Classic or dud : Jane's Addiction

I'll say dud for the simple fact that it was probably nothing more ingenius than Van Halen... it just seemed like it was... all the magickal atmosphere stuff came straight out of classic rock along with the hippie vibe Perry had going... Seems very well marketed and thought-out in retrospect. He was like a peace punk, huh? It feels like classic rock to me now. Back when I was a kid it didn't. Good music for kids, just like the rest of the Lollapalooza stuff.

Kids who could never see eye to eye on anything - long hair in front vs. hair long in back, dead milkmen vs. led zeppelin, goth chicks and smiths fans, our u.s. equivalents of ravey davey and also student grant could all sing along (in a thin whinge in no way approximating perry ferrel's delivery). This is what made them great. Such extremes all in one group, Ain't No Right was like kick out the jams for us, a power-sander decadence.

It's easy to forget all that when you see pics of ferrell dj'ing progressive trance.

Whatever this chap Stevie Nixed is taking it is clearly stronger than the bubbly orange that Jane's were partial to. For, Mr. Nixed is talking pure cock.

Jane's are incredible (though Raggett is right when he points out that Perry, for all his merits, remains eminently punchable).

All four musicians were fully out there and the ideas that permate Jane's music are ever hypnotic, hallucinatory and ecstatic. I can't get enough of these boys, even after listening to this stuff consistently for ten years.

So, classic, classic, classic. If you can't dig it, give up.

D'you think it's bad timing or coincidence that the band disolved after Ritual?

Another point is the production on Shocking which I find a little flat - I don't feel that Jerden and Champagne were able to get the best out of the musicians or the Jane's sound at this point, although having said that, I do dig the rawer edge and the more incendiary drum sound.

Whereas on Ritual, the guys at the controls were able to set them for the heart of the sun and that's where the music takes me. As for the first few tracks, I dunno man... from the lead-in narrative, I'm hooked and that buzzsaw Navarro riff. Jesus. Then there's that pop-bass on No One's.. Oh mama. The album is littered with winning creative decisions. Y'know, sometimes in fact, Obvious is my favourite track off Ritual though I'm not sure why. Do you get thet?

Out of curiosity, anyone know about the new Jane's material? From what I can gather of the websites out there, they are in the studio working with fucking Paul Oakenfold! Where the hell is Jerden when you need him?

Where I deviate from the fan party line is that I think _Nothing's Shocking_ and _Ritual De Lo Habitual_ are equal; _NS_ is more consistent, but _RdlH_ has better songs on it. If I wanted to listen to an entire album, I'd grab _NS_. If I wanted to play selected songs, I'd grab _RdlH_.

OK, so it's not the Academy but it's not a bad compromise.

Better get on the blower to the ticket agencies pronto then...

Hello.

uh, Neil Young? The only thing Jane's brought together were fratboys and fratgirls.

Verdict - Dud. They lie too much for truthseekers and are too pretentious to create something communal. And the junk culture stuff I have no use for.

Exception: Jane Says. Momentarily, the dream is alive. Especially when Dave Navarro isn't around.

Classic. Shocking is only nearly classic, but Ritual is beyond classic.

provided you skip "Been Caught Stealing."

Are you mad? (Mind you, the song always sounded better live.)

I don't know much about Farrell as a person/ality. Why is he punchable?

Completely dud. Their brains are fried to the max. They look like shit. They're music is just plain bonkers like Zappa's: tries to be funny but fails miserably. I suspect they tried to do the sock thing but they couldn't find any baby socks...

And to think I'm reading the Brendan Mullen oral biography now. I still really don't understand why I even bothered to buy the book, even though I am not as hostile towards them as I once was. That said, PF seems to be such a dick. I also can't believe the "they are incredibly seminal, paved the way for the rest" bullshit line. I mean, maybe they were (in reality) but I refuse to believe it anyway.

http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/I/412SN26SG4L._AA240_.jpg

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/41R5GTQWPQL._AA240_.jpg

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51J1PZZ9G4L._AA240_.jpg

Classic
Classic
Classic

My little sister came over the other day to rip all my Jane's Addiction CDs. Her quip: "Yeah, I've really wanted to listen to Jane's Addiction lately, but couldn't bring myself to buy them." They belong to a different era, and stick out like a sore thumb in this one. But we listened to Nothings Shocking, and it still pushed my wig back with its bombastic excellence.

Kids who could never see eye to eye on anything - long hair in front vs. hair long in back, dead milkmen vs. led zeppelin, goth chicks and smiths fans, our u.s. equivalents of ravey davey and also student grant could all sing along

Jane's pretty much united the smoking section at my high school.

Classic.

Just Because.

i like them a lot but they definitely shone in a particular time and place. it resonates a lot less now, but the succession of 'three days' and 'then she did...' is still pretty mindblowing.

I saw Satellite Party (Perry's new band) supporting Velvet Revolver on Thursday night. Never heard anything by them before, they were... ok. They did two JA songs - Stop! and Mountain Song - which got the biggest applause of the night.

It was a little bit sad though. I think maybe half of the people there knew who Perry Farrell was, half of them didn't care. People were just talking and drinking and paying no attention to this man who gave me one of the greatest nights of my life - Jane's Addiction live in a club in London in about 1987

I find JA kind of annoying, but I missed out on them at the time they were around, hence missing out on their cultural context, which a lot of the above comments talk about.

also, i once saw my dad flipping channels, and the "been caught stealing" video was on. He muttered, "obscene son of a bitch..." under his breath before changing the channel.

yeah, now (this day and age) really isn't a particularly appropriate time to be considering this question somehow

Flipped my lid over "Jane Says" again which I played while running last week, and also heard in a small bar (pub) just after the World Cup.

UGH @ this band

Mostly dud. I liked the second half of Ritual where Farrell's awful lyrics and singing kind of disappear beneath the jam session when it came out, but they were so omnipresent at the time I might just have been looking for a silver lining to make listening to that album less annoying. The "hits" are all uniformly terrible.

"then she did" is one of the great all time sublime epic jams. i've been playing it on the juke box every time i hit the pool hall. i don't lose when it's on

they had their moments.

"pets" was played somewhere last week.
brought back some memories.
good song.

Pets, yeah. That one was pretty good. Wasn't that a side project after JA though?

The "hits" songs are all uniformly terrible.

Porno for Pyros
xpost

i think it's been mentioned 10 x in this thread, but the second half of ritual makes all the other silliness associated with this band almost worth it.

Ritual and Nothing's Shocking are awesome.

Perry Ferrell is a dick.

Back once more:

...it was confirmed on Dave Navarro's blog Tuesday that the entire lineup would reunite Thursday for a full show at La Cita Bar in downtown Los Angeles. The night is hosted by Shepard Fairey, who will break away from maniacally screenprinting Obama posters and T-shirts for the evening.

Eric A's been back with them this time around. Too little, too late. (His solo album's all right enough.)

http://xiola.org/

2.25.09

i got my hands on some digital pics of jane's addiction's boxset cabinet of curiosities coming out april 21st and a track list. the packaging looks cool as shit. from the pics you can see quite a bit went into packaging. there is one main booklet, four individual sleeves highly decorated. it's gonna be four discs, 3 audio, one dvd.

http://xiola.org/news/2009/boxset.jpg
http://xiola.org/news/2009/boxset_open.jpg

unofficial track list

DISC [1]
0.CD
1.JANE SAYS (RADIO TOKYO DEMO) [UNRELEASED]
2.PIGS IN ZEN (RADIO TOKYO DEMO) [SCREAM - THE COMPILATION]
3.MOUNTAIN SONG (RADIO TOKYO DEMO) [OST: DUDES]
4.HAD A DAD (RADIO TOKYO DEMO) [SINGLE]
5.I WOULD FOR YOU (RADIO TOKYO DEMO) [SINGLE]
6.IDIOT'S RULE [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
7.CLASSIC GIRL [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
8.UP THE BEACH [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
9.SUFFER SOME [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
10.THANK YOU BOYS [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
11.SUMMERTIME ROLLS [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
12.CITY [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
13.OCEAN SIZE [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
14.STOP [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
15.STANDING IN THE SHOWER?THINKING [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
16.AIN'T NO RIGHT [APRIL 1987 DEMO]
17.THREE DAYS [APRIL 1987 DEMO]

DISC [2]
0.CD
1.TED, JUST ADMIT IT [HULLY GULLY DEMO (9/1987)]
2.MACEO [HULLY GULLY DEMO (9/1987)]
3.NO ONE'S LEAVING [HULLY GULLY DEMO (9/1987)]
4.MY TIME (REHEARSAL) [UNRELEASED]
5.BEEN CAUGHT STEALING (12"" REMIX) [SINGLE]
6.RIPPLE [DEDICATED]
7.DON'T CALL ME NIGGER, WHITEY [PROMO] *JANE'S ADDICTION & BODY COUNT
8.L.A. MEDLEY (LIVE) [SINGLE]
9.KETTLE WHISTLE (LIVE) [VARIETY ARTS CENTER(7/10/1987)]
10.WHOLE LOTTA LOVE (LIVE) [SACRAMENTO (7/8/1987)]
11.1970 (LIVE) [SEATTLE (12/11/1987)]
12.BOBHAUS (LIVE) [SEATTLE (3/29/1989)]
13.JUST BECAUSE (ACOUSTIC) [UNRELEASED]
14.SUFFER SOME (LIVE) [SINGLE]
15.THE PRICE I PAY (LIVE) [SINGLE]

DISC [3]
0.CD
1.DRUM INTRO [HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM (12/19/90)]
2.UP THE BEACH (LIVE) [KETTLE WHISTLE]
3.WHORES (LIVE) [HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM (12/19/90)]
4.1% (LIVE) [HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM (12/19/90)]
5.NO ONE'S LEAVING (LIVE) [SINGLE]
6.AIN'T NO RIGHT (LIVE) [SINGLE]
7.THEN SHE DID (LIVE) [HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM (12/19/90)]
8.HAD A DAD (LIVE) [HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM (12/19/90)]
9.BEEN CAUGHT STEALING (LIVE) [HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM (12/19/90)]
10.THREE DAYS (LIVE) [KETTLE WHISTLE]
11.MOUNTAIN SONG (LIVE) [HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM (12/19/90)]
12.STOP! (LIVE) [KETTLE WHISTLE]
13.SUMMERTIME ROLLS (LIVE) [HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM (12/19/90)]
14.OCEAN SIZE (LIVE) [HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM (12/19/90)]

DISC [4]
0.DVD
1.MOUNTAIN SONG (UNEDITED) [SOUL KISS]
2.CITY [SOUL KISS]
3.HAD A DAD [PROMO CLIP]
4.MOUNTAIN SONG [PROMO CLIP]
5.STOP! [PROMO CLIP]
6.AIN'T NO RIGHT [PROMO CLIP]
7.BEEN CAUGHT STEALING [PROMO CLIP]
8.CLASSIC GIRL [PROMO CLIP]
9.OCEAN SIZE [PROMO CLIP]
10.JANES SAYS [PROMO CLIP]
11.WHORES [LIVE - ITALY]
12.THREE DAYS [LIVE - ITALY]
13.THEN SHE DID [LIVE - ITALY]
14.DON'T CALL ME NIGGER WHITEY (LIVE) [UNRELEASED]

Hmm. Well that I'll get.

otoh i understand people putting out these tricked-out sets and everything because how else are you going to get anyone to spend any money on music. but even people who don't live in city apartments don't have like endless amounts of display space for all this stuff, do they? i literally would have no place to put that thing. (yes ok i could buy it, rip it and throw away the box. but jeez.)

gimme the dvd, the rest i can take or leave. even the shittiest janes youtube clips are pretty enthralling.

Got the advance of this box in this morning's mail. I was at the show included on Disc 3, so am pretty excited to dig into that, but the demos and such on the first two discs look pretty compelling too.

Oh, now I have to buy that.

BTW, I always thought it was: "One night I met a poet."

Yeah I'm definitely getting this.

Yeah, it seems pretty clearly to be "One night I met a poet." I was listening to that song not two days ago and had absolutely no confusion about the lyric...

It's very distinctly that and not anything else, although Raggett's suggestion is superiorl.

superior.

Superiorlol. And I still prefer it.

I was at the show included on Disc 3

Okay so I hate you (I remember being pissed I had to miss that show -- that and the Pet Shop Boys in March 1991 are my two greatest 'argh if only' regrets from UCLA days, I think. I did see Jane's about a month or so later at the Universal with NIN opening, though, so there's that.)

Oh shit, this band.

This band live.

This band dead

rong

LJ catching up on 1991

2009 baby

Every band member still great live except for Brüno

motherfuckin' took the pain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx6691i0KDE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uj4Q4zbtfM&NR=1

yes

How many times is Jane's Addiction going to rise from the dead? (This time, Dave Sitek is the bassist.) New song, "End to the Lies"

http://www.slicingupeyeballs.com/2011/03/30/janes-addiction-end-to-the-lies-stream-great-escape-artists/

Absolute must-read piece from Bill See, who was there, man. (Seriously, he was there, as a singer for his own band; he's also a v. good writer.)

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/144500-janes-affliction/

It is a great read, but also somewhat depressing to think that you really didn't hear the "real" Jane's unless you happened to be in L.A. watching them live before the first album.

Based on the various live cuts I've heard on bootlegs before Nothing's Shocking came out, I suspect he's OTM in the end. (And I say this loving those first three albums and the shows I did see.)

Oh, I'm sure he's 100% right, but as much as I love those first three albums it pains me a little to know even that wasn't the band's peak.

yesterday I turned on alt-radio for the first time in a long long time and heard some moody goth-influenced rock song rolling out of my speakers that fired off every want impulse in my body

it was "Irresistible Force"

the "three days"/"then she did..." one-two.

add on "Of Course" and you have the most devastating 1-2-3 of 1991-1992

The demos he mentions are really good (although not sure if they're so decisively better than the album versions).

"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm used to getting grease on my hands, you know, workin' with pizza and all."

JA played a school benefit for my kid's school yesterday, there were about 500 kids/parents there:

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/3168_10151191807078467_1389443676_n.jpg
https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/404079_10151191806888467_1154366216_n.jpg

I hadn't seen them perform in over 22 years (with Dinosaur Jr. opening up). They still sounded pretty good.

Good times.

"thanks for coming out, this benefit will get these kids the updated math books they need so that they don't end up as... WHORES! *music starts"

"Been Caught Stealin'! Once, in study hall!"

*insert trolling of your own choice here*

http://open.spotify.com/track/13EpmgPUF4KL4TlXOGqUPD
http://open.spotify.com/track/4adGevk93O42gzhGUIjHRa
http://open.spotify.com/track/4FIVO1LXRTjdewCtJv3qzW

that entire sequence is perfection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5NN8eMDir0

the whole 1990 Milan tv broadcast.

