In the history of music festivals, there is arguably no more recognizable name than Lollapalooza. The fest, founded by Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell, has grown from a touring concert series, to a mainstay Chicago festival, spawning international versions in seven different countries (with an 8th on the way). Still, one question remains: How did the festival get its distinctive name?
Like most things with Farrell, it’s hard to separate fact from fiction. In interviews, the singer has claimed the word — which has been traced back to the 1890s — originally caught his ear via The Three Stooges.
“I don’t know what Three Stooges episode it was, but I did hear Moe say, ‘That’s a lollapalooza!'” he recalled in 2012.
That’s an origin story Farrell has repeated over the years, but there’s one major problem: Despite attempts from a wide range of Three Stooges experts, nobody has found a scene in which the word lollapalooza is used.
Now, it’s possible Farrell imagined the classic TV moment. “In Perry’s mind, it could have happened,” Michael Ray, assistant editor at Encyclopedia Britannica noted to the Chicago Tribune in 2011. “But a good amount of time has been spent looking into whether anyone can come up with the actual episode. To the best of my knowledge, no one has actually come up with a source.”
Farrell, for his part, has also admitted an obsession with vocabulary, which seems to lean to a much more obvious source. The singer apparently came across “lollapalooza” a second time while reading the dictionary.
“As a songwriter, I used to read the dictionary a lot. I’d look for words. If I was hard up for a word, I would start thumbing through and sometimes it would trigger an idea for a song or a lyric,” the singer explained. “And, laying on my back reading the dictionary, I came across ‘lollapalooza,’ which said ‘something and/or someone great and/or wonderful.’ Then the second definition of it was ‘a giant swirling lollipop.’ And I thought about all the amazing, wonderful people I would bring together — not just the artists but the people themselves, the patrons, the people that listen to it, the punk rockers or post-punk rockers, and the rappers and all these wild people, Gibby Haynes and Ice T and Henry Rollins, man, smashing them all together. And I thought, ‘This is the perfect name.’”
Though Lollapalooza — a visually impressive 12-letter word made up of six consonants and six vowels — seems far from a typical title, it’s nonetheless become iconic. In 1996, an episode of The Simpsons was called “Homerpalooza,” emblematic of a broader trend to “palooza” just about any event.
“I did have a happy thought in my heart to know that it has become part of the American vernacular, with all these funny paloozas,” Farrell admitted. “Early on, as people started to kind of use the palooza aspect of it, typical to lawyers, I was getting calls all day long from a lawyer: ‘Somebody’s calling themselves Clamapalooza and they’re doing clams and oysters. Somebody’s doing Waterpalooza. They want to make a bottle out of it. We’ve gotta stop ’em!’ And I was at first really taken aback and I was put on my heels about it. But they were calling me all day long and I stopped and I thought about it. And I said: ‘These guys are probably making so much money trying to shut these ‘palooza’ people down. And I said to myself: ‘Better I should let ’em do it. Because I don’t intend on paying these lawyers all this money, No. 1. And No. 2, it’s actually advertisement for Lollapalooza.’ So I said, ‘You know what? Don’t bother ’em. Unless they’re calling it Lollapalooza, leave ’em alone and don’t call me.’ And you know, it really did work out.”
