Were it not for a sore throat, the Alternative Nation might have never been born.

The night before a scheduled gig at Glastonbury Festival in 1990, Los Angeles Art-Metal provocateurs Janes Addiction warmed up by playing a club gig. The next morning, lead singer Perry Farrell woke up to discover his voice was gone, and with it, the bands festival debut.

But instead of pouting about a missed opportunity, he decided to cultivate his own musical extravaganza. Lollapalooza was born.

Legitimate enough, right? Not so fast. The man at the center of the story, Lollapalooza creator and current figurehead Perry Farrell, is quick to call bullshit. The story has taken on a sort of urban legend quality to it, he explains.I did lose my voice. I didnt want to go up there (on stage) because I was kind of embarrassed. I mean, who wants to show up on stage and not be able to sing? People started to assume that because I didnt get to perform at Glastonbury, I decided to build one for myself. In other words, dont let the truth get in the way of a great story.Exactly, he adds, calling from his publicists offices in Los Angeles,and Im a sucker for a great story.

The year is 1991 and Janes Addiction is falling apart. The L.A. quartet are peaking commercially, but all the band can think about is how to bring it all to an end. Farrell and his manager discuss the possibility of a touring music festival. But unlike the dinosaur rock models that briefly surfaced in the 70s, this one would speak directly to the outsiders, the misanthropes, those on the fringe, the silent and unheard.

With albums likeNothings Shocking andRitual De Lo Habitual, Janes Addiction had already extended the metaphorical olive branch, creating common ground between the punk rock art-schoolers and the disenfranchised metal heads who despised where their genre was heading (think Poison, Ratt, Warrant and countless others whose defining characteristic was the guys in the bands used more Aqua-Net hairspray than the rocker chicks who pined for their attention).

Perry assembled a bill of musicians who were musically diverse from one another but all had dipped a toe in the pool of what was then being called college rock or Alternative Rock. The tour featured The Rollins Band, Nine Inch Nails, Living Color, Siouxse & The Banshees and Janes Addiction as the headliner. Alone, each might have been able to sell out a club or theater. Together on the same stage as part of a day long festival, they uncorked the zeitgeist.

It would be a box office bonanza for the next few years bringing names like Pearl Jam, Rage Against The Machine, Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins to audiences they could not have achieved on their own. By 1997, changing tastes and, more specifically, questionable booking (Metallica?), it had run its course. A brief reboot was attempted in the mid 2000s but was quickly scrapped due to poor ticket sales.

In 2005 Lollapalooza found itself reconfigured as adestination festival, meaning it would be hosted in the city of Chicago as a three day festival in early August each year. And just like that, Lollapalooza was once again a box office cash cow.

But why Chicago? As a life long Chicagoan, to ask the question is almost rhetorical. But what did the West Coast guy see in our City of Big Shoulders?

Well, lets start with the boring answer. Its centrally located close to the center of the country, it has great airport access and superb public transportation…but then you see Grant Park. Its big, its beautiful. You have the citys skyline as your backdrop on one side. The fountain (Buckingham Fountain) is right smack in the middle as a focal point. The lakefront is on the other side of the fest. You take one look at Grant Park and you have no trouble envisioning people in these beautiful surroundings. It accommodates everybody comfortably. Its adjacent to restaurants, hotels, museums and the downtown. It seemed to good to be true.

I mention that I like to call it our citys front yard.

Oh man, thats perfect!

Considering the history of the festival, it certainly begs the question that like Lollas in the past, this one might have to change or die. Would that mean ever pulling it from Chicago?Right now, your stuck with us, Farrell jokes.I think Chicago would be very upset with us. I think there would be a lot of people calling for our heads. Right now, the best thing for the growth of the festival, I think, is to add locations which we have slowly done over the past few years. We've recently expanded to Brazil, Chile and Tel Aviv.

What about Coachellas recent experiment in which they took their festival and stretched it out over two separate weekends with both weekends presenting identical line-ups?Eh…if we were to try that, I think I would want something different. The idea of the same line-up, I dont know. I like variety. Id like for each weekend to be unique.

So it devalued their product?

I think so, yeah. I heard there was some trouble moving tickets for that second weekend and some jokes were being passed around. I dont want to be on the receiving end of a joke when it comes to Lollapalooza. Its like if you have children, he continues.One of them might be the quiet, more cerebral kid and the other is more athletic and outgoing, and theres variance there, but you love them both equally and you embrace the fact that theyre not clones.

Plenty of other things have changed since that first Lollapalooza twenty-some years ago. The way music is digested is certainly high on the list. Back in the early 90s, no one was linked to each other the way people are now. There were no smart phones, or internet or Facebook. And it certainly changes the way people approach music.

Farrell is quick to agree.I see it with my kids (he has two sons). If my kids are listening to music, its usually in the form of a video. And its not even necessarily a band theyre listening to. It could be some weird, dirty, stick man video and Im going oh my god, what are you watching and who showed you that! But thats their way in. Thats how theyre getting exposed to it.