Listening to Ritual de lo Habitual for the first time in quite a few years I could really hear how much triggered replacements were used on the drums. It still 'kinda' works on something like "Been Caught Stealing" which had kind of a hypnotic drum feel, but the repetitive each and every snare hit will sound like the other one with no dynamics definitely doesn't work on the track "Obvious".

gonna kick tomorrow ~
Eric A not only wrote Jane says but is also the son of Dustin hoffman’s rival suitor in the graduate !

Nothing's Shocking was a watershed album for me. An extremely important record that came out at just the right time for me to fall in love with. I still play it.

Everything else is meh.

Ritual is their moment of glory for me; NS feels like they were trying to be metal ("Had a Dad," "Mountain Song"), and and to be "alternative" and self-deflating ("Thank You Boys," "Standing in the Shower...Thinking," "Idiots Rule") at the same time. On Ritual they embraced their art-rock insanity. Side 2 > Side 1, but there's really not a bad song on the thing.

trying to wrap my head around liking Jane's Addiction but not Mountain Song

I like "Mountain Song," and "Had a Dad" and "Jane Says" and "Up the Beach" and "Ocean Size" and "Summertime Rolls." That's half or more of a very good album. But everything else on that record is negligible or bad. Ritual has nothing anywhere near as bad as the weak tracks on NS.

I think i first heard them in 1989 at age 15 and for the next 3 years or so, culminating with the first Lolapalooza and stepping out of high school they were a Big Deal to me. By the time they couldn't hold together to follow up Ritual and it came to pass that Porno For Pyros was quite dull, I basically lost all interest and have been to embarassed by my initial fandom to ever revisit them.

Ritual is a masterpiece. Saw the reunited Jane's at Reading in 02 or so and Three Days made it rain. I usually hate "guitar solo" guitar solos, but that guitar solo just sends me.

Dud.

Classic

I think i first heard them in 1989 at age 15 and for the next 3 years or so, culminating with the first Lolapalooza and stepping out of high school they were a Big Deal to me. By the time they couldn't hold together to follow up Ritual and it came to pass that Porno For Pyros was quite dull, I basically lost all interest and have been to embarassed by my initial fandom to ever revisit them.

this, altho contra the last bit I do go back to side 2 of Ritual fairly often, that stretch is incredible

Usually I think of the whole "Classic or Dud" question as just a rhetorical device to talk about the band, not an actual question ("Joy Division: Classic Or Dud?")

But this might be the first time I think the answer is squarely "\Dud".

Back when they became a thing, I assumed I was gonna love this band -- they had the look, the right kind of fans, all the right associations -- but then I listened, and realized the emperor had no clothes.
Jane's Addiction always seemed like they had a lot of cool ideas, but not any truly great music (see also: butthole surfers, dead kennedys).

Their fans, in high school, were genuinely the coolest.

When/where I went to high school, at peak Jane's Addiction, their fans were the worst. I remember when this happened:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBT8rMv4j3M

Dum dums brought shards of riot souvenirs to school the next day. I'm trying to remember exactly which doofuses I knew went, and I want to say it was the kids who had a cover band that did Hendrix and Chili Peppers. Which is to say, kids that really got into Blood Sugar Sex Magik the next year, but didn't quite get Nevermind. Until, of course, everyone got Nevermind.

there are a number of things i hated when i was younger and have grown to love or maybe like or at least tolerate

jane's addiction is not one of them

Interesting thought here:
Jane's Addiction always seemed like they had a lot of cool ideas, but not any truly great music (see also: butthole surfers, dead kennedys).

I would answer neither classic nor dud. Nowhere near as important as they seemed at the time seems correct though.
These are usually a rhetorical device, with the notable exception of the Doors thread.

they were just sorta there when i was getting into rock music in the mid 90s and treated as received wisdom to an extent; this obscured the fact that aesthetically i just didn't, and don't, really care for their music.

I listened to Ritual a few weeks ago, for the first time in a long time. There is a lot about the record that has not aged well for me—it came out when I was in high school so it has all those intense teen associations, for better or for worse. But all that aside, side two is stil something special.

classic, NS and Ritual still great
It took seeing them live without Eric Avery for me to realize he’s the key to the whole thing. without him they’re pretty much a jim rose sideshow but with more hats.

one of their concerts tops my list for my alltime worst shows i’ve ever seen.
and: one tops my list of alltime best.

that’s how fucked up this stupid/awesome band is

Agree about Eric. Farrell was the fulcrum of the band but E seems to have been the creative force, at least for the songs that I love

She takes a swing man
SHE CAN HIT

wrong lyrix(?)

Have they remastered anything in the last 20 years. I think the cds i have are 1990ish

The albums were remastered for vinyl a couple of years ago but no new CDs were issued, and I don't even know if the LPs came with download cards.

Reading on Discogs, it seems like the 2016 box with the new LPs actually sounds worse than the originals:

OMG the originals compared to this is a joke, don't waste your money, purchase the original copies if you can. I have both of all and the dynamic range is completely different. The originals make these reissues sound like cassettes.

speaking of records, perry farrell is the worst DJ i have ever seen. every single transition was a train wreck.

did Lou Reed get a writing credit on "Classic Girl" right from the start?

No. In the original CD the songs are all credited to all four band members equally.

Why would lou get a writing credit idgi

me either

hesitate to say but "three days" was the greatest non-YES/RUSH prog epic since duran duran's "new religion" imho. "then she did" is all-time too. "now the nameless DWELL - they hold the key and turn your knob - I'LL BET!"

I guess there’s a resemblance to “Satellite of Live” ? I dunno, I just saw online his credit and was puzzled.

I don’t see anything about a Lou credit or connection in a quick search...

Navarro: There's a Bauhaus track, "Hope," which "Classic Girl" has always reminded me of; it was basically the exact same positioning and device on the guitar, just played differently. The tone of the guitar on "Classic Girl" — that chorused-out, washed-out sound — always had a very English goth sound to me, but when the bridge kicked in, it was very Led Zeppelin. What Perry's singing about, and the nature of his voice, made it iconically California. For me, to go from two pretty legendary English bands within the same track, and then keep it in California with that lyric and that voice, made it pretty special.

Awesome quote

anyone else heard Eric A and Navarro's album post Jane's, 'Deconstruction?' sounds very much like the lost follow up to 'Ritual.' Always thought Eric was the heart of JA, and Dave's playing there is great. Ned kind of panned it in AMG and I can see why...but real fans should find a lot to like.

Didn't do much for me. I was a dedicated Jane's fan but couldn't find much to love in any of the side projects. Porno For Pyros, Psi Com, Deconstruction, Banyan, New Jane's, Perry solo = dud.

Something came together just right for those three albums and then it went away.

I bought the CD for like $.99 in some cutout bin ages ago. I don't remember much but I loved this one track and still get it stuck in my head:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVADCalHJpo

Also Eric Avery is probably my favorite bass player ever

I’m tired of mostly every other of their hits from the 90s and wouldn’t mind not hearing anything by them ever again but Pets is still my jam. Endlessly enjoyable and listenable.

Deconstruction was an album I got right when it came out and played excitedly for friends ("It's by the guitarist and base player from Janes!") and when the music came on they couldn't wait to take it off.

I sold it back within a month or two.

Something came together just right for those three albums and then it went away.

― Cow_Art, Thursday, July 30, 2020 11:06 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I love the three 1987-1990 albums and, one day, decided to seek out some of the unrecorded live and demo songs of the era and iirc they were ... not good

I don’t know why but with this band in particular I always remember their songs better in my head than what is actually in the album. I guess I’m not a big fan of how they are mixed or how repetitive they get, but there’s definitely some pop brilliance in there.

I've never listened to that Kettle Whistle collection with all the leftover songs, but I think "I Would For You," which is on the Cabinet of Curiosities box, is the one that got away for them - had they recorded a real version it could have been the kind of power ballad single that broke them on radio etc.

Kettle Whistle has some good stuff on it and some crap. My Cat's Name Is Maceo, *shudder* Cutesy Perry is the worst.

Deconstruction was an album I got right when it came out and played excitedly for friends ("It's by the guitarist and base player from Janes!") and when the music came on they couldn't wait to take it off.

I sold it back within a month or two.

― Tōne Locatelli Romano (PBKR), Thursday, July 30, 2020 5:17 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This was my experience. I made a friend drive me to the city to buy it and it was pretty disappointing at the time. I'd be willing to give it another listen though, 30 years later.

I loved Psi Com though.

total #old here (and this comes off as super-gatekeeper-y sorry) but seeing JA live was the biggest dealmaker. I could add a bunch of bands to that category but the RdlH shows in late 1990 were otherworldly.

so OTM

It's kind of hard to comprehend now looking at who these guys turned into—I think they are/were pretty damaged by the whole thing—but there was that brief window of genuine magic. I have still never seen a show or shows with that level of weird dangerous energy.

It's kind of hard to comprehend now looking at who these guys turned into

gotta say Perk still keeps it real

true, and seems a mensch

Agreed; the two shows I saw (Christmas 1990 in L.A. and summer 1991 in NJ) were absolutely amazing.

Didn't get to see them until the first reunion. I think Flea took Avery's place? It was great although I can't compare it to earlier shows. Chip Away was a highlight.

the first time I saw them in 88 or 89 in the "B" room of a club in Northampton MA, and there was no opening act as I recall but maybe we were late? They had so much dry ice going before the show started that you could only really see the heads of those immediately next to you—plus Duke Ellington on the PA, endlessly, for what seemed like close to an hour, setting the whole room on the brink

Then finally those opening notes of Up The Beach and the head and gloved arms of this howling fucking psycho in evening wear poking out from the fog

rapturous

I saw them at the Philly Spectrum on the 97 tour. I had only been really into Jane's since 1993 or so - well after they had broken up - but time goes slower when you're a kid and when they announced the reunion tour it felt like this colossal once-in-a-lifetime event.

The show was great, but at the time I was under the impression that it was cut short. They had these big cages for dancing girls set up in the middle of the audience and I saw some mook scaling the cage and trying to climb in there during Ted...Just Admit It. After that song, the band left the stage and the lights came up with no encore. Just went back and looked it up though, and apparently they followed the same setlist for the whole tour, so I guess it was just a coincidence that they stopped at that point.

It felt like a very short show to me. I was more accustomed to 3 hour long Phish shows at the time. But it did feature some of their longer songs like Three Days, Summertime Rolls, Then She Did, and the aforementioned Ted.

I saw them a handful of times from 89-91 and they were awesome. They were the kind of band that scared the shit out of my parents.

Perkins AFAIK was a key element to their songwriting and they were never the same without him (though I do like "Superhero" even though it's tame Jane's song.) Allegedly they had the songs for Ritual written and demoed when they were recording Nothing's Shocking, and held the new songs for Ritual because they thought they were good. Ritual ended up being a challenging recording session because the drugs were starting to really distract, and by the end of the tour to promote Ritual the band was a fucking mess. That's why Lolla was the farewell.

I was under the impression all the NS/RdlH songs were mainly written by Eric Avery & Perry Farrell and they also chose Dave Jerden to produce as they liked what he'd done with Brian Eno. When Eric left Dave had a bigger part in writing and also choosing Bob Ezrin to to produce Strays. Steven Perkins mainly just liked to play drums and smoke pot, and so long as he could do that he went along with anything.

Yes, pretty sure that is the case. The oral history book Whores (2009) is a great read.

The Gift seemed profound in high school. Skeptical that it would hold up.

I saw them in 2001(?) at MSG for the reunion tour and it was such a fuckin drag

Like they crossed over from "weird art-rock band failing at being rock stars" to just "rock stars."

The Gift seemed profound in high school. Skeptical that it would hold up.

― Cow_Art, Thursday, July 30, 2020 11:19 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's pretty terrible, but has some memorable scenes and lines. Any time I'm heating butter on the stove and worried about whether it will start to burn, I think to myself in Perry's voice: "It's true. Butter didn't burn nobody."

Whole thing's on youtube though, so judge for yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKbdwLC8NFs

I got into Janes in late 91 and pretty much got high every night during the Summer of 1992 and fell asleep while listening to one side of a C90 on which I had taped Ritual (deleted "Of Course" (of course)). Will be eternally shamed for not seeing Janes.

Brendan Mullen's WHORES (and his Germs/L.A. punk oral histories) are all tremendous reading. Porno for Pyros robbed a liquor store while on PCP; it's one of the craziest,
warts-and-all bios I have ever encountered.

Eric Avery was indeed the band's genius. A wonderful songwriter with a gorgeous bass tone. The band did make one last shot at creating a new LP with the "real" lineup around
the time they toured with Nine Inch Nails, and Trent Reznor was producing it. Who knows how much was recorded.

GIFT is so nutty, but I wish WB/Farrell would OK its DVD release. The opening with him scoring heroin in a dress on the Venice Boardwalk is something else.

Saw them at the Astoria in London. Perry in a leather mini-skirt dangling a bunch of grapes over the crowd for them to pluck. Absolutely magical night. I don’t even know what it was about them exactly, it was way more than them just being a tight live band. Probably my young age at the time had a lot to do with it.

The first show I ever went to - literally the first time I saw any rock band play live - was lollapalooza in 1991 when I had just turned 17 and road tripped nine hours with five dudes in a minivan to get there.

It was amazing, as was the time I drove home from a party in the woods a few months later when I was super high and kept imagining an animated perry farrell with sunglasses (kind of like Lou Reed) wearing Gandalf’s robe while big pink fluffy music notes floated out of his mouth while he sang along to Then She Did which I was listening to at the time.

I should have seen them in 1991 when they played in Sydney just before breaking up, but I was broke and had an unaccountable (and unfortunate) stab of conscience about sponging any more money off my then-girlfriend

have always regretted not going and really this regret has driven me to see many hundreds of shows since

without that OG reference point, and with plenty of cynicism and awareness of how far they'd fallen, the two post-reformation shows I saw were pretty fucking great to me. I saw a pre-Strays set that was a blinder... then the second-last show of Eric A's return stint where there was a tonne of ill-feeling on stage and it was great.

even at that diminished level they still had something special, or maybe the ability to access it sometimes

they remain a band that it is impossible to defend or explain to anyone under 30.

weird dangerous energy

otm. Which they shared with Guns 'N Roses at the time. They're the real turning point from the '80s to the '90s, bringing punk into metal.

Is the "Pets" video anywhere on the internet? I've been dying to see it again for years.

https://vimeo.com/57887328

Avery is the axis & Perry, Navarro & Perkins rotate around him in a crazed shambolic New York Dollsian way

without Avery it’s pretty much a shitshow because there’s nothing to ground them

like when Flea filled in on bass for a while? they were a mess. ugh.

i love them though!

someone said this way upthread & it’s true: their fans were the coolest kids in high school. not like popped collar ‘cool’ but the completely-on-their-own-trip, artistic non-conforming kids were always Jane’s diehards, at least at my school

omg, thanks Al!

