Smashing PumpkinsOlivia RodrigoYungbludLollapalooza
At Lollapalooza, the Nineties Came Back Wearing a Baby Doll Dress
Billy Corgan handed his deepest catalog cuts to Olivia Rodrigo and Yungblud, and a generation gap closed on a Chicago stage.
Source material: rollingstone.com
A hometown summit
The Smashing Pumpkins waited 32 years to headline Lollapalooza in their own city. By Thursday night, Billy Corgan had turned the wait into a generational handoff. Less than an hour after finishing his own high-octane set, British rocker Yungblud walked back onto the Grant Park stage to sing "Luna," the closing track from 1993's Siamese Dream. Dressed in black to match Corgan, he handled the song's euphoric falsetto while Corgan played guitar. "This is a fucking dream come true," Yungblud told the crowd. The band last played the festival in 1994, on the original touring bill alongside the Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, and Green Day.
Olivia Rodrigo, bathed in red
Corgan announced "Miss Olivia Rodrigo" to a massive cheer. She appeared in a sheer baby doll dress and knee-high stockings, joined Corgan on acoustic guitar for "Thirty-Three," the fifth single from the 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The stage bathed in red light as rain fell over the dreamy performance. Rodrigo has been open about drawing on nineties alt-rock, and former Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf der Maur told NME that Rodrigo once told her 13-year-old daughter: "Without your mother, none of this would have happened." Auf der Maur hears the influence directly: "In Olivia Rodrigo's records, I notice the '90s influence in both the songwriting and production."
The lineage behind the guest spots
Both guests represent chart eras the Pumpkins helped make possible. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness remains the band's commercial peak, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 1995 with 246,500 first-week units, and later earning diamond certification for sales exceeding 10 million. "1979" became their biggest Hot 100 hit at No. 12, while "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" won the 1997 Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. Rodrigo's own debut SOUR and its follow-up GUTS both entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1. Yungblud won his first Grammy earlier this year for Best Rock Performance for his rendition of "Changes" at Ozzy Osbourne's farewell Black Sabbath concert.
A week of nineties callbacks
The guest spots capped a week Corgan staged as a hometown celebration dubbed "Pumpkinpalooza." It included a sold-out underplay show at the 2,500-capacity Riviera Theatre, a merch pop-up near Grant Park, and a roving version of Madame Zuzu's, the teahouse he owns with wife Chloé Mendel. At the aftershow, the band brought out actor Barry Williams — Greg from The Brady Bunch — for the sitcom's Seventies hit "It's a Sunshine Day," and reunited with Melissa Auf der Maur for "The Everlasting Gaze" from 2000's Machina/The Machines of God. Rodrigo has also shared stages with Robert Smith of the Cure, Weezer, David Byrne, Avril Lavigne, and No Doubt in recent years.
What comes next
The Lollapalooza set closed with the band's biggest hits — "1979," "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," "Today" — before Corgan turned to what's ahead. The Smashing Pumpkins launch The Rats in the Cage tour on Sept. 30 in Columbus, Ohio, built around a set marking the 30th anniversary of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness alongside a career-spanning second act. Rodrigo's "The Unraveled Tour" will support her latest album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. Auf der Maur, reflecting on the connection, said, "That's when it locked in for me that there are direct correlations." The night itself was enough of a statement: the Nineties are no longer a revival act; they're a shared vocabulary.