Lollapalooza 1991 may have been headlined by Jane’s Addiction, but every Gen Xer in attendance left the alternative festival’s first iteration with the same three words on their lips: Nine Inch Nails.
Trent Reznor’s burgeoning industrial rock outfit would take to the stage at 4pm, while the sun was still up, and tear through tracks from debut album Pretty Hate Machine, before taking out the angst accumulated throughout their set on their equipment.
By all accounts, it was a sight to behold. Dave Navarro branded their sets “one of the most exciting things that I’d ever seen”. Tom Morello succinctly summarized, “Nine Inch Nails kicked everybody’s ass.”
In this exclusive extract from Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival – the latest tell-all book from Guitar World writers and Nothin’ But a Good Time authors Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour – the full story behind NIN’s tumultuous sets is laid bare: the frantic music store dashes to buy more cheap guitars to destroy; the last-minute repairs; and that time Body Count smashed a pricey Gibson by mistake.
But as Trent Reznor observes, it’s a sacrifice worth making in the name of art.
“I am not going to be pretentious enough to say I never realized that if I break things it gets reactions. It is entertainment, right? That’s the bottom line.”
RICHARD PATRICK (guitarist, Nine Inch Nails) Job number one on Lollapalooza was to be as punk as fuck. We were absolutely dedicated to total mayhem and anarchy. Trent would tackle me several times during the show, I would throw beers at him, I would throw beers at the audience. It was the most decadent, crazy, do-not-give-a-fuck thing.
FRITZ MICHAUD (monitor engineer, Nine Inch Nails) I had to cover every single monitor wedge with Visqueen plastic wrap and duct-tape it on there every show, because Trent would throw beer and water in the crowd all day long, and he would immediately throw it right into the monitors if I didn’t cover them. Then the horns would stop working and the monitors would sound like there was a blanket over them.
JON KLEIN (guitarist, Siouxsie and the Banshees; touring guitarist, Sinéad O'Connor) They’d be filling the keyboards up with beer and smashing them, busting the guitars up…
MARK O’SHEA (tour manager, Nine Inch Nails) Trent was throwing Richard around onstage, yelling at the crowd, “Come on, you fuckers! Let’s go!” Just working the audience up.
TRENT REZNOR (singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, Nine Inch Nails) The show developed as we got more angry at the audience and they liked it. And then it got more abusive and dangerous and they seemed to like us more.
Chiropractors and doctors were like, “How long did you play college football?” I’d go, “It wasn’t college football. It was Trent Reznor”
Richard Patrick
RICHARD PATRICK My knees are still fucked up from that tour. I actually had to have back surgery because I walked with a limp for, like, ten years. Because my whole right leg was just whaled on. Chiropractors and doctors were like, “How long did you play college football?” I’d go, “It wasn’t college football. It was Trent Reznor.”
JON KLEIN They had this thing where every time they’d turn up in town, the crew would go out and buy cheap secondhand guitars and keyboards.
MARKY RAY (guitar tech, Nine Inch Nails, 1991; roadie, Ministry, 1992) So what happened was, on a day off, Mark O’Shea would give me a couple grand in cash. And we’re in the middle of America. Lollapalooza was the stay-forty-five-minutes-outside-of-every-major- city-in-America-tour, okay? So we’re at the Great Woods in Mansfield [Massachusetts]. We’re at Waterloo Village in New Jersey. We’re at Blossom Music Center outside of Cleveland, where I live.
They’d give me money and I would have to call up a pawnshop, a music store, find whatever was open. And remember, this is pre-internet. No cell phones, no anything. I’m calling on a landline using the Yellow Pages in a hotel room. I’d be like, “Do you have any…” We always needed to have a Kramer, a Schecter, a Jackson, a Charvel Charvette, some cheap student-line guitar.
MARK O’SHEA As long as we could get something with great pickups in it, which most of those guitars at the time had, we were good to go.
MARKY RAY So I’d be at a hotel in the middle of nowhere, I’d have to get to an airport, rent a car, drive into the city with my two thousand dollars in cash, find a pawnshop, and go, “How much you want for these five Charvels and a Schecter?” “Two grand? Here you go.” Then I’d take all the guitars – no cases, not even strung – throw them in the trunk, drive back to the venue, and set them up. And we had one song in the set, Ringfinger, that Trent would smash the guitar.
CHRIS HASKETT (guitarist, Rollins Band) I’d be on the bus with poor Marky Ray, who was having to rebuild guitars that Richie Patrick and Trent had smashed that day, getting them ready and working for the next day.
MARKY RAY The other thing I’d do is I’d go out there like the guy cleaning up shit after the elephants and take all the broken parts and literally put them in a trash can that Kevin Lyman and I would throw on the back of the semis at the end of the night.
