Both as the focal point of Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros and now as a
solo artist, Perry Farrell has certainly had his share of musical triumphs,
including a couple of hit singles. But his impact as an artist has had as much
if not more to do with his talents as an instigator. More than anything, it was
Farrell's twisted vision and the force of his mercurial personality that turned
what might have been just another shredding Sunset Stripped glam-metal band
into the art-damaged ambassadors of the emerging alternative nation that Jane's
Addiction became in the early '90s. And, though Farrell may not have been the
organizing force behind Lollapalooza, it was his seal of approval and his
willingness to ignore the boundaries that separated grunge from goth, rap from
rock, punk from metal, and, later, electronica from, well, just about
everything else that made the traveling tour such an unqualified success in its
first few years. (Indeed, it's no accident that once Farrell disassociated
himself from the project, Lollapalooza quickly lost its edge and, ultimately,
its appeal.)
Perry Farrell
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In recent years, perhaps out of nostalgia, or maybe just because he's come to
realize what a great band Jane's Addiction actually were, Farrell has divided
his time between solo work and the occasional reunion tour, including the 1998
Relapse Tour that featured Chili Pepper bassist Flea filling in for estranged
Jane's Addiction bassist Eric Avery. Farrell, who was born Perry Bernstein, has
also been quietly rediscovering his religious roots as a Jew. And, this fall
all three personas have come together with the release of his first solo album,
Song Yet To Be Sung (Virgin), and a Jane's Addiction reunion tied to a
tour that marks the beginning, by the Jewish calendar, of a "Jubilee," which is
said to be the culmination of a 50-year cycle in a Biblical tradition that
calls for a year-long period in which debts are forgiven, slaves are freed, and
peace and freedom are celebrated. Along with a Jane's line-up that includes
original guitarist and drummer Dave Navarro and Stephen Perkins plus Porno for
Pyros bassist Martyn LeNoble, the Jubilee tour features the anthemic rock band
Live, Afropop upstart Femi Kuti, and techno specialists the Stereo MCs. The
tour kicks off this Tuesday, October 2, at the Worcester Centrum.
I caught up with Farrell by phone in LA in the middle of a rehearsal to check
in on the state of Jane's and his plans for the tour:
Q: Hi, Perry, you just getting done with a Jane's rehearsal?
A: Well, I'm getting done with the music part of it. Now I'm
going to sit in with the dancers.
Q: What do you mean by the dancers?
A: Well, they move their legs up and down and side to
side . . . actually, they're going to be rehearsed so tight that
they could jump on stage with Britney Spears. They'll be wearing little
T-shirts.
Q: Are you going to be showing a little belly button?
A: A little bit more than a little bit. They're going to get me
out there in a pair of little shorts and a fireman's hat. No, but I am part of
a dance routine. I could be more involved. I'm just working on getting the
music for it down right now.
Q: So tell me a little bit about the concept behind the tour, aside
from the fact that it's bringing Jane's Addiction back together again.
A: Well, you know, it's Jubilee. Jubilee is the birthdate of the
world. And there are so many amazing things tied to Jubilee. It's part of a
50-year cycle, and on the 50th year you declare liberty and have these
beautiful musical celebrations where you redeem and forgive people. It's like a
huge birthday party for the world.
Q: How is that manifest in the actual show? Do you bring in any
traditional Jewish elements?
A: No, not exactly. But we've created a Jubilee Freedom
Foundation for relief for those who need it. Part of the proceeds are going to
go to wherever they're needed, and right now we have a great need here in
America to help repair the damage that was done at the World Trade Center.
Q: I would think that anyone who gets up on a stage in the next few
weeks or months has an added responsibility to address in some way the tragedy
in New York City and to try to help people deal with this tragedy.
A: The World Trade Center signifies that the whole world was hit,
because there wee people from every country who were affected.
Q: You recently released a solo album, and yet you're touring with
Jane's Addiction. Was that planned, or is it just an accident?
A: Well, the way it worked out was that the Jubilee year showed
up and I have 12 months to play for the Jubilee cycle. I think it's a great
thing that I could get the guys from Jane's together to start the year out. And
then for the remaining nine or 10 months I can do more of my own music. I'm
going to be doing a little bit of my music during the Jane's set, and then I'll
be doing a lot more of it at the afterparties. I'm doing only one of my new
songs with Jane's -- "Happy Birthday Jubilee." The guys have been reformatting
themselves into a drum 'n' bass mode that is so rockin'. It's all
live, though. Stephen Perkins has been becoming amazing at it. He's starting to
understand electronics a lot better. You might not notice the specific
differences between '90 or '91 and now, but you'll hear that it sounds more
modern. The machinery and the producers have gotten much more sophisticated.
It's just a wonderful time for music.
Q: Do you have an afterparty planned for Boston?
A: That I don't know. But when we can do them we want to, so that
I can do my DJ set.
Q: Are you surprised that there's a whole new generation of Jane's
Addiction fans out there even though you haven't really been a band for quite
some time?
A: Well, honestly, I'm not really that surprised because we
rocked so hard back then, and in a lot of ways I haven't really heard what we
were doing be topped in the rock circle. I have heard some amazing electronica.
So people who still love the sound of rock just have to check us out. I think
they'd be making a big mistake to miss us.