I always think of that scene in Fugazi’s Instrument where they’re filming fans before a concert in 1991, and there’s just a wash of Jane’s Addiction t shirts. Like, their status as the alternative band of that 89-91 period just goes without saying; you go and see any kind of vaguely name underground band, you will see many JA shirts.

definitely

I noticed earlier today that the Ritual de lo Habitual 25th anniversary concert film is on Tubi. I am kind of curious.

I never spent much time with Ritual for some reason, but NS to me is all-time. Hasn’t lost its power to this day. That ...3,4! leading into Ocean Size and then the world just explodes. Massive sound, and with so much atmosphere. But I could do without Idiots Rule which sticks out awkwardly from the rest.

I gotta be honest, I revisited RdlH after a long time of not listening to it and PF's lyrics are a bummer at least 40% of the time. If you produced him like Richard Ashcroft on early Verve records, you improve the album a lot imho

I've never been able to put my finger on why, but despite liking several acts in their general stylistic/musical orbit I've never gotten into this band at all. I have seen them live a couple of times, but to be fair only in the post Avery years, and those shows were lame. I do remember when Nothing's Shocking came out and the hoopla over the cover, but the music didn't do anything for me. I remember when Ritual came out and it was a huge deal to what seemed like a cross between alt types and jocks in high school. But for whatever reason, literally no-one I knew (or liked) listened to the band or hung out with anyone that listened to the band. It could be just a weird age thing, where maybe I was literally just one year too old or one year too young to sync up with their vibe? Dunno. I do remember some nascent frat bros covering one of their songs at the school battle of the bands.

xp I dunno I still find the lyrics on side 2 pretty moving, reflective while rocking. but the lyrics of "Classic Girl" are pretty dopey.

I only saw them at lollapalooza in 1991 & after a long hot day of rock they were transcendental. that festival that year brought a lotta different kinds of people out, olds & youngs, soft & harder druggies, it was multiethnic in ways I'd not frequently experienced before. it could never last, RIP

I wanna hear more war stories from the peeps who went to Lolla ‘91!

Here you go, then. A revised version of when I first saw Jane's (and NIN!) earlier in 1991 is up at my Patreon for subscribers. I wrote this when I saw the NIN/JA tour years later, and yeah even with Eric A back, I fully accepted you can't go back.

I wanna hear more war stories from the peeps who went to Lolla ‘91!

The day started off hilariously; a whole bunch of hippie types had thought, "Woo-hoo! Outdoor concert!" and set up blankets and whatnot right in front of the stage. The people who really knew what was up formed a large circle around them. The Rollins Band came onstage, Rollins bowed to the crowd like he was about to compete in a martial arts tournament, the band started their first song, and all the pit people rushed that front area. You could literally see the blankets and whatnot fly into the air as the hippie types scrambled, coughing, out of the giant dust cloud.

The first four acts would have been an amazing bill all on their own — Rollins Band, Butthole Surfers set including Gibby firing a shotgun loaded with blanks at the crowd (there was kind of a bridge between the first two sets as members of the Butthole Surfers came out to jame with the Rollins Band), Living Colour, Ice-T/Body Count.

I didn't really get to see Nine Inch Nails because I was in line for food, but I could see gigantic billowing waves of dry ice coming off the stage. And Siouxsie and the Banshees didn't play, so each of the first four acts got an extra 15 minutes or so of stage time, IIRC.

Jane's Addiction were amazing, of course.

I saw Jane's more times than I can count, including four Lollapalooza '91 shows, at Irvine, San Jose, Great Woods MA and NJ

The energy that built over the course of each afternoon and then as the sun set is sort of hard for me to describe, except to say that it was a kind of mania. That band wasn't just the headliner, the set was something like church for all of these different kinds of people. Without fail, at every show I saw—even on the later and last dates, *everybody* that had played that day was watching in the wings, totally engrossed. Rollins and the Buttholes and NIN and Siouxsie and Budgie—just completely, unabashedly, almost....worshipful? And then coming on at different points incl. Chip Away to be a part of it.

It's weird...it's kind of hard for me to talk about this band during that period because it totally owned me. I think maybe most of us have records that were almost *too* impactful in our youth to go back and listen to now w/ any regularity, like there's something sacred in there you're afraid to disturb, but Nothing's Shocking was that record for me.

Of all the 80s-90s bands that subsequently reunited, Jane's Addiction is the one for me that just most obviously wasn't the same band. That whole thing ended in Hawaii at the end of that tour, as planned. (It wasn't because Eric "left," as someone mentioned upthread. It had all gotten too intense, and the drugs and personal stuff and hurt feeling btw Perry and Eric made it a foregone conclusion that they were splitting.)

I went to see that first '97 reunion show at Hammerstein Ballroom and it was the most dreamlike, nostalgia-soaked event event I've ever attended. But it wasn't Jane's Addiction. And not because Eric's inegral piece was missing—though it totally was. It wasn't Jane's Addiction because the magic of that band had everything to do with a v specific time period and combination of personalities, and had a lot to do with naivety—Perry's and the Perkins-Navarro axis. There was some of the Zeppelin dynamic to that band—two, older more sophisticated, artier, guys + two very young, impressionable metal heads who could be "played" according to Perry's imgination. (I'm a total Eric A. stan but think there's a certain amount of revisionism in diminishing this part of it—not just stylistically but musically, this was mostly Perry's project...)

It's weird...it's kind of hard for me to talk about this band during that period because it totally owned me. I think maybe most of us have records that were almost *too* impactful in our youth to go back and listen to now w/ any regularity, like there's something sacred in there you're afraid to disturb, but Nothing's Shocking was that record for me.

This is kind of how I feel about Ritual. It's such an unbelievable swirl of punk, funk, metal, art/prog-rock...the contrast between the fast songs on Side A and the slow epics on Side B... NS is a great arty hard rock album, but it feels too "produced" and too patchwork ("Thank You Boys," "Idiots Rule"). Ritual is the masterpiece, to me. And hitting in 1990 it really felt like one of those "this is the next step, let's go" records, even though it still had so many tropes that went straight back to the '70s.

Mm, yeah. Like there was a way forward somehow and it didn't turn out to be that in the end, but there was a dream of it at least.

w/r/t to the G'n'R comparison upthread—regarding Jane's dark energy—for me and my friends that did not apply. Guns and Roses made this great record but we didn't percieve anything particularly threatening or sexual in it.

Jane's otoh were trucking in a lot of the gender fluidity and nihilism for kids who had been raised on classic rock radio but deprived of their own Bowie/Stooges disturbance.

I saw lollapalooza 1991 in Atlanta at Lakewood. We sat in the very back of the lawn section because we didn’t want to deal with any crowd. We sat next to old hippies who ate shrooms that day like potato chips; they were in bliss into the night. Ice T did “L.G.B.N.A.F” and the crowd was one in bouncing and shouting along. I felt like Siouxsie was when people clearers out to eat, but everyone was back for Jane’s. I was just far enough away that their stage set seemed supernatural: were there really nude women in those cages? Were there really monkeys climbing on the cages? Who could tell? Just another show with sex and violence…

I went to the 1991 lollapalooza south of Chicago; we got a motel 6 closest to the venue and it was a shithole and six of us were total rubes from upper michigan and were terrified due to the security guards and bulletproof glass in the lobby. We ate only dunkin donuts and taco bell the whole trip iirc.

The line of cars waiting to get into the lot was huge and full of all kinds of weird people who were listening to all the bands we loved on their car stereos which was amazing coming from a school full of pre-nirvana hair metal burnouts, like oh shit there are so many people who like De La Soul and the Beastie Boys and the Ramones and Fishbone etc.

Somehow we got tickets in the third row from Kyle's aunt so were right up by the front and met Gibby who drew a giant jizzing dick on the back of our super jesusy friend's shirt (the shirt was an "elvis is an alien" weekly world news cover). We met Hen Gee and Evil E from Ice T's crew and asked what the "your mama got two feet growing out of her titties" joke from a skit on the OG record was about and they were like "uh that's ice's shit, don't bother us".

I'd never heard the rollins band before and was super bummed they didn't sound enough like black flag; since we were right by the front PA speakers it was shockingly, deafeningly loud and we all had to get wet toilet paper and cram it into our ears.

Our annoying friend was hyping NIN but we were doubters because we'd never heard the record and he was frequently full of shit but they were fucking awesome for 15 minutes with strobe lights and fog in broad daylight at 2pm. Corey Glover from living colour ran up the aisle high-fiving people and he was way shorter than I expected and wearing a neon yellow wetsuit. The dude with us who was super into 'cop killer' by body count actually became a cop a few years later.

I actually kind of lost my shit when I heard the bass for 'up the beach' starting the Jane's Addiction set and it was dark and my first concert ever and it smelled like weed but I didn't know that yet and I believe perry farrell mooned everyone. It was pretty transcendent.

I love these stories, thank you

Guns and Roses made this great record but we didn't percieve anything particularly threatening or sexual in it.

I can see that, and definitely Jane's was on a more radical trip in all kinds of ways. But G'N'R was pretty threatening and sexual in a nastier, less utopian way. The original album art and all, they seemed legitimately fucked up in a way that seemed dangerous at least by the standards of the time.

Sometime I will turn this into a TED talk on how L.A. invented grunge.

Well, there's *something* to that, in that you have bands like Mother Love Bone and even early Alice in Chains that owed as much if not more to glammy LA hard rock than to anything punk. Certainly Duff himself is a pretty overt bridge between the two worlds/regions as well, and a group like Soundgarden straddled and subverted the hair metal/"grunge" divide, too. If there's something (among other things) that set Jane's Addiction apart from a lot of LA bands it was their shameless and at the time unfashionable worship of Led Zeppelin. The weird thing about LA hard rock of the '80s is how all of it of course owed *something* to Zeppelin, but few acts sounded anything like Zeppelin.

Did any grunge bands cite GnR as an influence?

Not sure about the 'hair metal' element in Soundgarden? Definite Zep/Sab worship but do you see an influence from any 80s post-VH/Crue hard rock/glam metal? I thought it was a reaction against that, although I don't know the first album.

Was Zep worship unfashionable at the time? Maybe in LA? In my dumb usa southern high school Zep worship was like Doors worship: standard among rock-listening white males.

I guess the obvious overlap in sounds that comes to mind is Mother Love Bone... though the grungy elements you could pick out are probably in retrospect

The difference is, that GNR were threatening in a weirdly sexual way *towards* queer kids (I was a fan until the Lies EP but let's not go there), while Jane's Addiction were sexual and threatening in a way that intimidated standard metallers.

Although I didn't see them then, I got into Janes around the time they toured with Love and Rockets, who were my favourite band in the world in like 1987. I can remember metalhead friends of my girlfriend coming round our flat in about '89, and we all did share an appreciation for GNR, but I can distinctly remember putting on a Janes record saying "well, it's kinda like a weird glam-goth Zeppelin, but way heavier on the Hanoi Rocks than the GNR?" and the metal boys being completely freaked out and disturbed by the androgyny, the genderfuck, the insect quality of Perry's voice. It did not go down well.

At that time, they were college-radio big. Like, they would have played at the converted barn space where we saw the Sonic Butthole Fugazis, etc.? I didn't get tickets to see them until they toured with Lush, that was around the time that Been Caught Stealing absolutely blew up, and they shot from playing converted barns where hardcore bands put on all ages shows, to playing at the RPI Fieldhouse, which was a huge stadium in the mid-Hudson Valley where I grew up. My sisX0r and I went to that show, as a pair of kinda goth, kinda queer, kinda psychdronenoise fuckups, expecting to see our scene in attendence. And ran into this wall of Frat Boy Types.

I remember absolutely loving Lush and going home wanting to be in their band. Even though Lush were really struggling with the frat boy audience! Janes were great but the audience composition had definitely changed. And I think halfway through the evening, my sisX0r had scored so we were high as balls by the time Janes came on, and my impressions are just this amazing, symphonic sea of sound, and my sisX0r and I trying to do our speed-enhanced goth dancing thing, and just getting so much shit from the frat boys that I ended up taking off my vest and using it as a whip to clear a space for us to just enjoy the music? They sounded great but the experience was... 'ok, this is no longer a fun space for us.'

I didn't go to Lolla 91, I went to Lolla 92, the one with Lush and JAMC and Ministry and my friend and I cut out and ran to get out of the parking lot before the frat-rock headliners came on.

But there was definitely a sense of, several different worlds colliding that didn't normally ever encounter one another at all. There was a huge confluence where they united many different elements, which was a brilliant utopian idea. The elements themselves did not always get along.

I wanna hear more war stories from the peeps who went to Lolla ‘91!

― The Mandymoorian (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, August 2, 2020 12:20 PM (yesterday)

I did! I was 15 and psyched af about it because I liked most of the bands + there would be people EVERYWHERE and that's what I was after at the time. I just wanted to wander around and stare at people and see bands. This was at Blossom Music Center in NE Ohio, where I had already seen a number of concerts so I knew my way around. It was so great to feel free to roam, the possibilities felt endless. I went with two female friends, one of whom was always embroiled in boyfriend drama.

I don't really remember much about the whole day tbh because that summer was abysmal; what I do remember is that I was mostly looking forward to finally seeing Jane's Addiction, who I listened to at top volume almost every day that summer. I was so angry and depressed and the only thing that took me away from it was Jane's Addiction super duper loud over and over and over.

By the time they finally went on, my one friend had caught her boyfriend kissing someone else and slapped him. I'm not sure where she went. The other friend was wandering around by herself. I was also by myself waaaaay back on the lawn with a bunch of unknown bros who were having the time of their lives. I could hear, but it wasn't the experience I was hoping for; I remember thinking "is this it? because this kind of sucks" and remembering that moment more than anything else about Lollapalooza '91

One of my friends recently texted me a photo of her Lolla 91 tshirt and it looked hilariously old. <3 the end

I wanna hear more war stories from the peeps who went to Lolla ‘91!

― The Mandymoorian (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, August 2, 2020 12:20 PM (yesterday)

My sister went and all I got was a sick Lushapalooza t-shirt

That summer was completely wild for inappropriate audience-non-sharing tour mates - it was the same year we saw Sisters of Mercy / Public Enemy / Gang of Four, which was another show where the divisions between different audiences were very, very stark and in upstate NY, definitely a little fraught.

For some reason the first Lollapalooza did not come to Philadelphia. Neither did the second. The third in '93, where RATM stood there naked in protest, was held in the JFK parking lot (was this after they tore JFK down?).

i wonder if i wrote about it in my diary -- probably? i found a video of the performance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3zcsbNWUbI

the metal boys being completely freaked out and disturbed by the androgyny, the genderfuck, the insect quality of Perry's voice.

