Here's Who Didn't Play at the Republican Lollapalooza
The 2012 Republican National Convention will go down in the history for Clint Eastwood's dialogue with an empty chair — and, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Action Network against one of its vendors, for all the female pop stars it tried and failed to get to play the party's quadrennial party for itself. Here's the full list (for the RNC and Lolla).
.The 2012 Republican National Convention will go down in the history for Clint Eastwood's dialogue with an empty chair — and, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Action Network against one of its vendors, for all the female pop stars it tried and failed to get to play the party's quadrennial party for itself. As first reported by the Washington Examiner, Lady Gaga, Dolly Parton, and Pitbull turned down enormous offers from AAN, which raises money on behalf of Republican politicians, according to emails collected for the lawsuit. (Which we were able to download from the PACER database.) But the Examiner overlooked several other performers mentioned in the lawsuit (a portion of which is reproduced below), all of whom were apparently considered as serious candidates to perform at the RNC.
Here's a full list of those performers, and the offers AAN made to each of them (if known):
- Lady Gaga ($1,000,000)
- Pitbull ($250,000)
- Gloria Estefan ($750,000)
- Dolly Parton (Unknown, but supposedly required a jet to travel)
- Kelly Clarkson (Unknown)
- The Indigo Girls (Unknown)
- Melissa Etheridge (Unknown)
- Pedrito Martinez ("next to nothing")
In the end, Kid Rock, Journey, Zac Brown Band, and Three Doors Down performed at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in August (along with Paul Ryan's iPod). Lynyrd Skynyrd had to cancel due to Hurricane Isaac — but that's a lot of aging white men, so you can see why the party might have wanted to reach out, and why the revised RNC music lineup may have had less to do with the weather than those performers the party didn't get. (At the Democratic National Convention, President Obama's rock-star speech was moved due to weather from a bigger stadium back indoors, where he shared a stage with James Taylor, Mary J. Blige, Foo Fighters, and Jessica Sanchez.)
In the meantime, the lineup for the actual Lollapalooza, scheduled for this August, was released today. None of the artists mentioned above will appear there, unfortunately, although with The Cure rounding out the headliners, we suppose Perry Ferrell ended up just as heavy on old white men and light on the hip female pop stars as Reince Priebus.
Embedded below is the excerpt from the lawsuit in which American Action Network officials discuss which artists they were considering: