Why Perry Farrell didn’t want Green Day on the Lollapalooza bill: “He was like, ‘They’re a boy band. I don’t want to book a boy band’”

Perry Farrell and Billie Joe Armstrong composite image.

Green Day might have been the opening act at the 1994 Lollapalooza festival, but there was no love lost between them and the festival’s founder, Perry Farrell. Indeed the Jane’s Addiction singer originally regarded the Bay City punk trio as a “boy band”.

This and other revelations arrive in a new book, LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival. It’s an oral history of the fest, which was originally envisaged by Farrell to be a travelling version of Glastonbury; a gathering of counter culture’s many tribes.