Were Jane's really seen as more androgynous than the glammy pop-metal bands of the late 80s? That seems a little surprising. Or did you mean compared to the heavier thrash bands?

Speaking of those weird confluence shows, the forgotten two-off shows (Bay Area and SoCal) that essentially was the functioning bridge between English/European festival culture and Lollapalooza and everything in its wake was 1990's A Gathering of the Tribes, which I didn't go to but I should have done. So basically if you want to consider ground zero, you have to thank Ian Astbury!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gathering_of_the_Tribes

I'm trying to remember what the metallers *did* like... they expressed disdain for the pop hair-metal bands like Poison and Crue, because those were ~for girls~. They liked Metallica and Motorhead, and got as far into hair metal as GNR. While my girlfriend and I liked Hanoi Rocks and glam rock shit like the Dogs D'Amour, and GNR was as far into metal as I really went? (OK, I had a few Motorhead tapes cause of the Hawkwind connection.) I seem to remember that these upstate NY cis-boy metallers were... OK with the sound of Hanoi Rocks (though they thought Michael Monroe looked stupid) because Hanoi's sound nodded towards Aerosmith and the Stones, who were all considered very classic, but Jane's Addiction was definitely too far into "weird" for them.

Were Jane's really seen as more androgynous than the glammy pop-metal bands of the late 80s?
IDK but they were a different type of androgynous iirc -- not female-via-male-gaze (big hair/makeup) but more general androgyny, genderlessness. More freaky? At least that is what I thought at the time.

Freaky def makes sense.

x-post ha! yeah, The Cult were one of those cusp-y bands who operated at the confluence of glam-goth and metal. Forgot about them entirely. They are responsible for so much!

My sisX0r and I went to that show, as a pair of kinda goth, kinda queer, kinda psychdronenoise fuckups, expecting to see our scene in attendence. And ran into this wall of Frat Boy Types...Janes were great but the audience composition had definitely changed.

I had this experience in 1990 going to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who I'd seen only the previous year playing a free outdoor show at Rutgers University, supposedly opening for Killing Joke (though we didn't stick around for that) — the crowd was a mix of all types of people and seemed very punk/freak-friendly, everyone having a good time sweating together on the grass. Less than 12 months later, just after Mother's Milk came out, I saw them at the Ritz on 54th Street in New York and the pit was a roiling frat-goon mass full of shirtless bros in Duke caps who thought the whole point was to punch people in the head and laugh as they fell. It was the strongest feeling of "this is no longer my scene" I have ever felt.

Yeah, freaky, too weird, unsettling - in a way that wasn't like hair metal was recognisable as kind of pantomime dame drag?

In Seattle there were a LOT of grunge/glam/metal crossover bands, just very few that were notable outside of city limits.

Soundgarden was opening for Guns N Roses on the Use Your Illusion tour around the time Grunge was breaking.

And hating it. From Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm.

Susan Silver: After I got the call about the Guns N' Roses tour, I went to where [Soundgarden] were, at Stuart Hallerman's studio, Avast! I remember walking in, I had a box of T-shirts, some new designs. And I was so excited. Oh, my God, I was so excited: "Hey, guys! I have something to tell you! We got an offer today...to go...on tour...WITH GUNS N' ROSES!"

They didn't say a word. After about 30 seconds - it felt like an eternity - one of them said, "What's in the box?"

the same year we saw Sisters of Mercy / Public Enemy / Gang of Four

It was genuinely amazing, like, every group was in top form and played fantastic sets. But the audience had the strangest vibe I have ever experienced.

tour coordinators definitely ahead of their time on that one

Interesting to hear these reminiscences about the place and importance of Jane's in youth culture at the time. I was a few years too young (9-12 from 88-91) and don't think I knew anyone who was a fan, even later on in the 90s alt-rock heyday. I was aware of them, though, and just thought of them as a metal band because MuchMusic played them on their metal show: they were a little too weird for me to really get as a preteen (although I didn't think of them as feminine at all); it was afterwards that I got into their albums and realized the creativity of what they were doing and saw their influence in so much of the alternative rock I had listened to.

It's funny, because I just went and listened to that first Janes album and found the offending track - I'm pretty sure it was Whores. They couldn't tell if Perry was a boy or a girl through the first song, but the minute he started screaming "I'm a whorrrrre, goddamn muthafucka, gimmee some morrrrre!!!" it didn't matter how heavy or gnarly the riffage was, they were like "this is f*gg*t shit, get it off!" - which, interestingly enough, was a reaction they had to the Velvets (but not necessarily the Stooges?) I could never figure out what her friends were gonna go for or not.

interesting but not surprising that "I'm a whore" caused offense but casually dropping n-bombs didn't even merit a raised eyebrow; I had heard "Mountain Song"/Nothing's Shocking first so when I went back to that album I had very strong "fuck this fucking band" reaction that lasted for about a year (basically, until I heard the second half of Ritual and thought "okay, they've clearly evolved and I don't feel like I hate myself for liking them anymore")

Were Jane's really seen as more androgynous than the glammy pop-metal bands of the late 80s? That seems a little surprising. Or did you mean compared to the heavier thrash bands?

― Feel a million filaments (Sund4r), Monday, August 3, 2020 10:34 AM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think definitely more than other glam hair bands...I mean they wore corsets and shit. They would make out with each other! Also Perry was p upfront about having worked as a prostitute.

Jane's seemed more androgynous than hair metalers at the time because I never got the sense that the hair guys "meant it"---like Poison was dressed that way to shock, it seemed to me, not because they felt gender fluid. But I dunno.

also Jane's lyrics gave prominence to women characters without just sexualizing them, even though the iconography of the records made it clear that sex was part of what was going on. like again side 2 of Ritual, or "Jane Says", or even "Been Caught Stealing": it's "his girl" but she's one of the gang, not just an object of attraction. I dunno this made an impression on me at the time even.

LL that video is great

Also Perry was p upfront about having worked as a prostitute.

Didn't know this was a true story.

Appreciate the context. Euler's point about lyrics is a good one.

Tbh, I only ever listened to NS/RdlH, although I listened a lot. Never heard this first album before.

Completely understand, DJP, like we've discussed this before around Christian Death. (And I can relate, because I did have the similar needle-scratch moment around GNR's use of 'f*gg*t'.) And this is part of what made that Upstate NY Sisters/PE show so fraught - that a bunch of kids who had no problem with n-words in Janes or Christian Death, in fact found those forbidden words to be *part* of the transgressive appeal - were suddenly face to face with Public Enemy, telling them that shit was extremely Not OK.

And it wasn't the word "whore" that raised the reaction - lots of metal songs had profanity and shit talk about sex workers. It was that Perry aligned himself with women, with gay sex workers, he was the titular "whore" rather than a cis male utilising a sex worker's services. That Perry did come across as genderfluid and queer - and that really *was* shocking, rather than hair metallers dressing like that "to shock" and not being shocking at all.

(I just want to make clear, that I was at that time, in 1989, in both a lesbian relationship and also in a quasi-gay relationship with a gay man who almost exclusively dated butch lesbians. 1989 was like that, OK, that was my life then. Jane's made sense to me. And the "this is music for f*gg*ts" comment was quite amusing in context, like, yes, my metal dudes, you are in a house full of gay people. What did you expect to hear, but gay music?)

Haha, you can tell I've just read Glitter Up The Dark last week. Wonder if I should start/revive a thread for that?

I think a better point of comparison among the grunge bands, was the way that people like Jane's actually opened up a space for Kurt Cobain to be a bisexual, dress-wearing, Riot Grrrl-repping dude who went on Headbangers Ball in an actual ballgown and became a superstar while doing it. Kurt was *read* as a lot more cis, albeit a pretty-boy, and known for being in a heterosexual marriage so that his bisexuality was erased, but I think Farrell did open up that space for someone like Cobain to go through?

Did Cobain have any same-sex partners? I hadn't thought there was evidence of that?

I think that's true, whether Kurt would have got there anyway is something we'll never know (I think maybe?) I was just saying the other day that there's just a lot less sex in grunge in general, let alone anything that came out of it, there's a dark seedy glamour about Jane's that no one else ever came close to. There's sex in Nirvana but it's crowded out by a lot of other stuff.

Also want to echo Ned's post, the general sense that Jane's themselves still feel like this blueprint for a future of rock that never happened and Nirvana were probably the biggest reason why it didn't, coupled with maybe the sense that Jane's had created something and simultaneously taken it as far as anyone could. Like, who else could have pulled off something like Ritual?

xp: No, it doesn't look like he did. I just went hunting for supporting evidence on that as well, because I didn't recall having heard anything. He discussed same-sex attraction though.

https://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/people/2013/10/24/rediscovered-interview-reveals-kurt-cobain-thought-he-was-gay

Orientation is about attraction, and not neccessarily about 'action'? Cobain said repeatedly he was attracted to dudes, that's enough for me. Policing people's orientations and identities like that and demanding 'evidence', especially frpm the dead, is considered kinda old-fashioned these days. ::shrugs::

One problem I sometimes have with hedonism as subversion is that it so often defaults sexist and gross. So Jane's Addiction having, say, go-go dancers or strippers writhing around on stage to me is really no different than Motley Crue or whomever doing it, and bands like Soundgarden, despite poking fun at that scene with songs like "Big Dumb Sex," still defaulted macho. I've never heard anything about Cobain being anything but heterosexual, but he did seem to recognize that stuff as problematic, which is why he went to such relative lengths to feminize or undercut that macho element to Nirvana's music. (Reminds me of Elliott Smith choosing the name Elliott because "Steve" just sounded like such a jock name.) Anyway, I can totally imagine Jane's Addiction embracing the sex/drugs/rock Sunset Strip scene, to the extent that I can also easily imagine them hanging with the likes of Motley Crue for all the expected (wrong) reasons. That could be perhaps why I dismissed JA as poseurs at the time.

I think I missed the generational bus with these guys. I remember hearing 'Jane Says' and 'Been Caught Stealing' on the radio as a tween in the late 90s, and both struck me as okay singles but way too jolly and extroverted compared to Nirvana and their post-grunge imitators, whom I obviously worshipped at the time. I listened to Ritual de lo habitual a few years later after coming across a glowing retrospective review (on AMG, if memory serves) and I can't say any of it clicked with me, probably because I've never been drawn to the 'transgressive sexiness' axis of post-1970s rock. Anyway, I'm slightly baffled by the recurrent use of 'dark' to describe their sound upthread.

My never-written senior dissertation on how the way for the grunge explosion was paved by Jane's, The Pixies, and Living Colour would have spent some time on the presentation link between the pansexual hedonism of Jane's and Cobain's "fuck it, I am wearing a dress today" insouciance.

the presentation link between the pansexual hedonism of Jane's and Cobain's "fuck it, I am wearing a dress today" insouciance

I hope this dissertation would also have included a mention of Living Colour releasing a single with the chorus "I ain't no glamour boy - I'm fierce!"

Orientation is about attraction, and not neccessarily about 'action'? Cobain said repeatedly he was attracted to dudes, that's enough for me. Policing people's orientations and identities like that and demanding 'evidence', especially frpm the dead, is considered kinda old-fashioned these days. ::shrugs::

― Branwell with an N, Monday, August 3, 2020 4:24 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Agreed. To be clear, I was simply responding to what Sund4r was asking about.

I've never heard anything about Cobain being anything but heterosexual, but he did seem to recognize that stuff as problematic, which is why he went to such relative lengths to feminize or undercut that macho element to Nirvana's music.

This is mostly what I get from the Advocate piece upthread.

Although I never experimented with it, I had a gay friend, and then my mother wouldn’t allow me to be friends with him anymore, because she’s homophobic. It was real devastating because finally I found a male friend who I actually hugged and was affectionate too, and we talked about a lot of things. I couldn’t hang out with him anymore...

I've always wanted male friends that I could be real intimate with and talk about important things with and be as affectionate with that person as I would be with a girl. Throughout my life, I've always been really close with girls and made friends with girls. And I've always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn't find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all. They had really awful haircuts and fucked-up attitudes. So I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I'm just more sexually attracted to women

Josh's take is a weird one on the LA underground scene which was still very SST-adjacent, eg Perry (as singer of PSI-COM) had opened up for Sonic Youth at Gila Monster Jamboree in what is the Mojave Desert (with The Meat Puppets & Redd Kross), had been featured on an early SubPop zine/compilation cassette, etc.

Early Jane's was less a part of the Sunset scene (Lingerie excepting) and more a part of the downtown scene (Al's Bar, HK Cafe, Scream) which was a world away from that universe. Curious if Underrated Aerosmith or Jay Babcock are lurking this thread as I believe they may have been drifting adjacent to this crowd (and also have sharper memories than I).

Living Colour coded as pansexual to me already from the first album, with "Glamour Boys" and the Mick Jagger connection (who in the late 80s was (still?) considered pretty sexually fluid). Even in the 80s all the colo(u)r they used signified...something. The second album continued with that, "Under Cover of Darkness" especially: "I like to touch your skin even if it is a sin". And then the third album had "Bi", which in retrospect sounds a bit judgmental to me but still raised the subject.

My take is only my take, and as often is the case, not necessarily accurate, esp. re: the LA scene. But at the time that's just the vibe I got from Jane's Addiction every time I tried to listen to them. Like I said, the only people I knew who listened to them at their peak were bro-types, and I never thought of the band as any different than I thought of the Chili Peppers. Just shallow party-down (on your pussy) dudes that wore socks on their dicks, or the (nothing's) shocking equivalent. Just seeing Dave Navarro end up the stripper-dating where's-my-shirt shredder pretty metal guy and Perry become the corporate mascot of Lollapalooza Inc. sort of bore that out in my mind. Again, just imo. I absolutely recognize that this band meant a lot to a lot of people. One of my best friends regales me with "Perry" stories all the time, and I more or less tell him the same thing, that I must have just been on a totally different wavelength.

(I should say I always loved the JA rhythm section. I played drums and loved watching Perkins play.)

I don’t think Janes had strippers/go-go dancers in their videos(?) I’m not a fan myself, but I went to h.s. from the Sunset Strip, and the goth-adjacent kids who were into Janes definitely wouldn’t have touched Motley Crue with, er, a 10-ft. pole.

I was just watching LL's video upthread, and there are definitely two bikini clad women writhing and simulating various sexual acts. A very Crue thing to do.

It was part of their live show, I think?

2011 Jane's clip: https://youtu.be/4qmrM-CSUr8

Porno for Pyros in 93: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osSOEH8EVZ4

NSFW obv
xp

(*far from the Sunset Strip)

Yeah, but their MTB videos back in the day? I’m not arguing they don’t have that gross machismo quality, I’m just not sure it was so detectable back when those first two albums were out.

