Perry Farrell on His Dad’s Influence

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Lollapalooza Founder Perry Farrell on His Dad’s Influence
By Jim Fusilli


Perry Farrell -------------------------------------------------------------- Getty

It’s been 20 years since Perry Farrell founded Lollapalooza. Two decades later, he continues to help curate the festival and produce it with partners C3 and the William Morris Agency. The brand is growing: This year, Lollapalooza not only set up in Chicago’s Grant Park for the seventh year, it held a two-day festival in Santiago, Chile; in 2012, Lollapalooza festivals will be held in Brazil and Chile.

Farrell, who is still best known as the lead singer of Jane’s Addiction, is spending long days and nights greeting family, friends and visitors throughout the festival in Chicago. (He also serves several stints as a DJ in the dance tent, which is called Perry’s.) We met briefly yesterday to talk about Jane’s coming album “The Great Escape Artist,” scheduled for a late September release. But with his wife Etty and their two young sons nearby, our conversation turned to family. Farrell, who was born Peretz Bernstein, remembered his late father, a jeweler who worked in New York City’s Diamond District.

Farrell, who is now 52 years old, first expressed his artistic side when working with his dad. He continued to design jewelry while studied graphic arts after moving to California in the early ‘80s. After Farrell found success with Jane’s, he’d visit his father who couldn’t quite understand his son’s music.

“He said to me, ‘Why don’t you write a song for Barbra Streisand? ‘Why can’t you write a song like Lionel Ritchie?’ I’d be sitting there with a Mohawk and I’d try to explain to him. ‘Dad, it’s a different kind of thing.’”

Farrell said he was never certain if his father approved of his career. “When I was young, he’d say, ‘A musician? How can you make a living as a musician?’ But when he died, I found that he had been keeping scrapbooks of stories about me.”

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com or follow him on Twitter: @wsjrock

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/08/ ... influence/