It started with a whimper: Christina Aguilera strained her vocal cords. Then Britney needed knee surgery, and everyone from Jessica Simpson to Fleetwood Mac reported an ''illness,'' resulting in a flood of canceled summer concerts. ''The pain seems pretty widespread,'' says Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar magazine, and he's not talking health care. While Madonna and Prince are thriving (at one point, Esther was pulling in $2.3 million per show), many of summer's other concerts have come down with a serious case of low-attendance-itis.
And then there's Lollapalooza. It's tough to concoct a medical excuse for the collapse of an entire tour (um, bad tofu dogs at craft services?). Last year, Perry Farrell revived the '90s alterna-rock fest (land of between-set body piercing) with limited success. With the return of original cocreator Marc Geiger, 2004 looked promising, thanks to a two-day battery of critical darlings like Morrissey, PJ Harvey, Wilco, Sonic Youth, and the Flaming Lips, plus odd-man-out jamsters String Cheese Incident. And then tickets went on sale. Most venues had sold just 3,000 to 6,000 tickets (of up to 25,000) before Farrell and Geiger gave up.
''It's very hard to find what went wrong,'' reports Geiger, currently in the process of Dismantle-palooza. ''There's too many opinions.'' And far be it from us not to offer a few more:
1 No headliner = No butts in seats.
Lollapalooza lacked that one
big band to bring in the Evanescence masses. Perhaps the thinking
was ''If Wilco draws 2,000 people and the Flaming Lips draw 2,000
people, then together they'll draw 4,000!'' But it's the SAME
2,000 record-store clerks showing up for both. And this week
found the new albums from PJ Harvey and Morrissey at Nos. 121 and
160, respectively, and Sonic Youth not even in the top 200.
Geiger says the decision to go super-indie was prompted by public
disdain for 2003's more mainstream offerings (Audioslave,
Incubus). ''There were a lot of critics who said that was what
they didn't like last year. So we went out of our way to address
those things. And you know what? The public voted.''
2 One: No longer the loneliest number.
Yet, according to Geiger,
''the artists, when they were playing their fill dates [days off],
sold more tickets than Lollapalooza. So people must have wanted
to see them, otherwise they wouldn't have bought tickets to those
shows, right?'' Right. But, as Seth Hurwitz, co-owner of
Washington, D.C.-based promoter I.M.P., suggests, ''Ask yourself:
Where would YOU want to see a band?'' Not standing in the
sweltering sun. Your average 30-year-old (and older) Morrissey or
PJ Harvey fans aren't going to ditch work for two days and wait
through six other acts to see those artists. They'd rather hear
their thing -- and JUST their thing -- at a club. In the dark.
3 Kids want their...well, you know.
MTV has a death grip on the
youth of our nation. And without the youth (and their expendable
income), you're not selling jack. By teaming up with MoveOn.org
instead of the MTV-allied Rock the Vote, virtually ignoring
hip-hop (Danger Mouse was relegated to the second stage), and
booking bands that fall far outside the network's rotation (aside
from the ''buzzworthy'' Modest Mouse), Lollapalooza failed to
capture the paper-thin attention span of the American teen. ''I
think this Lollapalooza lineup was aiming for the older end of
the audience,'' says Keith Dakin, the assistant music director at
WFNX in Boston. ''They were definitely losing the lower end of
kids, who are going to take their 20 bucks and go to Warped
Tour.''
