Jane's Addiction - Hard rock fights back

Senores y senoras

“Senores y senoras, nosotros tenemos mas influencia con sus hijos que tu tiene. Pero los… queremos. Creado y regalo de Los Angeles: Juana’s Addiccion!” *

Jane’s Addiction introduce themselves this way, with these words recited by a female voice at the start of their third album, Ritual De Lo Habitual. Perhaps this is exactly where their essence lies: brazenness, impact, and love for the city that gave them success and from which they set out to conquer the world, that Los Angeles which for so many artists has been a breeding ground for mixing the most disparate cultures and influences.

Jane’s Addiction are, to a large extent, Perry Farrell, their singer/leader/inventor/frontman. Farrell is yet another of rock's men of a thousand faces: the genius, the heroin addict, the sellout, the poet, the pervert, the shrewd businessman, the great mentor of indie rock.

Perry Farrell is the stage name of Peretz Bernstein, born in New York on March 29, 1959, into a well-off family. He chose this name as a play on the word “peripheral”, underlining his passion for marginal situations, the underworld and its characters: whores and tramps, junkies and failures. His motto, which he would proclaim once he had become a rock star, is: “It takes peripheral vision. Only that way can you see the center”. In fact, Farrell is also his brother's name. His mother, a collector of assorted art and an amateur artist, committed suicide when Perry was only four years old. This tragic event, more than any other, would shape his future life, and would be immortalized in the song “Then She Did…”.

As a teenager he moved to Miami with his jeweler father, before finally arriving at seventeen, running away from home “simply because I was a rebellious kid”, in Los Angeles, where he soon formed a dark-gothic band called PsiCom, taking on the role of singer. The band achieved modest success in the Los Angeles area, going as far as recording a self-titled EP for the independent label Triple X (which would also release the first record by the future Jane’s Addiction) and drawing the interest of several major labels. Before signing with one of them, however, the band broke up.

It's 1985 and the hugely ambitious Perry (still going by his real name) wants something else. He spends his days surfing, painting and sculpting with all sorts of materials (a passion inherited from his mother), having sex and doing drugs with his longtime partner Casey Niccoli, who in those years alternates with — and often shares him with — Xiola, the other key woman in Farrell's life, and of course making music. It's his meeting with Eric Avery, a bassist he connects with right before the definitive split of PsiCom, that gives him the push to put together a new band. This time Perry wants it to be rock, as rock as possible, fusing all the great musical loves of his life: Stooges, especially his idol Iggy Pop, to whom he'd been introduced by Casey, Led Zeppelin, dark wave, punk and psychedelia. He also picks a name: Jane's Addiction, after his heroin-addicted roommate. At the same time, he also adopts his stage name.

The two soon recruit Stephen Perkins, a skilled and powerful drummer who at the time was simply playing in a high-school speed-metal band. Perkins brings along that band's guitarist, and so the still eighteen-year-old Dave Navarro (born June 7, 1967) joins the group — he'll become the singer's alter ego, sharing with him the experience of a mother's violent death, in his case a murder.

My sex my drugs and my rock and roll…

The band is now complete. Perry pours all his repressed violence into the lyrics and music: "I like to see violence every now and then," he would declare in one of the newborn band's very first interviews, given to the Los Angeles magazine Flipside. Jane's Addiction almost immediately become a sort of legend in Los Angeles precisely because of the extreme energy they unleash in their live shows, especially at the Roxy, where — fittingly for Triple X — they record their self-titled debut album live.

Jane's Addiction (1987) is a record where the personality the band would carry throughout its career is already clearly defined and assertive. Moments of extreme rock-metal power alternate with enveloping psychedelic passages, and jolting rhythms give way to swaying, wave-like ones. The funk element is strongly present, and Farrell's voice constantly hams it up with his "Fuck!" or "Motherfuck'a!" or his ape-like howls ("Trip Away", "Whores"), before indulging in long, anguished, moaning pauses ("I Would For You"). Navarro shows off his technical skill and what would become his signature "resonant" sound, Perkins brings out the "tribal" side of the drummer's role, and Avery wraps everything in the coils of his bass. The album is split into two halves: an electric first side followed by an acoustic second side, where big ballads like "My Time" and the famous "Jane Says" reveal Zeppelin-esque influences far more than metallic riffs, and also show off the four musicians' varied compositional range, including their knack for "popular" immediacy.

