Lollapalooza’s alt rock debauchery revealed in new book —musicians too high to go on stage, tour buses lit on fire

nypost.com:

take the stage on the first date for Lollapalooza, a new traveling alternative music festival that the band’s frontman, Perry Farrell, has conceived.

There was just one problem.The band’s lead guitarist, Dave Navarro, who had been trying to get clean but struggling amidst the debauched atmosphere of the tour, couldn’t move.“I had gotten too high on heroin,” Navarro recalls in the book “Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival” (St.

Martins, March 25). “So then I was given cocaine … took a handful of pills and drank a bunch. By the time I got onstage, I didn’t know which way was up.” According to a number of witnesses, once Navarro and Farrell, who was also using hard drugs, were both on stage, the two got into a fight and started attacking each other in front of the audience.

But Farrell doesn’t remember it that way: “I thought we were off the stage. I didn’t know that we were on the stage. Were we?” he says in the book.The new oral history from writers Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour is a raucous tour bus ride that features interviews with some of the biggest names in music of the 1990s — Trent Reznor, Eddie Vedder, Billie Joe Armstrong, Ice-T and more.“Any situation when you put a bunch of young people on a tour with probably just fully formed prefrontal lobes … things go awry,” Beaujour, who grew up in New York, told The Post. “There’s lots of drinking, there’s lots of drugs, there’s lots of tomfoolery.”When Farrell cooked up the concert series in 1990, he was inspired by traveling festivals that were big in Europe.