Molson Park in Barrie was music paradise on Earth

I know it seems like forever and a day ago, but there was a time when if you were a Torontonian who wanted to see the hottest acts of the still emerging alternative music genre, you headed north. About 100 kilometres up Highway 400, give or take.

It’s not the most monumental anniversary, but in 2024 it will have been 30 years since Lollapalooza held its first all-day carnival of rock-and-rap oddities at Molson Park in Barrie. After the inaugural 1991 edition that saw Jane’s Addiction bid farewell as part of a 26-date travelling caravan with an Exhibition Stadium stopover, Barrie was an appropriately out-of-the-way locale for this loud racket that weirded out non-Gen Xers despite the mainstream momentum that alternative was gaining from bands such as Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I’m definitely not the only person whose life was profoundly changed that blistering August day. Lollapalooza opened the floodgates for a tidal wave of events and eccentrics on the shores of Kempenfelt Bay. With its wide, open-air spaces to accommodate side stages as well as a range of booths from concessions to merchandise and even a little political activism thrown in, Molson Park felt like the ultimate destination playground for impressionable youths looking to let off some steam and escape the ordinary. The commute from urban suburbia to music paradise on Earth was often half the adventure.

Lollapalooza (1992 to 1996), Summersault (1998 and 2000) and the Warped Tour (2000 and 2002 to 2007) weren’t the only circuses that came to Simcoe County in the years that followed. Festival-sized productions featuring Nine Inch Nails and a returning Soundgarden in 1994; Neil Young and Oasis in 1996 (less than three weeks after the latter performed in front of 250,000 people in the U.K.); Beastie Boys with Canadians Choclair and Rascalz as openers, and Radiohead in 2001, all saw pre-smartphone audiences make a beeline to Barrie for the sole purpose of losing oneself in great music.

Humblebrags didn’t come in the form of social media posts back then. You either had ticket stubs as proof of attendance or battle scars from overexuberant moshing while hopefully avoiding sunstroke. If readers have photos from this glorious concert era, please tweet them, @ROCKthusiast with #lollapalooza92.

I was at Lollapalooza 1992, an admittedly naive 19-year-old in the ways of modern sounds, actually a last-minute guest of a friend. I was no alternative revolutionary so didn’t think much of it when my friend wanted to be as close to the stage as possible for the band he came to see, the Jesus and Mary Chain. That plan was quickly blown to hell with Pearl Jam up as the second band of the day when I found myself in my first ever mosh pit.

I’ve spent the last 30 years searching for bootlegged audio to corroborate this story, but halfway through “Even Flow,” Eddie Vedder stopped the song to tell the frenzied crowd to “Pick that big guy up. A human life is more important than any song.” It was a scary few minutes, sure, but the entire Lollapalooza experience was an exhilarating one for me personally. Molson Park became somewhere I kept returning to in hopes of recapturing the excitement that flowed so freely and potently through my veins.

When Pearl Jam revisited Barrie in 1998, Vedder made a point of pausing in the middle of a dust-filled and raucous set to highlight “the guy in the f–king parking lot with a watermelon on his head like a hat,” in addition to “the guys with the flatbed truck with the couches and the chairs and the cocktail table, ready to roll it on home after the show.” Anyone who went to Molson Park during its years of entertainment operation could have told Vedder these fun sightings were pretty commonplace.

With the exception of 1995, 1987 to 2002 always included an event on or around Canada Day. All but two of them were presented by CFNY-FM, a.k.a. 102.1 the Edge. Alan Cross, longtime voice of the station, remembers the OG Lollapalooza at the CNE well and the debut in Barrie even more.

“When the first Lollapalooza rolled into Exhibition Stadium, there was skepticism about how well it would do. The promoter gave me a huge stack of tickets to help paper the house. In the end, it wasn’t a sellout but, for those who did attend, the vibe for that first event in 1991 was electric. Within a month, Pearl Jam’s ‘Ten’ album, ‘Nevermind’ from Nirvana and ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik’ from the Red Hot Chili Peppers were in stores. The Alternative Revolution was on. And when Lollapalooza 1992 rolled into Molson Park the following summer, it was beyond sold out.”

Cross said that when organizers of the first CFNY Canada Day Picnic in 1987 (which later became Edgefest) were exploring potential spots, none of them had ever heard of Molson Park. The most pressing question internally seemed to be, “‘Who’s gonna drive all the way up there on a Wednesday to see a bunch of Canadian bands?’ One of the ways we tried to mitigate the difficulties was to set the ticket price at $1.02. Tickets were sold through Pizza Pizza locations. Imagine our surprise when more than 25,000 people showed up … It was astonishing how much had changed with rock in less than a year.”

The streak probably would have been kept alive in 2003 had it not been for that “other” disruptive disease, SARS. It forced Edgefest to move to September and was dubbed the Last Bash in Barrie due to growing whispers that Molson Park’s gates would be closing for good.

The park soldiered on for a few more summers, notwithstanding the 2004 discovery that the on-site brewery was being used as an illegal marijuana grow-op since Molson vacated the premises.

By my count, using Setlist.fm as a primary source, there have been 24 artists who played Molson Park at least three times between 1992 and 2007. Over Molson Park’s concert history the top three bands in number of appearances are the Tragically Hip and Our Lady Peace at seven apiece, and Finger Eleven at six (all before their song “Paralyzer” hit No. 1 and after changing the group’s name from Rainbow Butt Monkeys).

It may not have been promoters’ first choice of a venue to host the Canadian portion of Live 8 in 2005, but a capacity crowd singing along to “Rockin’ in the Free World” and “O Canada” proved to a worldwide TV audience that Molson Park made for an awfully epic concert setting.

Sadly the roads my friends and I used to take off the Mapleview Drive exit now lead to big box stores, part of the Park Place shopping centre. Hopefully, when restrictions for concerts are fully lifted in time for summer, there will be a reason to travel another 30 kilometres northeast of where my favourite haunt used to be, to Burl’s Creek Event Grounds in lovely Oro-Medonte. I hear it’s scenic, tree-lined and has been working very hard to recapture the magic that was Molson Park.