And yes, we learned how to fix guitar necks so they could use them the next day. And that consisted of, you take a broken neck and you throw as much wood glue as you can in there, and then you C-clamp it, and then you run drywall screws countersunk on either side of the truss rod, and then you break off the ends on the back of the neck and sand them down, and then you sit ’em overnight, and you can restring ’em just enough that they’ll hold for maybe a song. Maybe. And those would be some of the guitars I would hand to Trent to smash.
RICHARD PATRICK Trent always wanted to raise the bar higher. He would be hyper-focused on trying to figure out different ways to elevate the show. We still had the punk ethic of “Fuck you, we’ve got a lot to prove.” It wasn’t the fully realized thing that Nine Inch Nails became. We were paying our dues, but at the same time, we were very, very, very confident as to what was going on. We knew we were the shit.
MISSY WORTH (marketing consultant, Lollapalooza 1991) I was the promoter at the venue in Ohio [the Blossom Music Center], and Nine Inch Nails is from Cleveland and had not played Cleveland in forever. We all kept telling the venue, “You need more security than you’ve got.” But also, “The security has to be really cool. They can’t just go crazy.” So Nine Inch Nails starts playing… and the place goes fucking wild. Everyone from the lawn is now in the seats. Everyone is everywhere.
MARK O’SHEA Basically they came down en masse, and you could see all the ushers literally turn sideways, like a turnstile gate. They just let everybody run down.
MISSY WORTH This is mayhem that you’re not gonna fix. You lost the venue. Like, “Holy fuck!” Now all you can do is pray and hope that no one’s getting hurt. And thankfully no one did. It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had at a show. And it was my own show.
MARK O’SHEA The Cleveland show is where Eric Avery and Dave Navarro were encouraged to come out and play guitar on Head Like a Hole.
DAVE NAVARRO (guitarist, Jane’s Addiction) We smashed guitars, we did a lot of stage diving and banging into each other and just the whole thing that was going on with them at the time.
MARK O’SHEA There was this mass of people up front, so Eric and Dave smashed their guitars and then dove into the audience. Then Trent stage dives. Then Richard stage dives. Next thing you know, I’m in the audience and I’m trying to grab Richard and throw him back up onstage. When I finally pulled him out, he had nothing left but his combat boots and his tighty-whities.
MARKY RAY The Head Like a Hole thing, during the course of the shows, Fritz and I started playing on that song. I think the first time we did it was at Sandstone Amphitheater, near Kansas City. We came up onstage, and all the crews and bands lost their shit. They were like, “Oh my god, that’s so cool! You guys played live auxiliary guitar on Head Like a Hole!”
I’d hand Ice-T a guitar, and he’d go out onstage and wouldn’t even plug it in. He just acted like he was playing, like blinka… smash!
Marky Ray
After that, it was open season. Everybody wanted to do it. The next thing you know, Eric and Dave were playing. Ernie C from Body Count. The Butthole Surfers. Ice-T would come up to me and he’d be like, “Marky Ray, I want to smash a guitar.” And I’d go, “But Ice, man, it’s the last one I got.” Then John Malm would say, “Marky Ray, give Ice-T a guitar.” I’d hand him a guitar, and he’d go out onstage and wouldn’t even plug it in. He just acted like he was playing, like blinka… smash!
JON KLEIN The last Lollapalooza show Nine Inch Nails did, Dave Navarro gave me his video camera and said, “A load of us are going to jam, ’cause they’ve invited us to smash guitars up.” And I sat on the side of the stage filming it for Dave. And what I remember is all the usual suspects come out and grab a guitar. And then one of the big Body Count geezers comes out. And it’s like, “Oh, this looks interesting…”
Zoom in on him. He wasn’t the kind of guy that you’d normally see picking up a guitar. And he walks up, walks straight past the rack of cheap guitars, grabs one of Trent’s really expensive ones and turns it into matchwood. I seem to remember it was a Gibson Explorer that he smashed up that night.
MARKY RAY Henry [Rollins] would sit there on our bus, incensed, going, “How can a guy break a fifteen-hundred-dollar Explorer? What kid wouldn’t give his right nut for something like that?”
RICHARD PATRICK We just did not give a fuck. We were just out to satisfy our animal instincts onstage. I think we spent forty thousand dollars on gear that we smashed on Lollapalooza.
Excerpted from LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival by Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour © 2025 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.
- Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival is out on March 25, and available to preorder from Amazon.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
“They were like, ‘Is that going to be OK?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we’re both adults’”: Phil X on playing Livin’ on a Prayer with Richie Sambora – and how his predecessor plays the Bon Jovi classic differently
“I take the job of curating this very seriously. Not just to honor the living members of Black Sabbath but also Randy Rhoads”: Tom Morello is honoring one of Ozzy Osbourne’s greatest collaborators at the Sabbath legend’s final show