The major label quickest to get its hands on this tasty prospect is Warner, who grants the band plenty of freedom — so much so that Farrell gets to produce the record himself. Without wasting any time, the group records its second album the very next year (1988), Nothing's Shocking. The cover, a photo of a sculpture by the singer himself, obviously plays on the title: it depicts two naked Siamese twins (Casey Niccoli) with their heads on fire, sitting on an absurd rocking chair. Scandal erupts immediately: many stores and a major distribution chain refuse to stock the record, and protests from outraged mothers pour in.

Whether or not it was all calculated to make headlines becomes a moot question in the face of the record's monumental content, one of the masterpieces of the '80s and one of the cult albums of hard rock. Just like that, right in the middle of a decade considered the most synthetic and dance-oriented, comes an explosion that, together with the parallel vitality of the hardcore scene of the time, manages to throw the doors wide open for rock's forceful return to the mainstream, which was about to happen. Even the intro, the brief "Up The Beach", announces an enveloping, hypnotic, psychedelic atmosphere. Picking up fully on the groundwork laid by the debut album, Avery's bass immediately becomes the true axis of these almost physical, wave-like movements that recur throughout the record — true mantras that Farrell, humming along, both follows and leads at once. We can't help but follow along like zombies.

Already with "Ocean Size", we move from the surfers' beach out into the open sea, into the ocean that a homeless man dreams of becoming in order to escape his miserable life, to be great — immense, even — for just one day. So we've set sail for the seas of a monolithic, Black Sabbath-style hard rock, but with an extra metallic edge, born of twenty years of undercurrent maturation pouring out of an already technically masterful Navarro. "Ocean Size" and "Mountain Song" (as if to say, from one end of the world to the other...) form the hard core of the record, the apotheosis of hard-rock impact, of heavy riffs fused with savanna drums and Zeppelin-style flights of fancy. Here, Jane's Addiction's rock is truly immense, gigantic, a perfect embodiment of the songs' titles in the grandiosity of every note, in the hypertrophic arrangements and in Farrell's flaying screams. This rock seems to plant itself in front of us and refuse to let us pass without going straight through it. It's pure, raw power.

But Nothing's Shocking is also something else — in fact, much more. Alongside the monolithic rock, funk-rock abounds, following a path their fellow Angelenos and friends Red Hot Chili Peppers were treading at the same time, though with much harsher intentions than theirs. Perfect examples are "Had A Dad", in which Farrell exorcises, in Oedipal fashion, the looming figure of his father, with whom he'd reconciled before his death ("I had a dad, big and strong"), the breathless sprint of "Standing In The Shower... Thinking" and the irresistible physicality of "Idiot's Rule", arranged around a horn section, where the direct presence of the Peppers' Flea on trumpet does full justice to the real musical forces of Los Angeles in those years.

The initial introspective reflection of "Ted, Just Admit It..." draws us into a long psychedelic ride through Farrell's world, where another side of his sexuality is revealed to us. The obsessive, endless chant "Sex is violent!", backed by Navarro's volleys of riffs and a thunderous drum rhythm halfway between a tribal dance and a bombing raid, makes clear where Jane's Addiction are pushing us, what they want us to see: that even by sinking very low, one can still reach the light. Where "Summertime Rolls", picking up the sun-drenched mood of "Up The Beach", pulls us back into a hypnotic state thanks to Avery's magic — able with just a few touches to conjure moods that are hard to escape — the record's true shining gem is "Jane Says". The studio version of this aching ballad is at its very best, becoming a priceless folk-rock pearl, an anthem destined to remain a fixture of countless nights around bonfires or in American college dorm rooms.

It's worth pointing out to buyers that while the LP closes with "Thank You Boys", a very brief bossa-nova joke, the CD also includes the studio version of "Pigs in Zen".

As for sales, Nothing's Shocking suffers from censorship issues and from being panned by much of the press, numbed to hard rock by the Guns And Roses boom. Still, Farrell's ambiguous image — kohl-rimmed eyes, dark lipstick, white face paint and dreadlocks, draped in trinkets and dressed in corsets, outlandish hats and Tibetan monk robes — causes a sensation among America's independent rock youth. The record circulates exactly where it needs to, with every college kid listening to it at least once. It also plants the seed for much of the indie-rock destined to go "mainstream", for the explosion that would bring rock back to the forefront for the masses too. Either way, the singer has hit the target he'd been doggedly chasing: he's a star, but an "alternative" one, somehow still on the "fringe". So who is Perry Farrell, really? A simple figurehead of underground rock? A shrewd self-promoter? Maybe there's no answer. As is often the case with rock, to really enjoy it we have to take it as it comes, without asking too many questions.

