Jane's Addiction - Up From The Catacombs (2006)

JUST ANOTHER SHOW WITH SEX AND VIOLENCE

by Gil Kaufman

“GIVE ME SOME MORE...MOTHERFUCKER!”

They were the pied pipers of the alternative nation. A velvet car crash that sped you to the brink only to peek over the edge then zip off in another, equally bizarre, direction.

Before they introduced the world to the concept of a Lollapalooza, Jane’s Addiction volunteered to lead a generation into an enchanted musical forest with their combustible mix of alien charisma, sex, drugs, and a heaping dose of anarchy.

Mashing up rock, punk, folk, heavy metal, and psychedelia, the unpredictable Los Angeles band was desperate to turn the world on with their theatrical vision. In seven short years, Jane’s blew open the doors for music that fed your head and your feet, released a pair of classic albums, headlined the debut of the Lollapalooza festival, and sparked a revolution whose ripple effects can still be felt today.

“I’M AS TASTY AS A RED PLUMB”

Farrell (born Perry Bernstein), the son of a New York jewelry designer, moved from Miami to the West Coast in search of his muse in the mid-’70s. The wraithlike singer with the tangled braids and deep, wild eyes adopted a trippy stage name (a play on peripheral), which doubled as a reference to his brother, Farrel.

Seeking an outlet for his vivid imagination, Farrell spent time as a cabaret performer and go-go dancer in a Newport Beach nightclub, and he worked the L.A. club scene with his short-lived goth rock group, Psi-Com. In 1985 Farrell was introduced to bassist Eric Avery, who joined up just in time to see the group split. The pair continued to perform together as a bass/vocal duo, sometimes as The Illuminotics. They recruited a guitarist simply known as “Ed” (his stay was brief) and drummer Stephen Perkins into the fold under the name Jane’s Addiction, partly inspired by a colorful roommate named Jane and her nasty habits. Not long afterward Perkins brought teenage guitarist Dave Navarro to the band, and Jane’s as we know it took shape.

The group began haunting the Sunset Strip club scene before Perkins and Navarro were old enough to enter the bars, often forcing them to wait outside clubs until right before taking the stage. Thanks to an arty sensibility, Farrell’s dreadlocks, outrageous fetish and vinyl outfits, and frequent onstage kisses between band members, Jane’s stood out amid the hair-metal bands that ruled the Strip at the time.

The music, of course, was a dead giveaway. Navarro’s tumultuous guitar solos were rooted in classic hard rock, but his concentrated bursts of chaotic notes and squealing feedback carefully toed the line. Avery’s funk-influenced bass, and Farrell’s delay-tweaked vocals, the musical mix of characters was undeniable. Gloriously self-indulgent and bombastic onstage, they quickly earned a reputation that resulted in a deal with L.A. indie Triple X Records.

A self-titled debut was released in 1987, recorded live at The Roxy in Hollywood. Though raw, it captured their frenetic energy and established Farrell’s penchant for provocative cover images with a self-portrait oil painting in which he modeled a corset/fetish outfit while striking a Christlike pose. From the first notes of the punk funk jam “Trip Away,” the album explodes with the group’s signature undulating quiet/loud dynamic, a hallmark of many of the grunge bands of the 1990s, especially Nirvana.

They were capable of building dramatic tension with a whisper and a scream. Even as he’s pledging a desperate yearning to please in the ballad “I Would For You,” Farrell’s ethereal vocals have an undeniable dead-end quality, morphing from a sweet-nothing to demented quaver from one line to the next. Jane’s features an early version of what would become the band’s signature song, the Lou Reed-style sung/spoken junkie’s lament, “Jane Says.” Elsewhere it jumps from the acoustic folk of “My Time” to the psychedelic tribal jam “Trip Away.”