*MTV (lol)

I didn’t realize it at the time but I was responding to their rhythm section too, when I liked them as a teen. They were HEAVY but not (I thought) quite as gross or scary/unapproachable as other heavy bands whose music I could access for one penny through Columbia House. Lol. After that summer idk if I ever regularly listened to them again. Certainly haven’t in probably 15-20 yrs?

Also this isn’t related to Lolla but the teen dance club I went to 89-91 used to play “Mountain Song” and all I remember was how loud it was and the pause before “coming down the mountaaaaain” everyone always recognized the song right away, it was one song that always brought the boys off the sidelines and girls could dance without being stared at/appraised.

My never-written senior dissertation on how the way for the grunge explosion was paved by Jane's, The Pixies, and Living Colour would have spent some time on the presentation link between the pansexual hedonism of Jane's and Cobain's "fuck it, I am wearing a dress today" insouciance.

― shout-out to his family (DJP), Monday, August 3, 2020 12:55 PM (fifty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Don't forget Faith No More!

Roddy: "To me, throughout our career, the representation of the band and the way I've been portrayed everything has been so homosexual every we've ever done. I've portrayed some absolute blatant, stereotyped homosexual. I've been the boy in bondage, the sado masochistic cop, the homo-cowboy. I mean. I've been so blatant about it - it just blows me away that people don't pick up on something like that. Y'know. what am I supposed to do? Hit people over the head with this? That hurts, right? It hurts your head and it's an insult to people's intelligence."

Certainly by "Angel Dust" the band was really leaning into it. You might be the guy to ask, do you think Patton as lyricist was coming to it on his own, or do you think he was influenced by being in John Zorn's orbit?

I'm speaking as a FNM non-fan here, but I think Patton's role in that band is way overstated. He was what, their third singer? Fourth? The music for The Real Thing was done when he came on board, and other bandmembers co-wrote lyrics to a third of the songs on Angel Dust.

I'll just say that, as a young kid, I did not recognize any sort of gay signifiers in dress. It did not occur to me that any rock stars wearing bridal veils and all of my grandmother's jewelry at once was anything other than trying to look weird and be creative.

Same tbh.

Pom, I can see "Been Caught Stealing" as jolly and extroverted but that seems like a bit of a stretch for "Jane Says".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kAIMlISHhU&list=RD1kAIMlISHhU&start_radio=1

I don't know how to qualify something like "darkness," and I have no idea how it scans now but at the time things like Perry's crucifixion seizure @ 3:22 was alluringly terrifying to me.

As a kid I had listened to all kinds of (mostly older) music on acid, but this was the first contemporary, heavy music I'd tripped to and there was something so powerful and alien and cutting to it...I mean it couldn't have been more far afield from the Chili Peppers or Motley Crue or whatever.

The notion of being somehow "scared" by music wasn't something I had really experienced before, maybe outside as a little kid projecting things onto the Beatles or Stones, and despite listening to a fair amount of goth and metal, the tropes never worked on me. But "Ted, Just Admit It," to me, at the time...yikes.

Because of the lyrics? I had no idea what they meant at the time. The song itself just pleasantly chugs away as far as I can remember – it's been a while, however.

xp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kAIMlISHhU

Yeah, lyrics and delivery. It's a two-chord chug otherwise.xp

I always wondered if Mascis is referring to this Mountain Song^ in Dinosaur's "Quicksand" cover

"Mountain Song" was the one that freaked me out when I was 9 in 1988. It was kind of funny coming back to it in my early 20s and realizing it sounded like Led Zeppelin.

imagine hearing it in a laser tag place surrounded by the smell of abundant teenage sweat, cigarettes, and alcohol
that's what it was like at the teen dance club

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rFB0bvmuq0

In high school I was used to only hearing Jane’s in certain specific places with very specific people, rarely if ever out in the wild

My mind was blown when I went to my first organized party at university (1994) & the DJ played “Been Caught Stealing” to a crowded room of like 200 people and a ton of people ran out onto the dance floor & starting singing & shouting & dancing

VERY exciting. Like “oh wow yes I am in the right place & these are def my people”

bought Nothing's shocking the week it came out, strongly disliked it and never liked anything those guys did, except for "been caught Stealing."

roundabout this time 29 years ago, I drove from NYC with a buddy to wherever Lolla was outside of DC. I didn't like NIN (still don't), Siouxie (do now) and Jane's, liked all of the other acts on the bill (big stan for Ice, Bholes and LC), but the whole thing was a blast, particularly Jane's. At that time, they did have dancing ladies onstage, and there is no doubt that 30 years ago, this coded more as "let's be free, groovy and sexual," not "these naked boobies are for your male delectation," and it was considered to be utterly, contemptuously separate from Crue/GnR/Sunset Strip.

Yet there were significant factions within the immediate pre-Nevermind milieu. I remember reading a tour report depicting Gibby and Paul fucking with or merely mocking Steve Severin specifically, underlining how ostensibly red blooded indie rock americans would not think much of effete englishmen who had enjoyed many years of major label support.
'

Coming back to Sund4r on Kurt Cobain, I went and looked it up in Glitter Up The Dark because I was pretty sure that the author of that book had referenced other interviews, including

Cobain, for his part, never objected to (Courtney) Love's gender transgressions - they complemented his own. Her position as a woman seemed incidental to their marriage. "I'm just happier than I've ever been. I finally found someone that I am totally compatible with," he told Rolling Stone. "It doesn't matter whether she's male, female, or hermaphrodite or a donkey. We're compatible."

Which, as the author rather snidely points out, is pretty much the dictionary definintion of pansexual, or person-oriented sexuality, to say you'd still be married to your wife if she were a man. The author, Geffen, is pretty overt about their agenda, in terms of this is a book on the influence of trans, nonbinary and gender transgressing people on the history of 20th Century American popular music. So they are reading into a lot of things - Kurt's wearing a dress on Headbanger's Ball, holding hands with his bassist and declaring him his 'prom date' - which, I dunno. For a lot of people, that would look like taking the piss out of homosexuality or queerness, but I watched the video again after reading the book, and he is doing it in a way that makes it clear, he is 100% positioning himself on the side of queerness. Like, yes, there is an edge of transgressive 'wind up the metalheads' - but it is also very much an expression of his own femininity. That doing that in 1992 - christ, it was still the Reagan/Bush era, the AIDS crisis was still fresh? Homophobia was... raw. But there is a *LOT* to read into. Not to mention, as this book also gets into, he went further than Jane's (who get only a passing mention) in terms of doing lyrical drag, not just writing songs about women, but writing songs from the position of female narrators.

It's funny, because I was never a Nirvana fan - always far preferred Hole - but their reading of Cobain in this book, just really clicked on an "ah, now I get it" level.

Also, I just always had an instinctive recoil reaction to RHCP, even before they crossed over - there was just something so absolutely "NOPE" about them on a fundamental level. There was very definitely a point where Jane's and RHCP started to blur and overlap and that was the point where I noped out on the band and never looked back. To look back at those first three albums is really to look back at who I was at the point they came out. Which is a part of my own life I very much burried for many years.

I am of the rationally-considered opinion that anyone who mocks Steve Severin should be drowned in a river

I loved Nirvana and Janes at the time, but Janes always seemed much artier, freakier, and scarier, no doubt. Nirvana had glossy album covers and videos - even something like Heart-Shaped Box was supposed to be weird, but looked like a fashion shoot - but Janes had weirdo paintings and sculptures for their album covers with nudity, and they were stealing, and they spoke Spanish, and the lyrics were about prostitutes and addicts and serial killers and jesus, and Perry Farrell shot a bottle rocket inside a hotel room in "The Gift". Janes just seemed like a band that if you hung out with them for long you might end up in jail.

I felt like this about most of the bands I listened to but that was more because if I was hanging out with them, I'd be zeroed in on as The Black Guy Who Probably Started All Of This than because of their actual predilection for illegal activity

lol

Certainly by "Angel Dust" the band was really leaning into it. You might be the guy to ask, do you think Patton as lyricist was coming to it on his own, or do you think he was influenced by being in John Zorn's orbit?

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, August 3, 2020 2:07 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I dunno as a *lyricist*, because (as unperson pointed out) a lot of the songs were by other people, but definitely as a vocalist/musician/contributor

He didn't really start doing the wild stuff he did on the Bungle/Zorn albums in FNM until the post-Jim era though (starting with "Another Body Murdered" in 93)

This revive is a glorius read. Love this band, love ILM.

All now with wings.

Jim Martin was an underacknowledged anchoring force in FNM. I remember him being pigeonholed as the token headbanger (friends with Metallica, didn't like all the weird tangents and lounge ballads, etc.) but in retrospect it seems like he was the guy keeping Gould, Bottum and the others from disappearing completely up their own asses.

pretty fun and enlightening account of the first Lollapalooza from the inside...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erhBkWMUCkU

starts around 9:30

Jim Martin was an underacknowledged anchoring force in FNM. I remember him being pigeonholed as the token headbanger (friends with Metallica, didn't like all the weird tangents and lounge ballads, etc.) but in retrospect it seems like he was the guy keeping Gould, Bottum and the others from disappearing completely up their own asses.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Monday, August 3, 2020 4:29 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I disagree completely, but this is probably not the thread for this argument

Rollins on Jane's live show at about 43:00 in that video is something else

xxxp: yes! all of those Henry and Heidi podcasts are great.

My understanding is that Jim Martin barely contributed to Angel Dust, which set the stage for his departure.

The author, Geffen, is pretty overt about their agenda, in terms of this is a book on the influence of trans, nonbinary and gender transgressing people on the history of 20th Century American popular music. So they are reading into a lot of things - Kurt's wearing a dress on Headbanger's Ball, holding hands with his bassist and declaring him his 'prom date' - which, I dunno. For a lot of people, that would look like taking the piss out of homosexuality or queerness, but I watched the video again after reading the book, and he is doing it in a way that makes it clear, he is 100% positioning himself on the side of queerness. Like, yes, there is an edge of transgressive 'wind up the metalheads' - but it is also very much an expression of his own femininity. That doing that in 1992 - christ, it was still the Reagan/Bush era, the AIDS crisis was still fresh? Homophobia was... raw. But there is a *LOT* to read into. Not to mention, as this book also gets into, he went further than Jane's (who get only a passing mention) in terms of doing lyrical drag, not just writing songs about women, but writing songs from the position of female narrators.

Nice post, Branwell. I feel similarly, I think, in terms of reading a lot of it as an expression of solidarity and support and rejection of toxic masculinity; it's interesting to see how people read it. I actually do think it's important for men who are primarily attracted to women to be able to do the things he talks about in that piece - be able to express closeness and affection with other men, relate to women as friends, question traditional masculine norms.

I have to say that if we polled Nothing's Shocking that "Ted, Just Admit It" would probably be my favorite song.

And this version... Man...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek6N_-O19do

Funny, but I just remembered that for the longest time -- we're talking years, like I only read the lyrics sometime in the 2000s -- that the lines in "Mountain Song" were:

"Cause you know, honey
Cause you mess me up."

Which I rather liked in terms of fucked up states of obsessive romantic mind. So learning it was "cash in now honey/cash in Ms Smith" was kinda annoying.

Anyway August always makes me think of "Summertime Rolls" so some hot day here it'll be time to listen to that one again, very loud.

I knew it was “cash in now honey” but I thought the next line was some weird bungling of the word “minute” like “cash in this meow-nut”

MISS SMAYOTH

lol

I heard “this meow” and had no idea wtf the “pin eyes” line was until the internet.

There was a girl in our group of friends who everyone called “Meegan my girlfriend” for a year or so

I don't think I ever even pondered what that lyric was

relistened to Nothings Shocking album this afternoon & it is still such a great sounding album, total volume-knob creep where three tracks in the volume’s already almost as loud as it can go because it still sounds so exciting

I remember that line about Cobain being in love with Love even if she were an animal back in the day, and thought it was one of the most beautiful things you could say about someone you were in love with - the purity and absoluteness of that devotion. I remember writing a piece on In Utero a few years back, and the guy Kurt worked with on the album sleeve talking about how obsessed Kurt was with seahorses, and the fact that the male of the species gives birth. Gender fluidity, and the obliteration of the barriers of masculinity, were definitely key themes for him.

I must say I object to Josh's suggestion Soundgarden were macho. Colossal riffs and Cornell's leonine howl aside, they always seemed a deeply spiritual group to me, especially lyrically.

When Jane's played Download in the UK a few years back, they had women dancers hanging from piercings as part of their stage show, and I remember there being a lot of discussion in the Kerrang! office, where I was working shifts at the time, over how to cover this. There was a sense within the team that this was actually gross, and objectifying, and also kind of embarrassing. The distinction mentioned above over whether Jane's were playing with naked dancers to thrill their male audience, Crue-style, or to play with larger ideas of sexuality and danger, is an interesting one, but I wonder if the distinction would fly today.

Three Days remains one of my favourite ever songs. I remember them playing it at the Reading festival in the early 00s, and Navarro's guitar solo seeming to stop the rain from falling. Stunning stuff. Farrell told me it was principally inspired by Fela Kuti and his sense of storytelling, and a song shifting through phases. Perkins told me it was "a total orgasm. It goes from soft, to hard, to cumming."

xp yeah Frances Farmer, the Raincoats, Marine Girls ... I’m glad Kurt used his position to raise the voices of overlooked women. Farrell seemed similar but I was never quite sure what his motives were.

LOL, the surname of my girlfriend at the time was "Smith", so you can be damned sure I knew that line was "Cash in, Ms Smith" because she used to scream it extra loud!

Also, sorry to keep dragging Cobain into a Jane's thread, but I think that the understanding of 'what Kurt was doing' was very different in the UK than it was in the US. A lot of the discourse around Kurt's femininity and potential bisexuality was stuff I encountered through UK Riot Grrrl people.

I do think that Farrell wanted to do a similar thing, that how many of the acts he repped for in the early days of Lolla - Siouxsie, Lush, Luscious Jackson, etc. - but just didn't have the intimate knowledge of ~overlooked women~ because Jane's didn't date Riot Grrrls. Though I'm really uncomfortable with the whole 'Jane's just dated Strippers' narrative that's happened on this thread. These women have names, and narratives, and stories of their own? And many prominent women within rock at the time - Courtney Love, Kathleen Hanna - worked as strippers. Having a history of sex work does not disqualify you from personhood or artistry! That's a weird narrative. But that whole weird back-and-forth about cis-(ish) men using female-(ish) sexuality in their work is... fraught. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. There is no generalisation to be made about it.

It depends on the cis-(ish) man doing it. It depends on the position of the audience watching it. Something that works in a queer-friendly punk rock show space, does not scale up to a stadium full of frat boys with their extreme male gazes.

