Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell remembered Pearl Jam’s 1992 and Nine Inch Nails’ 1991 Lollapalooza performances in a new Rolling Stone article.
Pearl Jam had no problem bringing the energy of their raucous club shows to huge stages when they joined Lollapalooza as Ten was blowing up. “I remember Eddie [Vedder] did a second-story dive off the speaker stacks into the crowd,” says Farrell. “I thought, ‘For sure this guy broke something.’ It gets harder and harder to impress a panel of experts, but Pearl Jam had that ‘It’ factor the minute they took the stage.”
Nine Inch Nails weren’t yet famous when they traveled the country on the first Lolla (which included Jane’s Addiction, Butthole Surfers, Living Colour and Ice-T), but they already knew how to stand out. “They were the only group that was messing with electronica to that degree,” says Farrell. “One time, all of Trent’s electronic gear went down. He was left with nothing more than a guitar and voice, so he destroyed everything on the stage and got off.”
