Jonathan Donahue (mercury Rev)

Self-portrait by by Jonathan Donahue

For almost two decades, Mercury Rev has pioneered virtually every style of weird, widescreen, or noisy pop music that other bands have dumbed down and taken to the bank. Veterans of the UK’s boutique festival circuit that brings us All Tomorrow’s Parties, Donahue described playing mega-festivals Reading and Glastonbury as “being on the battlefield set of a historical WWII documentary.” He’s also a funny, alarmingly nice gentleman with one of the greatest festival stories of all time.

Vice: Tell me about the Lollapalooza debacle in 1993.

Jonathan:

Perry Farrell had been a fan of ours, so that’s how we got on, and here’s the fun part: We went on right after a puppet show, or a guy juggling chainsaws, or that might have been one big thing. Then after us was Tool. So what happened in Denver was what was happening every night, we were sort of oblivious to it, that’s all. We were playing a song from the first album, it was “Very Sleepy Rivers,” and in the middle of it, things go into a far-out, sort of cosmic thing for about 15 minutes. A great “birth of the universe” is how we tried to describe it to the soundman we had, and he went with that. Lots of subsonic sounds. And all of the sudden I feel like the sound dips, and the meters went down at the front of the house, which was a board at the side of the stage, using all kinds of common sense. I noticed our soundman being lifted up by the back of his neck by security and carried away. So we just kept playing, then our bass player went to his aid. Then all of the security started throwing our shit off the stage, and our tour manager kept saying, “Get on the bus! Just get on the fucking bus!”

Wow.

So we’re all on the bus wondering what the hell happened, while our gear is still getting thrown from the stage. Then our soundman came on the bus and told us what had happened. The mayor of Denver had just happened to be coming by, checking the day’s events out or something. He stopped in front of our stage and noticed that it was louder than what was coming out from the big stage and made the comparison that “it sounded like a bus idling out of control.” And that was enough to stop the show on a dime. I remember Tool was really angry at us, like we caused the collapse of Lollapalooza as we know it.

Haha. But no, that wouldn’t be your doing.

Everyone in the band just got lost in that part each night, it wasn’t some concerted effort to piss people off or get Lollapalooza shut down, we were just some little second-stage thing.

You have a lot of experience playing smaller festivals in the UK.

We played the first ATP, the Bowlie Weekender festival…

Ah, the precursor put on by Belle and Sebastian…

That’s right. What’s happening now is we’re starting to see a lot of smaller festivals geared toward bands like us and the ones that you see associated with ATP. The audiences are smaller and limited to around 5,000 and they’re usually done on castle properties or the resort parks. You’re not finding a lot of younger bands that draw 16- to 18-year-olds, and the audiences are, to politely say, much more music-oriented. They’re not there to get plastered. They’re there for the music. They are emerging all over Europe, so bands like ours have this great outlet. At the huge festivals, you have no idea how many times we’ve gone on right after Limp Bizkit or Lee “Scratch” Perry.