I consistently find myself disappointed by self-consciously recorded rock epics b/c they aren't Three Days. It's basically perfect.

Why is Three Days such an absolute monster rock epic? Tons of people on this thread have nailed that - it's a rock epic that is built from the *bass* up, centreing the rhythm section. It seems to me that Eric Avery was coming from the post-punk tradition of Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees, where the bassline was absolutely central to the construction of the song. (Which post-punk plagiarised shamelessly from disco, reggae and funk, to be sure.) Or at least, that's what I responded to in the music. It reminded me of goth/postpunk bassline centrality. It's not a rock epic that just exists as distribution method for rain-stopping SOLOS (Even though there are solos, oh god, so many guitar solos.) which is where rock epics tend to go wrong. If your groove isn't right the whole time through, then it's not three-day mutual lovemaking, it's just a wank-prop.

The wild thing about Three Days is, thematically, it addresses a subject which is... potentially really problematic? Heterosexual couple meet a bisexual unicorn and share a three-day threesome of sex, drugs and mysticism. But what comes out of this story isn't "two girls, one guy, woot!" in an icky male-gaze kind of way of bravaggio boasting - if it were that kind of song, it would be awful. It repeatedly emphasises the centrality of female desire, female sexual pleasure, a man sidelining his pride to make it a good experience for everyone. Even though, in this song, the male is the speaker, he constantly and consistently references the importance of the women in his life, and his deep and mutual connection to them, the next song in the cycle (I always forget 'Then She Did...' is a separate song and not just the continuation of Three Days) addresses the importance of other women in his life, starting with his mother. It's a subject that, in another setting, could have been so icky and so tacky, but is actually transformed into something deeply spiritual as well as erotic.

The whole thing works together in that way - what if a rock epic was not about guitar solos, but about the rhythm section? What if a threesome were not about the jesus, but the marys?

I consistently find myself disappointed by self-consciously recorded rock epics b/c they aren't Three Days. It's basically perfect.

It's everything people tell you as a kid Stairway To Heaven is, and isn't.

The wild thing about Three Days is, thematically, it addresses a subject which is... potentially really problematic? Heterosexual couple meet a bisexual unicorn and share a three-day threesome of sex, drugs and mysticism. But what comes out of this story isn't "two girls, one guy, woot!" in an icky male-gaze kind of way of bravaggio boasting - if it were that kind of song, it would be awful.

Also, Xiola was 15 when Perry became obsessed with her, and after she died, her family told him that she was actually his cousin?? Farrell was telling me last year that a large portion of the song is him singing "about man preying upon man, how technology is changing us, our weak, corrupt leaders…", but definitely the powerful part is this sexual/spiritual connection between those three.

The whole thing works together in that way - what if a rock epic was not about guitar solos, but about the rhythm section? What if a threesome were not about the jesus, but the marys?

I love this - tho I have to interject, that's a pretty fucking awesome guitar solo, too. Then She Did was my favourite of the two tracks as a kid - I'm a sucker for the sad, dark song over the ecstatic one - but after seeing them play Three Days live, the sheer glory of Navarro's solo, and those drums in the last section, made it their absolute apex for me.

That oral history of Jane's is a terrifying/brilliant read, right up there with the same author's book on the Germs et al in terms of "Fucking hell how are any of you still alive?"

Oh no, I did not know about Xiola's age, but that's another... how do you address the problematic aspects of those kinds of relationships without diminishing the agency of the girl involved?

Farrell was telling me last year that a large portion of the song is him singing "about man preying upon man, how technology is changing us, our weak, corrupt leaders…", but definitely the powerful part is this sexual/spiritual connection between those three.

I'm gonna go a bit Blixa Bargeld here, and insist that... the person who wrote the song is not always the ultimate authority on ~what the song is about~? But I really saw that the sexual relationship in the song taught Perry something which became political. (Referenced again in the later song about his brother.) Sex can be violence, but in a sexual setting which is about non-domination, sex doesn't *have* to be violence, it can be something more. It is natural in the ecological world, that there are predators and prey, that's how nature works, and predators becoming prey is just part of the great ~cycle of life~ when it's in balance, but nature in balance also holds a whole host of other symbiotic and mutually beneficial interspecies relationships that Nature produces. Humans can be both predator and prey, or they can live in mutual balance - but leadership doesn't *have* to be predatory, in the way that sex doesn't *have* to be violence? That was my interpretation anyway, it is only one available interpretation of many possible interpretations.

I'm not saying the solo is bad! The solos are wonderful, but the solos are merely one tiny part of what makes the song epic.

Oh no, I did not know about Xiola's age, but that's another... how do you address the problematic aspects of those kinds of relationships without diminishing the agency of the girl involved?

It's hella tricky, isn't it? From every story I've heard Xiola knew her own mind. But...

I'm gonna go a bit Blixa Bargeld here, and insist that... the person who wrote the song is not always the ultimate authority on ~what the song is about~?

Oh totally. Also, his take on the song was very unfocused and all over the shop, I'd hazard a guess that he's editorialising the song long after the fact. I mean, some of the greatest songs are just slivers of ideas we flesh out in our own imaginations, aren't they really?

My point is, the Perry Farrell of 2019 is a somewhat unreliable narrator, or was that evening.

my head hurts from that sentence :)

Nothing's Shocking actually holds up better for me than Ritual. I think I just find the songs more cohesive and I really like the big guitar sound; also have an easier time hearing what Farrell is singing (although I never knew that line was "Ms Smith" until this thread). "Had a Dad" and "Mountain Song" are easily my favourite songs of theirs and "Jane Says" is my favourite slower thing they did. As much as I appreciate their more ambitious ideas, I seem to be a Jane's Addiction poptimist.

I don't really know why "Mountain Song" freaked me out as a kid tbh, since I liked all the FNM/Living Colour/King's X songs that were getting radio and video play at that time. Maybe the video? Maybe harder to find the tune?

I seem to be a Jane's Addiction poptimist.

I don't like "Been Caught Stealing" as much, though, somehow.

I do think it's funny that just about everywhere else on the board, fucking a 15-year-old is pretty consistently summarily dismissed as rape / something that can't be "consented" to, but Farrell spins a good yarn and the tune is real good so we can let this one slide maybe

I do agree with Branwell that the "fucking strippers" rhetoric is gross, weird and reductive

Simon H, I don't get into those kind of conversations, on ILM, for some very good reasons. Please do not confuse that with "letting it slide". Thanks.

ooooook!

tbc I do not place judgment on any of the posts itt, I just think this thread stands out, tonally, on 2020 ilx

She was wise beyond her years, you see.

lol

She wasn’t 15 at the time of the weekend chronicled in the song, was she?

19 I thought?

I do think it's funny that just about everywhere else on the board, fucking a 15-year-old is pretty consistently summarily dismissed as rape / something that can't be "consented" to, but Farrell spins a good yarn and the tune is real good so we can let this one slide maybe

Yeah I don't think that's what any of us were saying but if you want to stir up trouble where there isn't any go for it champ

18 when she died in 1987. The song Xiola by Psi Com was released in 1985.

I knew she was his cousin, which made me go o_O when I found out, but I didn’t know she was 15 and now I’ve gone full O_O

I don't care about digging up and cancelling perry farrell or antagonizing anyone itt but I think it's probably a good thing overall that this sort of behavior from a contemporary rock singer would provoke a much more visceral response

behavior

You are now banned from the Canpol thread.

hisser par mon propre pétard

The fact that he released the song and (in particular) album cover several years after she died of an overdose doesn’t seem very... respectful of the deceased?

(I’m not scolding him or anything, it’s just something that strikes me as I read the backstory.)

when i was a melodramatic early teen, i swore when i died i would hear "summertime rolls" gently lifting me off to heaven

Can I just ask you, what about the song cycle, or indeed the cover, seems like it’s disrespectful, and not like it’s a memorial or tribute from her former lovers?

ffs

The grooming part.

personally I am not sure there is a "respectful" way to memorialize someone who you (allegedly) gave heroin when they were 14

publicly, anyway

It may not be my place to judge – but knowing she was only 17, and died the next year, does put the song and album cover in a somewhat different context for me.

Yeah this has been an eye opening thread fer sure

Hooking your 14-year old trust fund baby cousin on heroin is peak Robin Hood Romanticism amirite.

i didn't know until now that she was PF's cousin? also did not know she was 14-15. what i knew amounted to "xiola" + "heroin" + "died young"
i was a teenaged magazine reader and i have a feeling the music mags weren't dwelling on the inappropriate nature of that relationship very much? idk. i am embarrassed to admit that i cut pics of this band out of magazines and taped them to my wall with all the other pictures i cut out of magazines and taped to my wall.

"I was the first guy she ever did heroin with": https://youtu.be/zNR8JitAWo8?t=1609

yikes

I don't think anyone needs to feel bad or defensive or whatever, but it is interesting that for such a mythologized band, the potentially uglier angles, which I gather have never been hidden, have not often been mentioned in the press as problematic or whatever (AFAICT). speaks to some pretty specific blind spots I guess?

such was the state of music journalism in the late 80s/early 90s
no one gave a shit iirc

Yep.

This isn't an indictment of Jane's Addiction fans btw, it's just sad how this behaviour remained entrenched even in groups that partly defined themselves in opposition to the overt machismo of their predecessors.

In the same clip, he talks about discovering she was his cousin after the fact.

Well, going back to my comparison to Motley Crue, even as recently as whenever The Dirt came out, I don't recall any reactions to those sleazy tales that went beyond mundane shock and titillation. Just lots of "lol, that's Motley Crue for you." It's possible that for many years/decades, fans as well as writers viewed rock stars of all stripes as sort of exotic animals, yet somehow never made the connection that this kind of bad behavior was shockingly/typical, and that if all of these acts had all of these stories then, well, maybe they're not that unique or exotic after all, just pervasive. They were just par for the seedy, scumbag course. A feature, not a bug, as it were.

Huh, can't say I've ever been a Jane's fanatic, though I have the first three records. I had no idea about Xiola at all so, yeah, this has been an eye-opening revive.

Not to pile on – but according to this 2001 piece, the “Jane” featured in the band’s name (and most famous song?) wasn’t too thrilled with the name (“I didn't take it as a tribute at all”), and I wonder if she consented to this:

Bainter's photo appeared on the insert of the vinyl version of the first Jane's album, and on thousands of posters that appeared all over the world. "It was very hard for my family," she says.

whenever The Dirt came out

The book, or the movie? I wrote about the movie for Stereogum and had...some thoughts.

I wrote a thing about that whole era of winking at "bad rock star behavior"

https://slate.com/culture/2019/03/the-dirt-netflix-movie-motley-crue-book-adaptation.html

xpost The book. By the time the movie came out the tide had turned pretty dramatically, so that even Nikki Sixx wasn't even trying to defend their behavior, he was iirc claiming Neil Strauss made the worst of it up.

But, like, Crue, Jane's Addiction ... I'm willing to believe the worst anyone says about demonstrably gross people and their respective bad behavior.

This revive is fantastic. I'd missed it. Wow. Thank you, ILM :)

By the way, I thought I'd put this comment here, from a YouTube video of 'Summertime Rolls':

Eden Lobb
1 year ago

This song always makes me feel nostalgic for a life that I never had. It makes me feel like I am am old man reflecting on my youth, but I'm 22 and I was homeschooled and do not have memories like that]

This revive is fantastic.

You could even say it's a… great revive.

But, like, Crue, Jane's Addiction ...

you can keep doing this but it's not going to start making more sense

You know I'm not suggesting they share many sonic similarities right? Or any? They are just similarly scummy and hedonistic hard rock LA people doing the things they do, the things that can fill a salacious oral history. Makes sense to me.

Los Angeles is literally all they have in common

Don't forget tattoos! So scummy

Come on, I know you all disagree, and they're not some perfect analog, but they have at least a little more in common than that.

those two bands and Oingo Boingo

Yes. But only those three bands.

I have to put it straight out there, that I am struggling in this conversation, as someone who was raped at the age of 13, and has zero desire to condone rape culture or cape for creepy dudes.

And yet, also, as someone who had consensual sex with older people before I reached the legal age of consent, (in fact even had a song written about me by a local punk band before I turned 18, which I *did* view as a tribute) I am struggling just as hard with the way that the girls/women in consensual situations like Xiola's are treated like their agency, their desires, their active participation just doesn't matter. We're missing her voice - I wonder if any of her poetry survives - and what she thought about the relationship, if she felt she was groomed or abused, or if it was as emotionally and creatively stimulating for her as for Perry and Casey? Not that it excuses or condemns Farrell for his part - but because her consent and motivation and agency matters, in determining if the album/art is disrespectful or a tribute. It's interesting to me to read the actual Jane's actual story - you know, it's complicated, Jane's story isn't simple, because addiction and recover isn't simple. But I relate far more to the Janes and the Xiolas in these stories (and I knew women very like them, back in the 80s) than it seems like some of you think about. That stuff like this seems less cut and dried if you were more likely to have been the Xiola than Perry Farrell (or Motley Crue).

As gross as Crue's behaviour was - that they treated women like pieces of meat - there's also something weirdly puritanical and often quite swerf-y about how the men who *oppose* this treatment, also treat the female participants as non-humans in a dehumanising way. Is it possible to condemn the Crue, and problematise Farrell's actions - without turning women into victims they may not have felt like they were? ARGH. I hate this discussion, I hate the conflicted way I feel when I participate.

I know that she got cancelled for later behaviour, but Jia Tolentino's essay on Lori Maddox and David Bowie, was really great at getting at some of the intensely complicated nuance around how we talk about this stuff, without discrediting or dismissing young women and their experiences.

This is a super fraught topic for me, so I'm probably going to bow out now - because, as a rape survivor, I do not want a bunch of dudes going around saying "Branwell excuses rape!!!" when I absolutely 100% do not, and I do not want to get crucified - or completely triggered - over another misunderstanding.

https://giphy.com/gifs/dancing-shark-forum-igR5863TALcSk

xpost to Josh )

It's not even as simple as "you excuse the band because you love the music they make" - there are bands I've loved much harder than Jane's who I've dropped much faster, because it was completely 100% clear that their members (in some cases, men I idolised!) were straight up abusive or violent towards women.

It's much more, "consent matters, agency matters, the women matter". And that's complicated.

I, too, never knew much or any of the backstory of the lyrics/theme of RdlH including Xiola who was depicted on the front cover and even pictured in memoriam in the dedication of the liner notes (!!! I swear I was a fairly observant fan of music pre-internet), but I thought this exchange upthread was worth a second-look:

such was the state of music journalism in the late 80s/early 90s
no one gave a shit iirc

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Tuesday, August 4, 2020 12:12 PM (one hour ago)

and then...

