. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaking from my heart, I am an old dance music enthusiast. I went to the U.K. in 1990 and fell in love with dance music through The Orb. I go back that far. I became a DJ through those years and playing house music, not party music. I’ve lived through all the stages and what I see happening is, I’m very happy for dance music that it has now become accepted by the mainstream and that we are able to do things like have it at Lollapalooza on the main stage. I do see that a lot of it has to do with the fact that it’s been commercialized. I think things might come back down to earth because of that. Some of the stuff is a little homogenized for me, and I think what might end up happening is it might start to go underground again. I don’t think you’ll ever lose the underground aspects of it because the culture itself is so underground. If young people that are kind of waiting for the hits to happen are at the parties, we can have big parties and we can have small parties.
How has the tour been with Jane’s Addiction?
We’re on our second to final leg. We came out with a new record earlier in the year and we’ve been touring off that record, “The Great Escape Artist.” Of course we come into Chicago now to do the Aragon Ballroom, capacity 4000. We’re doing a rock concert but we’re now commingling with immersive theater. So, we’re going to be dressing the theater itself. I have wood nymphs on the grounds. I have art installations all around. I want the patrons to feel immersed in the evening with Lollapalooza Chicago. I usually take a few days to show my family around Chicago and take them to the museums. This year, right after the show we head over to Cleveland and we’re on the road for the next month. And then when that exhausts, we’ll go home and we’ll start another record.
The bungalows for artists at Lollapalooza.
The reporter (left) and Perry Farrell touring the Lollapalooza grounds.
