The Smashing Pumpkins Returned to Lollapalooza With a Guest List
3 min readYungblud, Olivia Rodrigo and Melissa Auf der Maur all appeared across a seventeen-song headline set.
The Smashing Pumpkins headlined Lollapalooza for the first time since the travelling edition of 1994, and used a seventeen-song set to stage a series of guest appearances rather than a straight retrospective.
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Yungblud joined for Luna, Olivia Rodrigo appeared for Thirty-Three, and Melissa Auf der Maur returned for The Everlasting Gaze. Two of those are generational handshakes and one is a genuine reunion, which is a more considered piece of programming than a legacy headline slot usually receives.
The Rodrigo appearance is the one that carries argument. Thirty-Three is a deep cut from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness rather than a stadium singalong, and choosing it over an obvious hit signals that the collaboration was built around the song rather than the moment. That is a meaningfully different decision from a guest spot on a chorus everyone knows.
Auf der Maur’s return supplies the other half. Her presence connects the set to the band’s actual history rather than to its current cultural adjacency, and it gives a thirty-two-year gap since the last Lollapalooza appearance something concrete to sit on.
Legacy headline slots have become a distinct genre of festival booking, and most of them fail the same way: an accurate performance of a back catalogue to an audience that already owns it. The counter-strategy is to make the set unrepeatable, which is exactly what a guest list does. It cannot be streamed later in the same form.
Whether that reads as vitality or as curation depends on your priors about heritage rock. What is not arguable is that the band treated a nostalgia booking as a commission rather than an appearance, which is more than most acts in the slot attempt.
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