Meanwhile, the whole band starts clashing with their now-mature leader's dominant personality. Relations are extremely tense, especially with Avery, right from the album's recording sessions. When the group finally manages to take a break, many assume there won't be a follow-up to Nothing's Shocking. Indeed, a period of total silence follows.

The silence is suddenly broken in mid-1990 with the announcement of the third album, Ritual De Lo Habitual. When the record hits stores, what immediately causes the biggest stir is once again its cover, featuring a papier-mâché sculpture by Farrell depicting a blasphemous "Trinity" made up of a Christ (Farrell himself), a Mary (Xiola) and a Magdalene (Casey Niccoli), all three completely naked with their heads ringed by golden halos. Things are made even worse by the presence, in the tracklist, of a song called "Three Days" and by an accompanying booklet titled "Novena", containing the lyrics, credits and a long psycho-mystical essay by the singer. This time the "scandal" is truly enormous; two American shopkeepers are even formally charged with obscenity by police for displaying the record in their windows. Groups of fundamentalist Christians organize public burnings of the album. Farrell, however, in protest against the record label, which wanted nothing to do with such problems, had already had a certain number of copies printed with a second cover, featuring the First Amendment of the United States Constitution printed on a white background — and in the first few days after release, the "White Cover" actually outsells the original. Today it's something of a rarity.

Turning to the music itself, Ritual is clearly the product of the power struggle between Farrell and Navarro for control of the band. The result is an extremely powerful, explosive record that runs for long stretches with the throttle pinned to the floor — which is both its strength and its limitation. Indeed, the magical balance between psychedelic sweetness and hard rock roughness that had defined the previous record is lost in favor of the almost speed-metal velocity of much of the tracklist. A perfect example is the opener "Stop!", the best of the "fast" tracks, packed, as the title suggests, with relentless stop-and-go dynamics, carpet-bombing drums and bass, blazingly fast guitars that essentially amount to one continuous solo, and Farrell's trademark nasal voice flaying and tearing everything apart. Until it all gets swallowed up in the long central section, slow and heavy as a lead Zeppelin, which is the musical embodiment of the biblical-flood imagery evoked in the lyrics — a flood meant to wash away the pointless party chatter that fills the rest of the song. Once again, huge, overwhelming, biblical imagery is the singer's catharsis of choice: "One come the day when water will run, no man will stand for things that he has done... Hurrah!"

If "Stop!" is indeed a thrilling track, by the fourth blistering song, with Navarro insisting every time on cranking out his own torrential, lightning-fast solo, however much one can admire such abundance and technical skill, a certain flatness starts to creep in. On top of that, the production — cranked to the max across every frequency — adds to the sense of "too much". The feeling is that of the post-Christmas-dinner kind: everything delicious, but everything too much.

Fortunately, the album's most unexpected song arrives right on cue. "Been Caught Stealing", an amusing snapshot of kleptomania, is a danceable funky-pop track, powerful and with a curious, broken-up rhythm, original and irresistible, that literally makes it impossible to stand still. Reined in by the appropriate "cage" of the duo Avery-Perkins' spectacular rhythm section, the already fantastic Navarro comes out of it even more exalted. A huge dancefloor-rock hit, and it could hardly have been otherwise. The "amateur" video scoops up a pile of awards.

From here on, the album flows better. Another standout track is "Three Days", which through a long ten-minute suite recounts precisely three days of sex, drugs and resurrection with Xiola and Casey. Although it doesn't reach the heights of "Ted... Just Admit It", whose role it partly seems to be taking on - once again giving space to Avery's enveloping magic - it manages to pull the listener into the web of Farrell's blasphemous mystical-sexual delirium: "Erotic Jesus loves its Mary. Pieces of puzzle fitting each other" (Erotic Jesus loves its Mary. The pieces of the puzzle fit together). As already mentioned, "Then She Did..." recalls the suicide of Farrell's mother and once again takes us down Zeppelin-esque roads, through slow metallic psychedelia. "Of Course" presents a blend with gypsy music, but the Ravel-style attempt only partly works, the result being rather singsong. The album closes with the sweet ballad "Classic Girl" which, charming as it is, doesn't reach the splendor of a "Jane Says" - sorely missed on this album.

