With a main stage line-up of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Ministry, Soundgarden, Ice Cube, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Lush, 1992's Lollapalooza festival featured an even stronger bill than the inaugural event. But the most talked-about act on that summer's roadshow wasn't a main stage artist, or even a musician: instead it was The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, an 'alternative freakshow', who made the most headlines... with a little help from their rock star pals.
Rose's troupe included The Amazing Mr Lifto, who would suspend heavy weights from his nipples and penis, Slug The Sword Swallower, The Torture King and Bebe the Circus Queen, but it was Matt 'The Tube' Crowley, a former pharmacist from Montana, who became arguably the troupe's most infamous performer.
Crowley's act involved swallowing a seven foot length of soft plastic tubing, attached to a hand pump: Jim Rose would fill the pump with a mixture of liquids - beer, ketchup, eggs, chocolate syrup, whatever - pump it into Crowley's stomach, and suck it back out again, then offer the gross mixture to an audience member to drink. And when rock stars - Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, MInistry's Al Jourgensen, Soundgarden's Chris Cornell and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder among them - accepted that challenge, they unwittingly started a (mercifully brief) craze for vomit drinking among America's youth.
"Chris Cornell was the first rock star to consume the contents of my stomach." Crowley recalls in Lollapalooza: The Uncensored History of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival, an excellent new overview of the festival from writers Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour.