With songs about sex, drugs, whores, deviance of every sort, and a menagerie of gutter-dwelling characters, Farrell’s lyrics plumbed a Bukowski-worthy world of grime and desperation, themes that he would continue to explore on the band’s next two albums. While Jane’s Addiction didn’t chart, it set off a bidding war won by Warner Bros. Records, which signed the band and released their studio debut, Nothing’s Shocking, in 1988.

“IT AIN’T EASY LIVIN’”

Farrell’s cover sculpture of a pair of women joined at the hips and shoulders with their heads aflame was a sure sign that Jane’s would not round their edges for their major-label bow. Shocking is a dizzying trip, with increasing dramatic tension as it segues from the Cure-inspired goth/metal gut punch “Ocean Size” to the metal funk rave-up “Had A Dad.” The media critique/homage to serial killer Ted Bundy “Ted, Just Admit It…” creeps in on a slinky jazz rhythm track with swirling noise, until Farrell spouts the refrain “Sex is violent!,” setting off a machine-gun gallop of tribal drumming and slashing guitars, as his vocals grow more agitated and sinister. Contrast that with the willowy six-minute “Summertime Rolls,” a pastoral stroll that washes over like a wave of narcotic heat, and you have the bookends of a classic album.

But with its slipstream changing musical and lyrical moods—often within the same song, sometimes within a single verse—the album is hard to pin down.

If you’re looking for clues into Farrell’s trickster persona, though, the Zeppelinlike stomp of “Mountain Song” features a classic line (“Cash in now, honey”) that would prove prophetic and ironic. One of the first songs the group wrote, it’s Farrell’s meditation on grabbing all you can, while you can, ironic because the band called it quits just a few years later at the height of their popularity. The album won a loyal underground following that grew as word spread, helping it chart for more than 30 weeks on its way to an eventual platinum certification.

“HUM ALONG WITH THE T.V.”

In 1990 the band once again courted controversy over cover art, with Ritual De Lo Habitual. A number of record chains refused to carry the album with Farrell’s anatomically correct sculpture, which featured him in bed with two women. As a protest the band issued an alternate version with the First Amendment printed on a white background. The final album by the original lineup was a revelation in songwriting and composition, no matter which cover you ended up with.

While the smash lead single, the frenetic, playful ode to shoplifting “Been Caught Stealing,” became the band’s first radio (and MTV) hit, songs like “Three Days,” a languorous 11-minute tale of a ménage à trois, found Jane’s perfecting their unique style. Reining in much of the profane, chaotic blurt of their early days, the band allowed the compositions to spread to proglike lengths and shift through a range of emotions. Not that Ritual was completely blurtless. Blitzing opener “Stop!” became an instant live favorite for its turn-on-a-dime rhythms, as did the mockingly masochistic “Ain’t No Right,” in which Farrell boasts, “I am skin and bones/I am pointy nose/But it motherfuckin’ makes me try.”

At the peak of the mountain, Farrell launched his dream project in 1991: Lollapalooza, a multi-act summer tour with sideshow diversions and a lineup that cut across musical boundaries. The main stage featured such diverse acts as Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T, The Butthole Surfers, Siouxsie & The Banshees, and Henry Rollins, as well as Jane’s, who, torn apart by drugs and internal squabbling, announced that it would be their farewell outing.

But what a way to go. Tweaking racial and musical tensions, Farrell teamed with Ice-T on the tour to perform a playfully evocative cover of Sly & The Family Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey” (with Farrell answering “Don’t call me whitey, nigger”). As much as their music, the band’s last stand served to cement their reputation as leaders of a new school of anything goes, the masters of the mash-up.

Just weeks after Ritual became the band’s first platinum album, garnering a Grammy® nomination and winning Best Alternative Music Video for “Stealing” at the MTV Video Music Awards, Jane’s played its final show in Honolulu in September of 1991; Farrell performed nude.

“THOSE WERE THE DAYS”

Post-Jane’s, Navarro teamed with Avery for the short-lived Destruction before signing up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, stepping into a guitar spot vacated by John Frusciante in 1992 and filled by a small succession of players in the intervening years. This Peppers lineup recorded only one album, the dark and challenging One Hot Minute (1995); Navarro split three years later, citing musical differences.