I wrote a thing about that whole era of winking at "bad rock star behavior"

https://slate.com/culture/2019/03/the-dirt-netflix-movie-motley-crue-book-adaptation.html

― The Mandymoorian (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, August 4, 2020 12:26 PM (forty-nine minutes ago)

and I quote:

Unlike Crüe, ’90s alterna-dudes were often using their spotlight for progressiveness and inclusivity. Perry Farrell brought alt-lit bookstore Amok Books on the first Lollapalooza, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain decried homophobes in the Incesticide liner notes, the Beastie Boys published a pamphlet about respecting women in the mosh pit, and Minutemen’s Mike Watt put a Kathleen Hanna answering-machine message about statutory rape on his major-label solo debut. The actual backstage behavior of the alternative era was another story, obviously, and a lot of bad behavior was justified by intellectualizing shock tactics as “transgressive.” However, the public sentiment was tonally light-years from Poison singing “I Want Action” in front of a drum riser painted like a woman’s legs.

I don't think the Crue and Farrell are cut from the same cloth, although this Xiola tragedy reveal is incredibly unsettling. Because these events transpired over 30 years ago, I did a quick usenet search of her name which revealed she was a promising mixed-media artist and was well liked by all who knew her, and she also dated Angelo Moore (Fishbone) around the same time as Perry.

Not sure where I'm going with all of this other than:
1) Xiola's story is absolutely tragic and Perry (always seemingly portrayed in media as deep/spiritual/romantic) is really indefensible
2) Josh in Chicago (who I'm a huge fan of) has a very uh... unusual take on the LA underground scene confusing it with the Rainbow/Whiskey glam universe.

consensual situations like Xiola's

Are you sure that qualifier applies here? Age of consent laws exist for a reason, don't they?

xpost Ha, I admit I'm being at least a little facetious.

Yeah, I mean, again, per that excerpt. The *tone* and *vision* and *intentions* and *presentation* of the artists were wildly different, even if you correctly don’t want to split hairs between “raping teenagers because it’s badass” and “raping teenagers because I’m a cool bohemian free spirit weirdo”

That all said, there was probably a little more Entitled California Rock & Roll Douchebag in Perry and Dave than, say, Primus and Faith No More and Fishbone

@Whiney, there's a really good oral history of early Jane's in the Spin 2003 that you probably have access to? I just started reading it and it's pretty good.

Spin, Aug 2003

see if this works, starts on p. 68:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Gxaz3RhzGKoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Ads, ads everywhere. I'd forgotten what that's like.

Are you sure that qualifier applies here? Age of consent laws exist for a reason, don't they?

Even that's not cut and dry, though, insofar as these vary widely over time and between places - if Xiola were in Canada in the 80s, she would have been legally able to give consent (to sex, not heroin) even at 15, for example; so was it a non-consensual act just because they were in California? (Legally, yes.) Or were Canadian teenagers giving consent legally but not morally? (This might be an arguable yes as well but it's not clear-cut.)

And this is where we get above my pay grade so I'll note that I do like the solo on "Three Days" a lot.

It's a great solo, yeah.

Age of consent laws do vary a fair amount from context to context, no doubt about it, but for my money, 14 (more so than 15) is an exceedingly low threshold, pace Italy, Germany, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, etc. I certainly take your point, though.

(I think it was actually 14 in Canada as well pre-08.)

I don’t presume to know if Xiola did or didn’t feel like a victim, or if she might have considered the song & LP cover to in fact be awesome tributes to her short life. But knowing that Farrell began “dating” her when she was 15 (and he was 23 or 24), and that he introduced her to the drug that would soon kill her, makes her “consent” seem heavily complicated.

rolling age of consent and ripping navarro solos thread 2020

But knowing that Farrell began “dating” her when she was 15 (and he was 23 or 24), and that he introduced her to the drug that would soon kill her, makes her “consent” seem heavily complicated.

That very informative SPIN article says she was 13-14. He was 9.5 years older than her, so yeah still 23-24.

To his uh... credit (?) he didn't know she was his cousin until after she'd passed away.

Either way, extremely poor judgement. I don't care if you're from Flushing, Ann Arbor, West Hollywood or Punkeydoodles Corners.

(I think it was actually 14 in Canada as well pre-08.)

Yep, unless the adult was in a position of authority, which kinda begs the question imo.

Age of Consent guitar solo: https://youtu.be/MxH5odhoKfU

lol

"Actually it's ephebophelia and it's an example of the live más mentality."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C54gosWr5no

Tbf the lyrics are outright PC in comparison:

Sweet seventeen- age of consent
Seventeen- age of consent
She's seventeen and tight, ah yeah (look out)

it seemed to me there was a lot of pain and sadness informing this music...how much of it having to w the murder and suicide, respectively, of Dave's and Perry's mothers, I don't know

I also always felt that the light that came through it—the beauty—was a sexual energy, and more specifically a feminine energy. It never struck me as having anything to do with power or exploitation, but the sanctity of sex. If anything, as a kid it seemed to me that they were elevating women.

As for the stripper poles, the women in cages, etc. I definitely don't think that it was ironic—but it always scanned to me as having to do with establishing a balance—keeping one foot in the gutter, saying that sex can also be this too, it can be about objectifying each other as part of a compact, etc. (Obv BDSM was a big part of that aesthetic esp early on.)

guys i know you all love a good thought exercise & beating a dead horse literally to death but this is straying far far into nagl

(this all being a matter apart form the Xiola issue)

xp

Were there ever any boundary-pushing bands that dared put a scantily clad dancing *dude* in a cage to be objectified? Not taking a pot shot at this band in this case, just as I said, whenever bands want to be shocking or sexual or whatever, it's always the ladies that get trotted out as props.

Other than this guy of course
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_1Fr5F9Q_J0/hqdefault.jpg

I also always felt that the light that came through it—the beauty—was a sexual energy, and more specifically a feminine energy. It never struck me as having anything to do with power or exploitation, but the sanctity of sex.

There is a particular type of creepy guy who works this angle, of course - "It'll be a spiritual experience...". Maybe Farrell is the exception.

(Sorry, I should stop posting - I'm genuinely skeeved, but I'm not even a fan of this band, so what do I care.)

Josh honestly I think you kind of don't get any of this, because as you said upthread you missed it at the time, but you are painting in really broad strokes and continuing to miss the mark and it's really fucking annoying

JiC forgot about Bez

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/WellgroomedAnotherIbadanmalimbe-small.gif

I thought exploring the tension between 'you had to be there, maaaaan' and retrospective post-millennial takes thereon was the whole point of this revive?

I dunno I think I have a handle on what Pearl Jam's deal is, but because I've never really listened to it very closely I'm going to refrain from shitting it up w/ my long-distance takes

I'm 45 years old, I'm very aware of the band. I missed them only in the sense that I didn't like or connect with them. Jane's Addiction doesn't need me as a fan, but if the only people who can discuss bands are fans of them, well, I know how that goes.

Like, I can hum the introductory bass line of Three Days right now, off the top of my head, which is more than 99.9% of non-fans can do.

xp I hope that's not what you think I'm writing... I mean to say there are posters sharing things here about that whole scene, and rather than deepen or develop your point you seem hellbent on one-noting this BUT GIRLS IN CAGES! thing

So yeah all you Navarro fans should check out the Deconstruction album. Lot to love there.

morrisp completely OTM, choosing a bassline you love over disgust at introducing a 15 year old to heroin, having a 3-day smack and sexual bender with her and your girlfriend and then making a sculpture of it to transform it into art is not a defensible position. Musically, a great song, but I am not going to listen to this skeevy motherfucker any more. He always struck me as a creep and I thought oh maybe it's just my innate contempt for that kind of muddled semi-spiritual bullshit that masques as a cover for "do whatever the fuck I want". So yeah, I was right after all these years. Goodbye asshole.

I think you might be the right audience for this, but can I tell you how much I love this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBUxxl5NnME

So yeah all you Navarro fans should check out the Deconstruction album. Lot to love there.

I've probably said it before in this thread but in some ways that Deconstruction album holds up better than Jane's for me - obviously it lacks the big ticket tunes but yep Navarro is still in his sweet spot between rock pyrotechnics and post-punk moody textural stuff - and these days I find Eric Avery's lyrics more personally resonant (less "toxic"?) than Perry's golden god self-mythologising - and def. interesting project wrt this thread in the context of a partial critical response to Jane's immediately after the event

Were there ever any boundary-pushing bands that dared put a scantily clad dancing *dude* in a cage to be objectified?

Someone post that Shamen video with Jason Statham in it

just realised how wrecked my syntax was above, but the TL;DR is that the art doesn't justify Farrell's behaviour and I'm done with Jane's, which resolves the ambivalence I've always felt.

Someone post that Shamen video with Jason Statham in it

I have to say, again and again, that this is stuff that is extremely personal for me, and a lot of it is about naming and reclaiming my own experiences of the time.

While a teenager, I absolutely had non-consensual, coercive sex that was 100% Rape. I also had consensual sex in which I was the agent and the intiator and it was 100% Not Rape, and the difference between the two experiences was not that I was 17 2/3 in one case and 18 and one day in the other.

The difference was consent, it was agency, it was whether I felt like I was in control of the experience, and that my desires and needs were being honoured.

The conversation has switched over the past few years, from "no sex is ever rape" to "all sex is rape". The latter position *ALSO* means that the desires and needs of the female (or on the "down" side of power) participants are STILL not being honoured, and are not likely to be.

When a group of people, mostly cis men, demonstrate that they do not understand what ISN'T rape, it makes me very wary that they don't have a very good understanding what IS rape.

Music often functions as a... theatre of desire. In many ways the music industry (and even moreso back in the 80s) is in the business of commodifying sex, desire, romance, longing, infatuation, and all of those other exciting emotions, and providing a place for people on the cusp of sexuality to experience and explore them. (ILM has a long history of demonstrating that it is intensely uncomfortable with female desire.) An industry that traffics in desire in this way, is entirely ripe for abuse. To combat that abuse, without simply declaring "desire" off limits (because we all know whose desire gets cracked down on first), one has to understand, beyond a 'letter of the law' approach, what is, and isn't abuse.

(The absolute epitomy of the dark side of this 'letter of the law' approach to consent versus abuse is on that other thread, about the Killers thing. "The actual girl was not raped; however deliberately convincing the only female crew member, for weeks, that her colleagues were all rapists, was just ~hazing~ - therefore no abuse has taken place." Please move beyond these letter of the law approaches. The letter of the law can be used to harm, discredit, diminish, the negative experiences of women, as easily as it can the positive.)

Now I'm gonna go have a little dance on the Shamen thread.

The band that Jane's most resembled lyrically, at the time I loved them, was the Velvet Underground. That absolute refusal to take a moral position, writing completely non-judgemental songs that were "neither for nor against, just about".

And who you choose to take that moral non-positition towards, is far more important than the act of non-position. Farrell was pretty clear that he very much did have a moral position on cops, governments, leaders. But in the face of the Reagan/Bush years of Just Say No and the War On Drugs (which was actually a war on the poor, and specifically a war on African-Americans, because no one cared if Wall Street was a blizzard of cocaine) to refuse to take a moral position, to write songs that posited... sex workers are just people; drugs can be fun or spiritual or all kinds of things; shoplifting is exciting and fun - the directionality of who gets moral blame (cops) and who doesn't (sex workers, shoplifters) can be really powerful in a way that transcends the sleaziness of the writer.

I don't think I ever, even at the height of my fandom, thought Farrell was any kind of messiah or... (role model is the wrong word here) - he was, like Lou Reed, a fucked-up, damaged individual writing songs about fucked-up, damaged people - whose damage resembled the damage me and my friends had - in a way that didn't condemn us for our damage, but allowed some people who had been quite marginalised by the Reagan-Bush moral regime, to accept and address our damage.

I totally respect people who choose to nope out on him because (in the absence of Xiola's voice), they read his behaviour as not-OK. I was never under any illusions that he was any kind of ~nice person~ - he exuded fucked-up damage, so it is not a surprise that he was sleazy or creepy, any more than - it was disappointing, but also not a surprise to discover that Lou Reed was an abusive control freak. I just really hope that people ITT understand that I am not excusing Farrell's behaviour. But this music provided a lens through which people like me could examine our own damage.

I was never a junkie, but I was certainly an addict and an alcoholic, during periods of my life. It took therapy to help me understand, that as impressionable as I was, and as irresponsible as these artists might have been - I didn't become an addict because of Lou Reed or Sonic Boom or Perry Farrell. I was *drawn* to these artists and their addict art because there was already damage to me, the kind of damage that makes people think addiction is a solution.

Their first album, they covered a Stones song and they covered a Velvets song - and I think, at the time, I was very aware of the Velvets connection, and saw them through that lens.

thanks, Branwell, great posts. I think a lot about "acceptable transgressiveness" in art but also in "lifestyles" and the obvious tensions therein. There's something different about our moment of "progressiveness" in which the advances are today less in the direction of "freedom" than in other directions, of "do no harm" but also "respect others' freedoms". But those don't necessarily go together well. as ever this is not the thread for this but I don't know what is.

it's not exactly that weird or suspicious that ppl are erring on the side of "that's pretty fucked" when we have almost nothing of xiola's side of things. partially because she's dead from the drug perry (and probably others) helped supply her from a young age

that said I would never judge anyone for finding value in whatever art they please. I still listen to brand new, and in some ways knowing what we know or could guess about his conscience actually makes their later work i daresay quite powerfully bleak

I'm not exactly rushing out to give them my $$$ though

oh lastly some of us have conclusions and attitudes that are informed by experience as well even if we don't all post about it, something to keep in mind when yer tempted to make sweeping pronouncements about those annoying cis boys :)

Not to mention that my understanding of this and other similarly sketchy situations was chiefly shaped by listening to the women I know who have experienced such things first-hand. I will also say (alongside Simon, and for the last time, I promise) that offering heroin to a 14 year-old who ended up dying from it before even reaching the end of her teens is a significant part of what makes this tale so disturbing.

Oh but she was such a free spirit. And he was so damaged, you see.

My daughter is 18.

I had a long conversation with my Mum about the times described in this thread.

To this day, she hates my then-girlfriend because she introduced me to drugs and gay sex, and she thinks that ruined my life for decades. I have no way to express to her, that being introduced to drugs and gay sex genuinely saved my life, and without those experiences and those people, I would not have survived the 80s and I would not be here today.

People can read the same situation in many different ways, depending on their position and relation to it.

Is there anything left to be gained by continuing this, or are we just at “we disagree, leave it” here?

idk is it really ILX if we don't drag this out until a valued poster ragequits

(j/k I'm happy to drop it)

Is there anything left to be gained by continuing this, or are we just at “we disagree, leave it” here?

I think the latter, with a recommendation that anyone who hasn't read Pamela Des Barres' I'm With The Band find a copy.

