Los Angeles – Lollapalooza – a marquee touring festival of the 1990s that fell on commercial hard times last year – is returning this year in drastically scaled-down form.
Lollapalooza ’05 will run July 23-24 in Chicago’s Grant Park. The band lineup will not be announced until the third week in April. The festival Web site (www.lollapalooza.com) will go live Friday.
Lollapalooza began life in 1991 as a major vehicle for the exposure of left-field rock talent. A highly successful summer touring proposition in the early ’90s, it took a five-year hiatus from 1998-2002, as other treks like the Vans Warped Tour stepped in with similar concepts.
Grosses for Lollapalooza were uneven in 2003: The tour collected $13.7 million from 25 dates, according to Billboard Boxscore, and some dates were killed.
Last year, the festival’s entire July-August run of two-day dates, with scheduled headliners including Morrissey, the Flaming Lips, the Pixies and Sonic Youth, was canceled because of poor ticket sales.
Some of the festival’s founding participants are involved in this year’s Windy City event.
William Morris Agency veteran Marc Geiger booked Lollapalooza before leaving the agency to head the ill-fated Web-based label ArtistDirect; he returned to the agency in 2003, booked the ’04 festival and is working on the Chicago shows. Jane’s Addiction lead vocalist Perry Farrell also is on board in a creative capacity.
Capital Sports & Entertainment, the Austin firm that is partnered in the city’s highly successful Austin City Limits Festival, will mount the Lollapalooza shows.
WMA declined comment on the ’05 festival. A spokeswoman for Capital Sports & Entertainment did not return a call seeking comment.