Im not sure if their generation places as much importance on music as we did. What I think it comes from is…I look at it like reading. Back in the 1700s, homes had a reading parlor. Thats were you went to read a book. They dont really do that any more. And then it moved on to music. Families would huddle around the radio. People would go out to Jazz clubs. Then they moved on to rock clubs. But now they go to a festival. Its like a one stop shop, like trying to cram a years worth of listening to live music into a single weekend.

I remind him that, at the very least, its good for the line of work hes recently chosen.Absolutely! Be careful what you wish for, right? Farrell continues,When we were young, we didnt have video games. So what took up our time? Music. Wed go to clubs or basements and see an unsigned group. I mean, when was the last time you heard of someone going to see an unsigned group!? So, as a result Im not sure if the music scene is as important to them as it was to us. They have other things to do now. They play Mind Craft on iPads at a sleepover.

I mention that you could certainly compare the reading parlor of yesteryear to Generation X sitting downs and listening to music on vinyl.Oh yeah, he agrees.At their age, Id go to my friend Mitchs house. He had an old Macintosh computer and his parents sound system. Wed put on The Who, wed put on Led Zeppelin and save every penny we had for a concert ticket.

It became ritualistic.Totally, he muses.You had to take it out of the sleeve, place it on the turntable and drop the needle. Twenty minutes later you had to get up and flip the record. Youd smoke a joint and trip out about how cool they (whoever you were listening to) were. Youd read the liner notes. Youd stare at the art. Does anyone know who played on Justin Timberlakes last album? No, because everyone has it on their phone or their music player.

Someone asked me recently if I still had vinyl, like Janes stuff or Porno For Pyros (Farrell band after Janes imploded) and I told them, Im going back to my parents house and getting my whole collection together…I was invited to DJ in Ibiza to open one of their biggest clubs called Space and I thought about how cool it would be to do it with vinyl. I looked at my Technics turntable thats gathering dust and just thought how great would it be to play a record again. I love the size. I love the sound. Being able to decorate the sleeve…Ill stop or I could just go on and on.

Another cultural shift in the Lollapalooza universe has been the emergence of Electronic Dance Music or EDM. I ask Perry half jokingly if I could borrow his crystal ball, seeing as how he managed to predict the Alternative Nation and was way ahead of the curve with what is now an exploding genre of music. He laughs then explains his original intentions.When I put together Perrys (the stage at Lollapalooza that hosts EDM and DJ culture alike), it started with a simple question: Would you (the promoters) be cool with a stage in a grassy, shaded area, located so that people will pass it on their way to another stage? They could chill to a DJ for twenty minutes or a half hour, maybe meet some like minded people.

But in the back of my mind I was thinking one day, one whole side of this park is going to be for dance music. So two or three years later it really grew. Perrys tent kept getting larger. Then some of the acts outgrew the tent. Next thing you know Daft Punk is closing out a night on a main stage with their pyramid. Then came Deadmau5 doing his thing the next year as the rain beat downs on these kids who were losing their minds from what he was doing.

Do you envision a time when EDM overtakes rock as the main reason people come to Lollapalooza?I certainly see more growth in EDM right now than I do in rock music he states.

Twenty-plus years is a long time any relationship, specifically one as fickle as musicians and their audience. But Lollapalooza soldiers one and it still manages to surprise its maker.There are 150 acts each year that we think are great and thats why we invite them, say Farrell.Someone always has the ability to come out of nowhere. What I do for the music community is Im giving them a stage and an audience. They need to go out and make their own legend. As I get older, I actually learn from these bands. In the early days, I was the opinionated one. You come to find its like an ecosystem. It starts to feed off of itself. Its always exciting to see and hear whats going on.

Anyone in particular that youre interested in checking out this year? Theres this band…I think theyre from London…I heard them and they really reminded me of The Clash…and, oh, man whats their name… Farrell goes quite thinking.

Palma Violets I ask? Yes, totally, thats them!

And what about past performances that have stuck with you? I fully expect Perry to take more than a few moments to ponder his answer but it presents itself almost without hesitation. The Gaga moment! he exclaims.

I really think we got her at the perfect time. And Im not even referring to her performance on the main stage. She had some friends in a band (Semi Precious Weapons) that were playing one of the smaller side stages. People had obviously made the connection between the two because there were tons of people on hand for their set. Suddenly she does a stage dive into the audience. Shes wearing a fishnet outfit and electrical tape Xs over her nipples. Everyone is going crazy. They were grabbing her crotch, grabbing her hair. It was like they were so in love with her, they needed to devour her. They needed to take a piece of her with them. It was so great seeing such a huge celebrity behaving that way. It also bordered on looking horrible (laughs).

As if all of that wasnt enough to keep the man busy, theres still his commitment to Janes Addiction. The on-again-off-again band that hes fronted since the late 80s will once again hit the road this summer as part of the Uproar Tour, which also features Alice In Chains and Coheed and Cambria (both Lollapalooza graduates). It all seem light years away from a Thanksgiving weekend in Chicago in 1988 when Janes Addiction played at what was then called Cabaret Metro. Three bucks gained you entrance and the opener was a local band called Smashing Pumpkins. Adds Farrell,Those shows were to good to forget.