Classic or dud : Jane's Addiction

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.