Classic or dud : Jane's Addiction

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”