Lollapaooza 1996

My coming of age began in earnest on June 30, 1996, in Pecatonica, IL, at the Winnebago County Fairgrounds near Rockford. Desperately trying to do things that would be considered cool by fellow grade school classmates, I bought tickets to attend Lollapalooza, which at the time was a traveling music festival. Parodied by The Simpsons and embraced by the MTV generation, it captured the zeitgeist during the pre-internet days in the late 1900’s. Along with my two buddies, we’d somehow convinced one of their mothers to drive us over 100 miles from home so they could spend the day sitting in their car in the parking lot doing who knows what while the three of us spent the day making memories that that are hard to recall 28 years later.

Metallica and Soundgarden were the headliners, which was a big deal, but I wasn’t a real fan of those groups then. Over on the second stage, we stood at the rail to see Ben Fold Five perform their brand of piano rock, and I think our photo ended up in a local newspaper. Rancid and the Ramones were there, as well as some monks who had gained notoriety during the Free Tibet movement. Thanks to the Internet Archive I can relive my youth listening to Chris Cornell belt out Spoonman, Fell on Black Days, and Blackhole Sun from that show. Over on YouTube there is an amateur video with awful sound quality from a tripod set up far away from the stage of the entire Metallica set too.

Front hit of Lollapalooza concert shirt bought 1996.

The most exciting development to come out of that concert-going experience was our newfound access to purchase marijuana paraphernalia. No need to look over a shoulder for the law or hoping that some unbothered store clerk would sell the illegal wares to a bunch of tweens. The vendor at the festival couldn’t have cared less about our age so long as our allowance money was green. The $5 I got for taking out the recycling each week was almost enough to cover the entire cost of the green metal hand pipe. He also cut me a deal on a fake pair of Oakley sunglasses. On the ride home, I wore my newly purchased concert t-shirt and giggled joyfully as the pipe was concealed in the free pouch with which my counterfeit shades came. What a day!

Back hit of Lollapalooza concert shirt bought 1996.

I was in sixth grade, so not yet a teenage delinquent. Causing trouble back then meant stealing chromies from luxury vehicles, using a water balloon launcher to send bagels and other food items into the local tennis club’s courts and swimming pool from a great distance away, or throwing rocks through windows of abandoned buildings. All I knew of marijuana at the time was what I had been taught in the D.A.R.E program by the mustachioed police officer who, in the future, would go on to win a $500,000 settlement from the village after filing a lawsuit for age discrimination when he was overlooked for the deputy chief position, that it was illegal and would usher me into a life of crack cocaine addiction and prostitution if I were ever to take one puff of the stuff.

A similar-looking metal hand pipe to the one used by my group of friends

A neighbor of mine, just one grade above me in school, had recently broken bad and began selling brickpack weed in five-dollar increments to middle schoolers in the suburb we lived in. He’d been running with the “wrong crowd” from one town over and went from band a geek to Wu-Tang Clan fan #1 in a few short months. Some might just call that growing up. Parents called him a bad influence. I guess he was. But that’s what older brothers, cousins and neighbors are supposed to be at the time in a young man’s life.

My 1996 Lollapalooza ticket stub.

It had been settled at the festival that we would pool our money to buy $15 worth of the low-grade cannabis imported from Mexico being offered by the neighbor. There was no trip to an unsafe location or threats of violence during the first drug deal I took part in, as promised by the D.A.R.E. officer. We waltzed into my neighbor’s home, greeting his mother on the way through the kitchen, then headed up to the attic, which housed the operation that would be supplying the ditch weed to stick in our pipe to smoke. He ripped a piece from a trash bag, placed an amount of herb into it, and then sealed the package shut with a lighter. Just like that, we were in business.

Almost as soon as we procured the devil’s lettuce, disaster struck. Back at my house, in the basement, we called a friend who had an open house with inattentive parents busy with their high-stress jobs in medicine. He lived only two blocks away, so it would be a quick bike ride to the setting for our first session. As we rose from our seats, a panic set in when the 11-year-old child tasked with holding on to the contraband couldn’t find it. The million-dollar trap house where we scored the dope was just one door down, so there wasn’t a lot of ground to cover.