Meanwhile Farrell and Perkins re-emerged as Porno For Pyros and jumped right back into recording with a self-titled 1993 debut that mixed the classic Jane’s sound with a funky Caribbean-island vibe, spawning the playful hit “Pets.” The band released one more album, Good God’s Urge, in 1996, which featured a Navarro cameo on “Freeway,” the first step in a detente between the bandmates.

Ex-Minutemen bassist Mike Watt filled in for departed Pyros bassist Martyne Le Noble on the Good God’s tour, during which the band would perform the Jane’s tune “Mountain Song” to rabid response. But the dates—including one on which Navarro leapt onstage for an acoustic set of some unrehearsed Jane’s tunes—were cut short when guitarist Pete DiStefano was diagnosed with cancer. Pyros broke up a short time later, but not before they were joined by Chili Peppers bassist Flea to record “Hard Charger” for the soundtrack to Howard Stern’s Private Parts. It was that collaboration that cemented the plan for another swing.

In the interviewing years, Lollapalooza, with its Jane’s-inspired parade of adventurous music and socially responsible causes, had helped keep the Jane’s myth alive, a legend that grew as alternative music went from noisy upstart to ruling the charts, thanks to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Beastie Boys, and Smashing Pumpkins. Which is why the announcement that Jane’s Addiction would reunite, minus holdout Avery, in 1997 for the Relapse tour was met such rabid enthusiasm. With old friend Flea filling in for Avery, the tour dates drew not only the original fans but also a younger set who had likely discovered the band’s albums in their older siblings’ collections and had never gotten the chance to see Jane’s live.

The month of shows played to packed houses. They were often inspired, and, in the case of a ravelike mini-Lollapalooza in San Franciso called ENIT, a harlequin quilt of colorful, big ideas about global communion, hard-core techno DJ sets, and pleas for peaceful coexistence. The outtakes album Kettle Whistle accompanied the dates and featured the steel-drum-accented live take on “Jane Says” recorded on the band’s 1991 farewell tour.

They went their separate ways again afterward…until 2001, when they reassembled to headline Coachella in Indio, California, and a subsequent tour, with Le Noble filling in for Avery. After solo records by Navarro and Farrell (Perkins had stayed busy during Jane’s long interims with three albums by his band, the musical collective Banyan), the group—with ex-Alanis Morissette sideman Chris Chaney on bass—decided to record their first new album in more than a decade, 2003’s Strays, featuring the hard-charging “Just Because.” After a headlining stint ion the resuscitated 2003 edition of Lollapalooza, internal conflict splintered the band for what appeared to be the final time in 2004.

“GIVE ME MY TIME!”

Maybe it’s because of Jane’s Addiction that nothing’s shocking. That alternative music grew to be the dominant force in the early ‘90s, allowing the outcasts to feel the glare of the spotlight, if only for a moment. That European-style music festivals like Lollapalooza became the norm, from the jam-inspired H.O.R.D.E. tour to the female-centric Lilith Fair, the punk WARPED juggernaut, and their modern equivalents, Bonnaroo and Coachella. That a whole new generation of rock bands feels free to blend metal riffs with hip-hop scratching, cathartic lyrics, beats, and attitude.

Alternative radio has been dismantled, hip-hop and R&B have taken over the charts, and having a bleeped curse in your single is about as dangerous as it gets these days. But Jane’s helped a generation realize that it’s OK to taste the rainbow of musical flavors. Or maybe they just inspired us to dance to their perverse siren song as Rome (or Iraq, or Bosnia, or Afghanistan) was burning.

We’re still looking for a new pied piper, and there might be times you forget how these songs moved you, but that seed’s been planted. When you hear them again it’ll come back to you, or turn on your kid brother, maybe even your daughter. They’re the songs that even after all this time beg, “Give me some more…motherfucker!”