Classic or dud : Jane's Addiction

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!"