The flaws of Ritual De Lo Habitual, then, are an overblown production and too heavy a reliance on metal, at the expense of psychedelia and folk. Either way, it's also true that this is, hands down, one of the best albums of 1990, even though that year was packed with excellent records. Naturally, all of this hits home with the "rock kids", not least because this time the timing is right and the bomb goes off: everyone takes notice of Jane's Addiction.

This time, the singer's new interests, the band's definitive success and the tour deal the final blow to the already precarious internal balance of the band, and by the end of it everything falls apart: "We simply didn't give a damn about each other" (Farrell).

…Are my fuckin’ home business

In 1991 Farrell comes up with Lollapalooza, the traveling rock festival par excellence and one of the symbols of '90s rock. For years he manages to bring, touring across the whole United States on the same stage - to which various secondary stages would later be added - an impressive array, in both quality and quantity, of bands and musicians from independent labels, alongside superstars and "new blood" acts that would soon reveal themselves to be among the greatest bands of all time, interspersing them with circus shows, sideshow acts like sword-swallowers or fire-eaters, poetry readings, all while indulging his taste for the grotesque and the freak. He manages to create something unique and unrepeatable, especially in the very first editions, which he personally curated as organizer. Over the years, Lollapalooza's lineup has included, just to name a few, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Siouxie And The Banshees, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cypress Hill, Smashing Pumpkins, Beck, Beastie Boys, Soundgarden, Tool and of course Jane's Addiction. Every year an impressive headline bill draws hundreds of thousands of spectators across its stops, and of course rakes in tens of millions of dollars, largely to the benefit of its creator. An idea and a spectacle destined to remain in rock history.

During these years, Farrell, together with Perkins, simultaneously launches the musical project Porno For Pyros, which produces two albums of mediocre quality and modest commercial success. Navarro busies himself with collaborations (Red Hot Chili Peppers), overpaid session work and solo records, as well as collecting sports cars and appearing in gossip magazines, dating Playboy bunnies and calendar actresses, eventually marrying Carmen Electra in an outrageous star-system wedding (news of their divorce is quite recent).

The band reunites in 1995 with their friend Flea on bass, since Avery would always refuse to take part in any reunion, to record a couple of new tracks to include as bonus material on the compilation Kettle Whistle and for the world tour that followed.

After yet more years of silence, once again out of nowhere, in 2003 comes Strays, Jane's Addiction's new studio album. Young session man Chris Chaney is recruited on bass (for years with Alanis Morissette, in whose band he is, fittingly, replaced by Avery), and the old '70s rock hand Bob Ezrin is brought in to produce, the legendary producer behind Alice Cooper, Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd. While Chaney holds his own on bass, even if he can't give certain passages the depth Avery once brought, the album is unmistakably stamped by Ezrin's gigantic production.

His classic hypertrophic sound meets Navarro's already hypertrophic guitars, and the result is an endless sea of six strings in which everything else is submerged. A decent-to-good album, certainly capable of teaching any nu-metal band raging at the time how real rock is done, but decidedly over-produced. Naturally, the band has changed too, and it shows. There are two big singles, "True Nature" and "Just Because", fairly solid even if far from past glories, and a lot of mediocrity in the rest, with a couple of exceptions. Gone are the long stretches alternating mammoth rock with psychedelic passages within the same song; every track is kept to a radio-friendly 3-4 minutes, 5 at most, and above all they're radio songs made for a pleasant hour's listen, not built to last. The psychedelic/acoustic moments are basically reduced to just "Everybody's Friend", the shortest song on the album. The record certainly makes itself heard, maybe even heard again, but without leaving the indelible mark on the soul that the band's classic albums did.

Once the "inevitable" world tour following the album wraps up, the surprise announcement comes of the band's new breakup, once again declared "definitive". But should we really believe a band of born "sons of bitches"?

And indeed, we shouldn't have believed the rumors of yet another breakup. Farrell changes his mind, perhaps does some quick math, convinces Navarro and the ever-faithful Perkins, and almost manages to rope in Avery too. But the bassist sees through the bluff and leaves the table in time. For a while he joins the entourage of Duff McKagan, the Gunners' legendary four-string man himself. But that too is just a brief chapter. The three remaining members, with some outside help, give birth in October 2011 to The Great Escape Artist. It's a faded photocopy of their old exploits. Ten tracks, classic in form but essentially hollow, more heavily laced with electronic elements than in the past, empty and impersonal.

Contributions by Davide Sechi ("The Great Escape Artist")

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