Q+A: Tom Beaujour on His New Lollapalooza Book and Producing Successful Oral Histories

Interview with a New York Times bestselling author!

May 26, 2025

This week, we’re psyched to be joined by Tom Beaujour, co-author of Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival and the New York Times bestseller Nöthin’ But a Good Time, both with Richard Bienstock!

Tamara Palmer/Music Book Club: You conducted hundreds of interviews to bring such a special oral history to life — what was the process of arranging your book like, and when did you know it was time to wrap it up?

Tom Beaujour: As we did with our last book, Nöthin’ But a Good Time, we started with a somewhat scattershot approach, letting circumstance dictate which people we spoke to first. For example, I saw a press release announcing a new album by Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers, so I scheduled an interview for a Guitar Player feature with him with the caveat that I would also get 30 minutes to talk about Lollapalooza. That led to a Buttholes drummer King Coffey, which led to a roadie, which somewhere else. Suddenly you have 20 interviews done and you’re off and running and discern where the stories worth pursuing are. Then a year later you have 120. With this book, the arranging of the interviews was pretty much done for us as we had specific years of the tour that kept things in easy-to-manage piles.

We blew our deadline by six months, so we clearly did not wrap things up quickly enough! You’re done when you’ve managed to let go of the things you hoped to cover but can’t but can also see you’ve told a great story despite it.

What advice can you share for authors at any level who want to compile oral histories?

Don’t do it! But if you do here’s my advice.

1) Find a writing partner. It’s sooooo much work, so many interviews, sometimes so demoralizing… it’s much easier to call someone and say, “we’re fucked!” than to just mutter it under your breath. Also, people get stuck on things. We both were able to walk the other back from going WAY too long on certain sections because we had become obsessed with some arcane aspect of the festival.

2) This is one that needs to be attributed to the great Rob Tannenbaum. He once told me “TAKE CARE OF YOUR A LIST!!! It will take a lot of time, a lot of unfailingly cheerful follow-up emails and a bit of luck to secure interviews with the most recognizable names in the story you’re trying to tell.

The truth is that if you don’t get the A list, or at least some of it, people will think you’re peddling some sort of fly-by-night hack job. But you must stay cool. You are asking publicists to ask their clients to do something not directly related to whatever project is being promoted, and most publicists flinch when putting those requests through. Also, no artist owes you an interview. We all have x minutes left to live, and you’re being done a favor if someone gives you part of their x.

3) That said, the best interviews are usually people who haven’t been talked to a thousand times. Roadies, managers, bass players, drummers, lawyers. Those will be where the real gold is.

Congratulations on being NYT Bestsellers! What do you enjoy most about your long author partnership and how did it come to be?

Thank you. I am inordinately proud of being one as I think my dad would have been impressed, and even a little jealous.

Rich and I have known each other since 1995, when I was the Managing Editor of Guitar World magazine and he came in as an intern or assistant editor. I maintain that the first thing I said to him was, “Dude, do you smoke a lot of weed?” We subsequently worked together on Revolver magazine and Guitar Aficionado, which is where I first brought up the idea of doing a hair metal book with him. Given that all or our discussion drifted (and continue to drift) inexorably to that topic it seems to make sense. I think work on Nöthin’ began in earnest in 2017.

My fondest Lollapalooza memory comes from the first tour in 1991. I will always remember sitting behind Ice-T's box at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA and watching him signing boobs. What are your favorite personal Lollapalooza memories?

Having Ice-T sign my boob at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA! No, I hate to admit this, but as a snotty New York City kid who was basically left to run wild after getting to junior high, I had seen so many good bands (some that would end up on Lollapalooza and some not) by the time the festival kicked off that the idea of standing in a hot field in the beating sun to see any band did not appeal to me at all. Richard, who in 5 years younger than me and grew up in the suburbs, had his life changed by going to Lollapaloozas ’91 and ’92.

Do you have any favorite music books (classic or current) that you would recommend to us?

My favorite music book is probably Our Band Could be Your Life by Michael Azerrad; it’s a history of the American ’80s indie rock scene that is sickeningly well reported and stealthily, wickedly funny. For biographies, Warren Zane’s Petty: The Biography and James Segrest and Mark Hoffman’s Moanin’ at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howlin’ Wolf.

As far as oral histories are concerned, Please Kill Me (New York Punk), Walk This Way (Aerosmith) and the Dirt (Mötley Crüe) are all tops. My recommendations for rock autobiographies are Bob Mould’s See a Little Light, Lita Ford’s Living Like a Runaway, Kid Congo Powers’ Some New Kind of Kick, and Neko Case’s The Harder I Fight the More I love You. I’m currently reading Mike Campbell’s book Heartbreaker and it’s a must-read for guitar nerds.