Classic or dud : Jane's Addiction

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