In the summer of 1991, Jane's Addiction pulled together America's first touring alternative rock festival, Lollapalooza, with a bill which included Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails, Fishbone, Rollins Band, Butthole Surfers and more. Only one of these bands felt the need to bring a shotgun onstage daily, however, and that band, inevitably, was the Texan noise-rock experimentalists fronted by the eternally unpredictable Gibby Haynes.
“Our light show wouldn’t work in daylight,” guitarist Paul Leary explains, quite reasonably, in a new interview with Pitchfork, so “Gibby got a 12-gauge pump shotgun and he’d load it up with what’s called popper loads - they don’t shoot bullets, but they’re used to train dogs, by having a louder, more violent explosion than a regular shell.
“Siouxsie and the Banshees was on that first Lollapalooza bill. At one show, I was playing a solo and I looked down - there’s Gibby and Siouxsie at my feet, wrestling around with a shotgun pointed at my head, trying to grab it from each other. That was like seeing a rattlesnake - I jumped 10 feet in the air.”
