(That 1994 lineup also seems improbably cool in retrospect, but that’s ’90s alt-rock culture for you. The whole show was conceived as a rebuke to the previous year - the Smashing Pumpkins/Beastie Boys/Breeders year, the year that Nirvana were slated to headline until Kurt Cobain killed himself - because people thought that things were getting too pop. As headliners, it had old underground gods Sonic Youth, opening their set, the night I saw them, with “Teenage Riot,” only seven years old at that point but already a classic. It had Cypress Hill, performing in front of a gigantic inflatable Buddha with a pot leaf on its belly and, at the climactic moment of their set, wheeling out a 10-foot bowl with a smoke machine inside it. It had Superchunk and Helium and Redman and Built To Spill, all playing over on the side stage.
It had Mellow Gold/”Loser”-era Beck, gawky and unsure and not yet ready for stages that size, though he’d get there soon enough. It had Hole, performing under silvery stars and openly feuding with other bands on the bill. It had Pavement, so sloppy and aloof the day I saw them that the West Virginia crowd pelted them with chunks of mud. The 1995 edition of Lollapalooza had a lineup that, in retrospect, seems almost inconceivably cool.
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