Tom Morello: Nine Inch Nails “kicked everybody’s ass” on the 1991 Lollapalooza tour

Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello has said that Nine Inch Nails “kicked everybody’s ass” on the inaugural Lollapalooza tour in 1991.

• READ MORE: A brief history of Lollapalooza, from touring carnival to a global network of festivals

The first edition of the annual tour, which ran throughout the ‘90s before eventually transitioning to a destination festival in Chicago in 2005, was headlined by Jane’s Addiction, the band of the event’s founder Perry Farrell.

The star-studded line-up also included Siouxsie And The Banshees, Living Colour, Ice T & Body Count, Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band and, in a mid-afternoon slot, Nine Inch Nails.

At that point, Trent Reznor’s band had only released their first album ‘Pretty Hate Machine’, hence their minor billing on the line-up, but as Morello has revealed in a new book exploring the history of Lollapalooza, Nine Inch Nails stole the show.

“That first Lollapalooza? Let’s not mince words: Nine Inch Nails kicked everybody’s ass,” Morello says in Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story Of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival, by Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour. “I never heard of that band. Would unreservedly never buy a cassette that had keyboards on it other than Pink Floyd.”

“And let me say, I went to the LA show, and I ran out the next day to buy ‘Pretty Hate Machine’. They did the thing that concerts are supposed to do – create converts. And I was one.”

•  READ MORE: Every Lollapalooza line-up poster since 1991

A similar sentiment was shared by Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro in the new book. “Watching [Nine Inch Nails] on Lollapalooza was one of the most exciting things I’d ever seen, probably up until this day,” he said. “Here you’ve got this brand-new band, this brand-new sound, and they went on at four in the afternoon, in broad daylight … so every day I was at the venue at four.”

“The band would start playing and Trent would come out, and I’m telling you, man, it was like Elvis or The Beatles … you can hear the girls losing their minds. It was like old Beatles footage where you hear the screams and you’re expecting girls to faint out there.”

Elsewhere in the book, it was revealed that Farrell had planned for a giant burrito to be shared by all festivalgoers at each stop of the original 1991 tour, while at one stop, Nine Inch Nails’ gear “literally melted in hot weather” when it was all plugged into “one electrical outlet” on site.

Nine Inch Nails are heading on tour around the UK, Europe and North America later this summer, their first live performances together since 2022, with support from Boys Noize. Find the full list of dates here and any remaining tickets here.

This year’s Lollapalooza, meanwhile, will run from July 31 to August 3 at Grant Park and will feature headline sets from Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, KoRn, A$AP Rocky, Tyler, The Creator and Gracie Abrams.

The post Tom Morello: Nine Inch Nails “kicked everybody’s ass” on the 1991 Lollapalooza tour appeared first on NME.