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Friday, Feb. 6
"Lollapalooza
of a Business"
Perry
Farrell
Along
with being the central figure of Jane’s Addiction, Perry Farrell
is also the founder and organizer of the Lollapalooza festival. At
the Concert Industry Consortium in Los Angeles February 6th, he presented
the conference’s first keynote speech by an artist, sharing
his thoughts as a musician on the “art of public assembly.”
We’ve attempted to reproduce his animated, funny and quirky
speech on the following pages.
His keynote was introduced with a short video that showed some of
Lollapalooza’s unique entertainment. First, there was a bogus
cop who cited fans for such things as parking a car with a “Girls
Kick Ass” bumper sticker in a “no-ass zone.” (Concert-goers
harassed by the bogus police officer were rewarded with backstage
passes.) A second clip showed a puzzle that concert-goers had to untangle
by using their cell phones and interacting with various characters
on the Lollapalooza grounds.
Last year, Lollapalooza
created a system to support mobilized gaming. Using the concepts of
the video game, we created an interactive playing field that was reality-based.
We hired actors and actresses who played characters and agents who
would walk around the grounds. Our audience used cell phones as navigational
tools to guide them through the festival, leading them through a series
of activities. They were given prizes if they were good, and penalties
if they were bad.
Now, I learned a while ago that radio shows back in the ’30s
and ’40s were sponsored by companies that basically built radios
themselves, and they were always looking for content. They had hardware
and they needed content. So I used that concept and applied it to
Lollapalooza with the cell phone. We integrated cell phone technology
into the fabric of our festival to create a brand new festival experience.
So, I’m very happy to be your keynote speaker today. It’s
a strange honor for me. I’m the creator and producer of the
Lollapalooza festival and I have also graced the stage as a musician.
My value to my associates is mainly as an artist and I accept this
role as an artist. It’s a very nice role because, as an artist,
you get to remain childlike.
I think everyone is an artist at one time. After a while, you buy
into consensus reality and then you lose your abilities. An artist
is one who continues to believe he can self-decorate the world. It’s
very difficult to remain an artist because being childlike usually
means you fumble as an adult, and eventually you’ll need representation.
In the modern world we call this representation management.
I think that today management and marketing are as important as the
field of music and, in some cases, it’s even more important.
A lot of times people start with pretty faces, and pretty faces are
good to work with, but it’s not enough to be a pretty face.
Nowadays you have to have a soda can held up to that pretty face.
So, stepping into this market of music, I realized that I’d
have to be more than just creative; I’d have to become very
savvy to compete with people. I’d have to think of ideas. And
when I began to think of those ideas, I really began to think of the
long-term effects of those ideas. I’d think in five-year spurts,
and I would think about how those ideas would affect the audience.
I started to feel kind of like a scientist. And I felt that Lollapalooza
was, in a way, a petri dish.
I am partially responsible for the nose rings and the tattoos that
you see on the youth of America but, in part, I am also responsible
for their alternative lifestyles. Hopefully, I gave people room to
remain artists and think freely for themselves.
My professional life as an entertainer began in the ’80s. At
that time, there was an exploding scene here in Los Angeles and there
were band names popping out of everybody’s mouths. There were
DJs in clubs, but the DJs played music that was basically band-driven
music, and the people really came out for the bands. It was the end
of the hair band era. I think Guns N’ Roses was the last band
to tease it out. After that, it was done.
I myself liked to frequent the punk clubs. I played with all those
cats and lived with all those musicians. I went to see them and they
went to see me. There wasn’t really a night off. It was, pretty
much, that we were out in the clubs seven days a week.
At the time, there was a clothing store on this dead-end street called
Melrose. The clothing store was called Flip. If you were savvy you
could go behind Flip and get all the clothing they threw out, then
put it on. And sometimes the people who worked there, if they were
your friends, they would throw the clothes out for you, and you’d
run around and get the clothes out of the dumpster.
And then there was a store called Nana’s. All of the punk rockers
wanted jobs out of those stores because there weren’t many places
where you could wear a nose ring, have cherry-red dreadlocks and get
a job.
Everybody was ravenous to play music and we would play anywhere they
would allow us to. It was a lot of fun and everybody had dreams, and
we all felt like we could do this on our own. At that time, there
were alternative record labels that were very healthy, and it was
the beginning of college radio, too, so it was as if we had just graduated
high school and we were going to live on our own. It was that kind
of a feeling.
We didn’t play at places like the Roxy or the Whisky, or the
Troubadour for that matter, because at that time you had promoters.
What they would do was they’d buy a night on the Strip and then
take that night and sell it back to musicians, and the musicians would
rent the night out from them. It’s what’s known as the
old pay-to-play.
I’m not sure if you guys know of the old pay-to-play, but it
was wack.
The only people who ended up playing on the Strip were kids who would
come in from the Valley and whose parents had enough money to buy
them guitars and amps and a stack of tickets, and then the room would
be filled up with their relatives.
So, we never touched it. We went downtown and we went to places like
the Anti-Club. That’s where we played. And we started putting
on our own parties.
And I was lucky enough to know this girl. I mean, she was a girl but
she was also a call girl. She was my first manager. She wanted to
promote me and I thought to myself, you know, she is a whore and this
is the music business. She’s perfectly qualified.
(Applause) Thank you. And it did work out.
So anyway, with my drive and her backing, we started to put on our
own parties. These were decadent, illegal, fantastic parties. She
would greet people at the door with her nipples taped over with the
“x.” We would book things like a transsexual dance revue
and then I would set up in the corner, alongside the transsexual dance
revue, classic motorcycles.
But I would never tell the motorcycle guys that we also had the transvestites.
So, we’d have the motorcycles for about half the evening until
they saw what was going on onstage and then they would all take off
because they were so embarrassed.
It didn’t quite mix but, for us, it was a lot of fun. Except
for one guy. I remember he ended up in a mental ward because he kept
falling asleep and woke up with a transvestite between his legs and
went home thinking ... it was terrible, I know.
I hope he’s OK. I don’t know where he is.
Back in the ’80s, there was a group of heathens that put on
parties in the desert and we called ourselves Desolation Center. We
had cult bands like the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets and Sonic Youth,
and they’d come and perform with entertainers like this fellow
called Mark Pauline from San Francisco. He was famous for his giant
robot wars and he would spear dead pig carcasses with hydraulics.
Ours was the show where Mark blew his thumb off. So, that’s
what we were famous for.
Anyway, after that, I always take insurance out.
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