(N.B. I'm working on a 30th anniversary piece about Jane's and Ritual, and this discussion has given me a lot to think about, particularly since I had no idea about the various folks' ages when the record came out — not only did I not know Xiola's age, I didn't know Perry was so much older than his bandmates; he's 61!)

guys i know you all love a good thought exercise & beating a dead horse literally to death but this is straying far far into nagl

Fwiw, idk if this was referring to me but I had thought Branwell made a fair and interesting point and was thinking about how even hard legal lines don't necessarily make those questions clear-cut, morally, in terms of the point they raised. Not sure what it looked like to you. Introducing a young teenager to heroin is totally indefensible and horrifying obv and the whole story has been making me shudder over the last couple of days.

Yeah, some kids mature faster than others, but it's pretty well established that drugs and alcohol adversely affect teenage brains which are still in development, and I'm sure that adding sex to the mix makes the situation even worse. Addicts sometimes talk about that part of their brain being frozen at the point where they first experienced the euphoria that drove them to addiction. It makes sense to me that 20-somethings would be able to cope with those intense feelings and maybe draw them out through addiction while teens would be more inclined to just chase those feelings into oblivion. In this case, the issue is not about Xiola's consent or whether or not she enjoyed those 3 days, it's about her being too young to process those feelings that Perry foisted on her. And the fact that he turned her tragedy into a commodity, no matter how artfully done, is just vile and disgusting.

this thread's turn/thinking about lolla '91 and that summer/the whole thing has me feeling all kinds of fucked up
in case anyone wondered why i stopped being part of this conversation
fun fact -- 8/5/91 was when i saw that show i posted above!

Thanks for posting it upthread LL. I was watching it and soaking in the feeling of being 18-19 again.

unfortunately, i was soaking in the feeling of being 15 again too and it was very bad

(The absolute epitomy of the dark side of this 'letter of the law' approach to consent versus abuse is on that other thread, about the Killers thing. "The actual girl was not raped; however deliberately convincing the only female crew member, for weeks, that her colleagues were all rapists, was just ~hazing~ - therefore no abuse has taken place." Please move beyond these letter of the law approaches. The letter of the law can be used to harm, discredit, diminish, the negative experiences of women, as easily as it can the positive.

The band’s statement doesn’t say “therefore no abuse has taken place” — it says the guy in question was fired in 2013 for other “unacceptable” behavior, including his “treatment of others on the tour” and “a series of sexist remarks and rude comments, (which) caused the female crew member on the audio team great distress.” It’s also clear they took the new allegation very seriously; beyond getting to the bottom of it, I’m not sure what more they can do to the guy as a matter of law.

unfortunately, i was soaking in the feeling of being 15 again too and it was very bad

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Wednesday, August 5, 2020 11:38 AM (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

:( sorry

so you guys ready to move on to Porno for Pyros or what

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtjRgEQFFio

Massive apologies for trying to bring this thread back to the topic of Jane's Addiction, but I've read a few pieces in the last day and one thing that keeps coming up is Perry's age relative to all the players in the band/scene.

When the band formed in 1985, Dave & Stephen were 18, Eric was 20, Perry was 26.

By the time they were in contract negotiation for songwriting credits for Nothing's Shocking, Perry was 29, Dave & Stephen were 21, Eric was 23.

In case you don't know the story, Eric left the band for 2 days because Perry's lawyer (the only member to bring one to the meeting with the label) demanded 62.5% of all songwriting credit, with the other band members getting 12.5% each. Dave Jerden (producer of Nothing's Shocking) eventually talked Avery into-rejoining the band after a few days, but it's pretty clear that the band (esp. Avery) was never the same after this.

So this recurring theme of Perry's age gap not just with his bandmates but his romantic partners (XB +9.5 years, CN +5.5 years, CC +9 years, MD +8 years, current wife ELF +16 years)... seems rather significant.

About Porno for Pyros and those songwriting credits, I was just reading this section in Whores:

MARTYN LE NOBLE: I cowrote pretty much all of the stuff, including "Pets" but never got proper credit. Perry had a very interesting structure. We went into the studio and recorded the whole record. Then Eric Greenspan, the attorney, came in and said, "We'll structure it like this. I suggest you get your own attorney." After Eric Greenspan left, Perry said, "When Dave and Eric got their own attorney, that's when I broke up Jane's Addiction." He was like, "You can get your own attorney, but if you do, this band will probably not exist."

Also, they were all smoking lots of crack at the time. Total crack record.

Huh, so that's Buck Angel in the "Cursed Female" video?

BuckAngel Entertainment
7 years ago
That is the point! It is me before I started taking testosterone. ENJOY!

well I sure have learned a lot about perry farrell over the last few days

Same, heh.

My takeaway from all of this is basically that Perry is the John Phillips of that scene. I still listen to both Jane's and the Mamas & the Papas, but I completely accept that both were driven by abusive drug-addled egomaniacs.

TALKIN BOUT THE PAYGS
THE PAYOOOOOGS

PA-PA-PA-PA-PAYOG

Removed from, like, the ominpresence of seeing it a billion times as a kid, just rewatched "Been Caught Stealing" video with adult eyes and, man, is it brilliant

Perry is totally the older dude hanging out with high school kids and the kids think he's cool until they grow up and remember... "Who was that creepy dude that was always around? Why was he hanging out with us? Weird."

Loved JA but Perry always struck me as skeezy. "Ain't no wrong now, ain't no right. Only pleasure and pain." Okay, 90's Jim Morrison.

Recently unearthed pic of Stephen Perkins & Perry Farrell cruising for burgers.

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c5c8728a9fcfa709de8e06cc7b316b66

goddamn peeyogs

PA-PA-PA-PA-PAYOG

― singular wolf erotica producer (Hadrian VIII), Wednesday, August 5, 2020 10:38 AM (one hour ago)

https://i.imgur.com/2B7ROSB.jpg

don't really know how to weigh in on the support vs. do not support problematic artists thing

and I also realized that me "supporting" Jane's Addiction is probably listening to Nothing's Shocking like 4 more times on streaming before I die and got depressed

tbh correctly or not I don't really consider spotify streams as "material support" for artists

I'd be the most detestable hypocrite of all on this board if I didn't think listening to JA and enjoying their music will never not be fine (and at least Perry Farrell is no Jon Nödtveidt), but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be real-life consequences for ethically bankrupt behaviour. And while I myself was too young to know what the band seemingly stood for in its heyday, this revive has impelled some quality posts from all quarters and it does personally get me thinking about the mixture of progressive and toxic alt-rock attitudes that I grew up with in the 90s and early 00s.

I on the other hand have never had a bad or wrong opinion or attitude but I still found it interesting!

imagine hearing it in a laser tag place surrounded by the smell of abundant teenage sweat, cigarettes, and alcohol

I'm looking forward to checking out that video from Blossom you posted; I was at that show too but sadly have no real memory of JA's performance. I do remember them at Peabody's DownUnder if you know that club shortly after NS came out, was a much bigger fan at that point. Still have the shirt from that show in my attic in pretty great condition 'cause I was never comfortable wearing it anywhere.

Omg lol do I know you?? My webmail works, I’ll get the message! Akron.

Ha! Never expected to run into a fellow Dancin’ alum here! (That’s what it was called, right? I can’t find any evidence of its existence online.) Based on your timeline I think our age difference makes it unlikely we know each other (by ’89-’90 I’d graduated to Nine of Clubs) but our paths probably crossed. I’ll send you a message later!

Dancin’ on the planet! But we called it Photon and everyone fronted like they weren’t going but they always showed up. I used to prank the payphone. And there was a dedicated indoor smoking room. A good lol we will have!

Before this whole discussion kicked off, I pitched a 30th anniversary writeup on Ritual to Stereogum. It's up now, and incorporates some of what was discussed here. (It was a lot longer at first, a broader piece about how much weirder "alternative rock" was immediately pre-Nirvana, and included discussion of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, Faith No More, Primus, and Suicidal Tendencies.)

Thanks for sharing that.

“This guy’s a real moron — he doesn’t even understand fashion!”

^this is a pretty funny response to being hit by a flying Birkenstock.

That take was on the Classic Girl cd single! Also something about "women reach the age of menopause - that'll do!" that always befuddled me in the intro to their L.A. Medley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXoLYvQW7XY

Just a couple days ago on twitter, Perry mentioned getting abused by his step-mom. Can't remember if I had read about that before.

Chris, Parental guidance was all but absent from my life. I owe much of my drive to a step mother, who let me know with a constant bashing, that I was no good. So, my advice to parents today is abuse your kids as much as possible. If you’re in a bad mood; take it out on them... https://t.co/L4RSz1Ar7W

— Perry Farrell (@perryfarrell) August 18, 2020

Good piece, unperson. It makes me wish I could ‘get’ this band, even though I know I never will.

Getting drum sounds while recording Jane’s Ritual -30 years ago - I have plenty of footage of the sessions ;) pic.twitter.com/Q2czczRjyl

— Stephen Perkins (@stephenperkins) August 21, 2020

Good piece there for sure.

X post sounds like an excerpt from bonzo’s montreux!

Senors y senoras
Tenemos mas infkuceienca

Zeppelin for younger Gen Xers

I listened to Nothing’s Shocking for the first time in decades recently and it sounded truly great — I was surprised by how much i enjoyed every song, even now! Not only that but the thing that stood out was the drumming in particular. I wouldn’t have thought S Perkins was that influential for me but his playing still sounds really good.

Yesss

As a middle to young era gen xer i liked zeppelin but loved janes addiction because it was all of the pomp and bombast and great bass playing but with more punk rockness and way less slow boring blues shit.

I know they enjoyed dry ice. Got herded out of the ICA in midwinter cos they set off all the fire alarms with that stuff.
Didn't really pick up on the lps until a while later.

Have they ever remastered the cds?

i don’t ~think~ so? mr veg is a big fan so we’d have snapped them up if there were remasters to be had, i’d think. but i could be wrong.

No; there were vinyl remasters a few years ago but no CD equivalents.

Audio Fidelity (an audiophile label no longer in operation) reissued Nothing's Shocking on a 24k gold CD in 2012, remastered from the original master tapes with HDCD encoding. It's an expensive collector's item now, but supposedly it does sound really good, especially if you can decode HDCD on your player.

Is there a reason why not if like everybody else has reissued things of that stature several times over.

It seems like the main way to justify remasters is the inclusion of bonus material, and it looks like they exhausted the vaults between Kettle Whistle and the box set.

There was a vinyl box in '16 that had the two WB albums, an abridged Kettle Whistle, and a previously unreleased live album that on the whole really should have had a dad a companion CD release.

previously unreleased live album

It was the third disc in the Cabinet of Curiosities box.

Ok, so the vault is truly exhausted then.

In 2016, I cobbled together all the covers/remixes/originals not on the three LPs. It's about 70 minutes of music and pretty underwhelming

There was a vinyl box in '16 that had the two WB albums, an abridged Kettle Whistle, and a previously unreleased live album that on the whole really should have had a dad a companion CD release.

the vinyl on this sounded pretty bad imo - the recent Ritual reissue on clear vinyl was brilliant, though.

Surely a cd update on its own would be welcome. & if lacking bonus tracks surely there must be some live stuf of some quality. Or demoes of crucial tracks or something. Just seems like the cds were issued like once , not sure how later things like the box of the 3 together differed soundwise.

Have just been conscious that I would like a more recent cd upgrade for like years like.

Back together with Eric Avery judging by photos on Instagram this morning?

pretty incredible development considering the bad blood after the last reunion

i was so stoked to see that line-up perform live even though (or even because?) the acrimony was palpable and they were tuned down a couple of steps to save what's left of Perry's voice

JA have burned a lot of my goodwill (and dispelled a lot of their aura/magic) with their non-Eric activities* - but with him involved i would always be cautiously interested - one of my all-time favourite musicians

*i also wholly understand that they need to pay their mortgages

It is crazy but also great how much of a difference he makes to their music - in some ways he’s better than they deserve but no question on my mind that i’d pony up my dollars to see that lineup again, last time was great

I’m interested in this detail from Pitchfork’s Nothing Shocking review:

Jane Addiction’s convinced their new label to allow a “fake indie release” of Jane’s Addiction on Triple X Records to maintain their street cred, a strategy they accused Guns N’ Roses, Smashing Pumpkins, and Soundgarden of copying afterwards.

so.. dave navarro not playing on the smashing pumpkins tour - due to long covid Is the official reason - weird. love that eric is back but don’t know i would enjoy a Jane’s show without Navarro

pretty good article about all of it in rolling stone, interesting on the eric/perry rapprochement

Yeah, Jane's without Dave would be as tough to wrap my head around as Van Halen without Eddie or something. On the other hand, I love Troy Van Leeuwen (who is filling in for him) so I hope he pulls it off with aplomb.

That's pretty wild. Van Leeuwen just filled in for Captain Sensible on the Damned's tour of the U.S. this year.

Was Dave Pajo busy or something?

Why is RS the worst website in the world

yeah you gain so much w eric but without the flashiness of dave it doesn’t work
jane’s is such an oddly specific ecosystem

yeah you gain so much w eric but without the flashiness of dave it doesn’t work
jane’s is such an oddly specific ecosystem

ok so now Josh Klinghoffer has replaced the still MIA Dave Navarro and they sound… really great?! like Klinghoffer (who I know nuthin about) is totally nailing a kind of shreddy looseness that sounds like JA of the olden days and the rest of the band have lifted to meet him, and even Perry sounds energised and determined to max out what’s left of his voice and -??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSi_7azF7u4

Its not in that vid but I saw a clip from the night before where JK totally bodied the Three Days solo and actually got chills -

Anyway something slightly interesting going on when I thought they were totally destined for an endgame of sad cash ins and diminishing returns

Nuts Avery is back in the band. Perry ever so slightly looks like Biden in that clip. Still think the dancers are kind of embarrassing.

Eric’s always been the heart of JA to me so this is really cool news

Josh Klinghoffer is a pro sideman dude, he was in RHCP for a while, I'm assuming a super great player

he filled in for Matt Cameron on Pearl Jam’s last tour - he’s really good (his own stuff under Pluralone is p decent too)

Whoa reading Klinghoffer's bio is quite a thing — he's played with/been close Bob Forrest, John Frusciante, the Chili Peppers and now Jane's Addiction (among many others). He must be some kind of junkie whisperer.

He played some of the drums on Warpaint's Exquisite Corpse record, as well.

I think a big part of being an in-demand sideman is the ability to be chill and vibe with a wide range of challenging personalities

Also the youngest inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame I think!

Yup - at 32, beating previous record-holder Stevie Wonder (38).

He also played on Warpaint's "Exquisite Corpse" EP

i think he was on maron’s podcast a year or so back and talked about Rhcp etc etc