When we didn’t find the baggie anywhere between the two houses, we fretted. Back in my basement and dejected, the crisis was averted when the sack of weed was located deep in the recesses of the secondhand couches we sat on. How it got there, we hadn’t a clue, but we were back in business. I hopped on my GT Performer with mag wheels, sped over to our buddy’s house, and showed him the goods. As the youngest of three boys he was less impressed with our score since his brothers had already educated him in the ways of weed.

sick ass bike

We broke up the dry, brown, hay-smelling marijuana on a copy of Nintendo Power Magazine, picking out the sticks and seeds as we were directed to by our 15-year-old supervisor. We headed outside and stepped behind the garage, not the least bit concerned that on the other side of the fence was a heavily traversed alley next to the biggest apartment complex in the town. My first time smoking pot was unremarkable. I hadn’t even puffed a cigarette in my life, so inhaling anything was foreign to me. I didn’t get stoned, but I probably pretended that I was.

Over the next couple of weeks, I would return to the scene of the crime frequently to recommit the offense and finally experience the mind-altering effects of that so-called drug. Pretty quickly, my whole group of friends were similarly experimenting and providing my neighbor with a steady income stream. Some kids went at it with furiosity, quickly becoming what parents or teachers might call “burnouts”. Three guys got expelled from eighth grade for getting stoned at lunch. I enjoyed it but was more inquisitive about alcoholic libations that could be stolen from liquor cabinets in the homes of the hard-working adults paying the mortgages and property taxes.

The cheap aluminum pipe from Lollapalooza was the first that any of us smoked from and held a special place in our hearts even as we began to acquire nicer instruments to smoke from or learn of new ways to get higher than a skeetercat howling at the moon. Taking knife hits, which was akin to freebasing, blew my socks off. Making a gravity bong with a two-liter pop bottle and bucket after seeing it in a High Times Magazine was an out-of-this-world trip. We’d fashioned a bong from bent glass tubes made in science class, a pilfered Erlenmeyer flask, and a rubber stopper to showcase our ingenuity.

Yet we always came back to old reliable. Pretty soon, the window screens at school started getting cut up to replace the resin-caked one that came with the piece. The party halted to an abrupt stop one summer day when our friend’s mother came home early from a shift at the hospital and caught us almost red-handed. While the unmistakable smell of burnt cannabis was heavily in the air, whoever had the pipe at the time blindly tossed it away so we could have plausible deniability when she started her investigation into the matter.

Scarified for the greater good, the metal pipe was gone but never forgotten. Soon, we’d have a glass spoon pipe take its place, then a fumed color-changing pipe. One person’s older brother had a reworked bong fashioned from a glass Gatorade bottle with a parrot and tropical foliage molded onto it in clay, which would occasionally make an appearance. Sometimes, we’d buy enough ganja that we didn’t feel bad about rolling a bunch up into crooked joints that barely burned, but damn did we feel like Craig and Smokey when we that happened.

The following Spring, when my friend was doing some punishment-enforced yard work, he unearthed the trusty pipe from a newly planted garden, having ended up there after being flung across the yard the year prior. After reviving it through several rounds of baths in boiling water, enough of the dirt encrusted on the pipe was gone, making it usable again. Some of our motley crew assembled behind the garage. Armed with a freshly loaded bowl of some much higher grade bud than when the pipe was christened, the archeologist who dug the artifact up sparked it with a small torch lighter. Immediately after taking the first hit, he exhaled and began to violently cough and dry heave.

It turns out the taste of the dirt it had been buried in wasn’t entirely removed by our rigorous maintenance, and the taste of the flower was overpowered by the bitter flavor of soil. Had I known then about the powerful cleaning power of isopropyl alcohol, that unfortunate incident may have been prevented. It was determined then that the pipe would be permanently retired. It might have been chucked in a dumpster on a run to the Mobil Mart for a Charleston Chew and Dr. Pepper or dropped down into the sewer. It’s final resting place inconsequential after the amount of joy it brought my group of friends for that short period.

The double-sided concert shirt printed on a Tulex tag is now considered collectible and pops up on Depop, Grailed, eBay, Wyco Vintage and elsewhere frequently for hundreds of dollars. With no intention of letting it go, I showed it to a vintage seller in Pittsburgh a few years ago and he lowballed me with $50 offer thinking I didn’t know shit about its true value. The shirt has been a core piece in my wardrobe since I came into its possession. I wore it to the 1997’s Lollapalooza Festival, where Tool, Snoop Dogg, and Devo were among the main stage performers. I wear it often despite it fitting a bit snugger around the waste than when I was rockin’ the suburbs just like Quiet Riot did.

Picking up chicks

At the petting zoo.

I’ve held on to it not because I knew it would be worth ten times what I paid for it all these years later but because it brings me back to standing behind that garage with my red-eyed miscreant friends getting lifted. It reminds me of a time before knowing the anxieties of personal and professional responsibilities that come with being an adult. It’s not my favorite shirt that I own. Or the most expensive. Or the oldest. But I dig the hell out of it and the feeling it gives me whenever I slip it on.