If ever there was a more humbling story. I would read this. Before Green Day were headlining Coachella or selling out stadiums off Dookie alone, they were almost booted from one of alt-rock’s most iconic stages.
The person responsible for the near booting too was none other than Jane’s Addiction frontman and Lollapalooza founder, Perry Farrell.
Cast your mind back.
It’s 1994. Dookie is exploding. Green Day are the snot-nosed punks from the Bay Area with enough hooks to piss off purists. And apparently, that’s exactly what happened. In a new book, Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival, it’s revealed that Farrell tried to block the band from playing the ’94 lineup by brushing them off as a “boy band.”
“He was a fucking asshole, straight up,” Billie Joe Armstrong said. “Apparently, he thought we were some act put together by Warner Bros. or Mo Ostin or something.”
According to then-stage manager John Rubeli, Farrell hadn’t vetoed a single act before. Apart from Green Day. Only after Rubeli broke down the band’s Gilman Street roots and indie history did Farrell begrudgingly let them join for half the tour. The Boredoms would cover the other half.
Green Day, never one to let a grudge simmer quietly, hit the Lollapalooza stage and dedicated ‘Chump’—a track literally about someone acting like a dick to Farrell himself.
“We wanted to prove he had his head very far up his own ass,” Armstrong said. “His minions came up and told us he was angry. I just said, ‘Tell him to stop acting like one.’”
It didn’t help that Farrell, in the same era, was apparently more focused on creating a massive communal burrito for festivalgoers—yes, really—than understanding what Green Day were about.
They’d eventually cross paths again at Woodstock ’94. Here, Armstrong says they briefly shook hands. But the damage was done. And Green Day, already fuelled by piss and spite, used the snub the way they always have: as fire.
Now, thirty years later, they’re still here—headlining festivals Perry Farrell couldn’t keep them off if he tried. A true testament to not letting the buggers get you down.
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