Early Good Vibes And Expansion Announced - Los AngelesTimes

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The biggest Lollapalloza ever marked its 20^th anniversary Friday in Grant Park with birthday cake, a record attendance of 90,000 and plans to further expand internationally.
As the first of more than 130 bands to play this weekend on eight stages began bringing the noise, festival organganizers backstage were glad-handing their new partners in Sao Paolo, Brazil, where Lollapalooza will debut next year. Last April, the inaugural Lollapalooza Chile took place in Santiago.
“This is a landmark festival with an established brand, and it will help us set a footprint in music,” said Leo Ganem,  an executive with the Brazilian promoter Geo Events, which is partnering with Texas-based C3 Presents and Los Angeles talent agency William Morris Endeavor to bring Lollapalooza to Sao Paolo.
Lollapalooza will look to expand to a third international location in 2013, said William Morris’ Marc Geiger, who co-founded the festival in 1991 when it first toured North America and helped establish “alternative rock” as a mainstream touchstone.  But C3’s Charlie Jones added that there are no plans to license Lollapalooza to any other city in the United States.
“We’ve always  said Lollapalooza lives in Chicago,” Jones said.
The festival was effectively dead  when Jones and his partners partnered with William Morris and co-founder Perry Farrell to revive Lollapalooza as a destination event in Grant Park in 2005. It has expanded ever since, from a two-day festival drawing about 65,000 fans in its first year to this year’s three-day, 270,000-capacity record-setter. Those figures make Lollapalooza the largest rock festival  in America, surpassing even Coachella in California and Bonnaroo inTennessee.
By midafternoon Friday, tens of thouands had already arrived to catch early sets by bands such as Wye Oak, the Vaccines and Young the Giant.
“I love Lollapalooza because it’s the one festival that even my grandparents know what it is,” said Wye Oak singer Jenn Wasner.
 To accommodate the bigger crowd, the festival has spread out even farther in Grant Park, from 80 acres in previous years to 115 acres this year, and made some logistical adjustments to reduce bottlenecking and human traffic jams. But the height of the action was yet to come, with headliners such as Coldplay, Muse and, later in the weekend, Eminem and Foo Fighters sure to draw huge crowds.
Some of the congestion on the big stages will be relieved by the Perry’s electronic tent, with 15,000 capacity.  The DJ lineup is the single biggest growth area in the Lollapalooza lineup. “It was a cult thing when we started here in 2005, but it just kept getting bigger and bigger every year since,” Geiger said. “Rock is in a drought right now, we’re waiting for two or three more greats to develop in the rock format. But this festival is way beyond what it once was,” when it was exclusively identified with alternative rock.
The food choices alone reflected that. The first Lollapalooza surely didn’t have lobster corn dogs – 15,000 of them, in fact – or torched ponzu aioli on the menu at its concessions stands.  Nor did it have a stage devoted to childrens entertainment, a family-friendly oasis in a sea of what Farrell described as “90,000 weirdos.”
The weirdness was at a minumum, though. On a sultry Friday, it was about mostly pleasant musical choices, enlivened by fresh voices such as Le Butcherettes and Kids These Days.  With the multitude of bands, it was almost impossible not to find something to pass the time until the big-ticket acts arrived in the early evening.  In the words of a track spun by Chicago DJ Lady D, “Music takes me where I want to be.”
greg@gregkot.com