Q: How have Jane's Addiction changed in the years that have
passed?
A: Here's what's happened. The electronics -- and when I say
electronics, it's nothing to be afraid of. Electric guitar is electronics. So
it's nothing to be afraid of. I mean, what a guy can do with his drum kit now
is amazing. And we've added a keyboard, which is lush and it gives beautiful
pastoral sounds on top of what we already have. We have a lovely lady this time
through playing keyboards and her name is Linda Good. Not only is she sexy, but
she's also a great keyboard player. We've been working as a
drum 'n' bass keyboard band, too, and that's what's really changing
our sound. When you've got a guy playing a live electronic drum kit -- the
snare's real but you can filter the sound electronically -- it makes the bass
player play differently, and the keyboard player gives people like Dave and
myself a chance to change the way we sing and play guitar. If there's a problem
with rock. it's that sometimes there's too much of everyone in the band all
playing at the same time. I'm not saying that what we were doing in '91 was
worse -- at the time it was top of the class. But now we've all gone out and
done other things artistically, and we've each come to the band back bearing
gifts.
Q: Have you tried to come up with any new material?
A: Well, today was amazing. We actually jammed and came up with
musical formulas, and if there were time and everyone were agreeable, I think
we could do great work. So let's keep that open.
Q: You guys are all in different spaces now from where you were 10
years ago, particularly in terms of substance abuse [here the phone cuts
off].
A: Hello . . . that was a funny time for that to
happen, but I really didn't do it.
Q: Yeah, maybe I shouldn't be asking this question, but have your
feelings about drugs changed? Can Jane's Addiction be Jane's Addiction without
the addiction?
A: Yeah, I mean, listen, man, I would think the most important
thing about Jane's Addiction is the music. You could have a pile of drugs, but
you won't have Jane's Addiction. And you can have a bunch of music from Jane's
Addiction without the drugs and it's still Jane's Addiction. If people don't
want to do drugs, that's their prerogative. If they want to do drugs, that's
their prerogative. Right now, what I'm enjoying is Red Bull and Belvedere. I
will go to my grave saying we have rights and freedoms to enjoy ourselves and
at the right time it's great and perfect to celebrate and get high. But you
have to be aware and good to your body and to the people around you. If you're
getting sloppy to the point where you're dangerous to yourself or the people
around you, then it's a problem.
The difference between the way I look at things now and the way I looked at
them then is that now I think much more toward eternity and about persevering.
I want to look good in my 60s and 70s. I want to be sexy on a yacht with young
girls in bikinis. And you can't do that if you're a burnt-out cokehead. That's
why I like to look good now, because I'm preserving myself for when I'm in my
60s on a yacht with those young girls in bikinis. I can still have a couple of
drinks and I like to smoke my spliff. The other stuff, man, it hurts my body,
so I just cut it out. The coke takes away the highs in your ears so you can't
hear that well. And when you're on heroin, you lose the highs in your voice.
But can we still rock? Hell, yeah. I think we're sounding a lot better.
Q: You've surely if subtly brought elements of Judaism into your
music. How important to you is that today?
A: It's as big a part of my life as my two ears, my eyes, my
ears, and all the rest of my body. I know a little more about who I am and
where I came from and how I relate to people and how people relate to me. I
think everyone owes it to themselves to know where they came from. That's what
makes the world go round.
But I also think that everyone should be tolerant of where other people come
from. I'm very in love with myself and my past. I honor it. But if I were a
Christian, I'm sure I would find my background just as rich. And everybody's
got their own thing. So I don't want to come off too heavy about being a Jew
because, well, I just wish that everyone would love themselves as much as I
love myself. And they can, and they should, and they better.
Coming clean: Dave Navarro on the return of Jane's Addiction
Dave Navarro doesn't want to talk about his book. Or as the former and current
Jane's Addiction guitarist who also did a stint in the Red Hot Chili Peppers in
the mid '90s puts it when I bring up the topic over coffee at Starbucks in
Harvard Square, "I'd actually rather not talk about that."
The response sounds rehearsed and I consider shooting back something like "Did
your lawyer tell you to say that?" for the benefit of the jury until I realize
that this is not Court TV and I'm not counsel for the prosecution. Indeed, as
recently as two weeks ago, Navarro was suffering through rounds of press
interviews about his debut solo album, Trust No One (Capitol), so it's a
fair bet that he's had a lot of practice steering journalists away from
Don't Try This at Home: A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro (Regan
Books), the brutally candid first-person year-in-the-life portrait of the
artist as a hopeless junkie scumbag whose pub date originally coincided with
the album's release. That plan was scrapped (the book is currently on
indefinite hold) because the graphic and disturbing revelations in the book
would almost certainly have overshadowed the CD, relegating it to little more
than a footnote in a scandalous tale of fear and loathing in the Hollywood
Hills. You have to wonder whether there will ever be a good time to
release such a book. In the meantime, Navarro's solo album is being
overshadowed by something much more productive -- a Jane's Addiction reunion
tour that kicks off this Tuesday at the Worcester Centrum.
What's ironic is that the reunion tour comes on the heels not just of the
release of Trust No One -- a semi-confessional modern-rock offering
inspired by dark days of drug abuse outfitted with slick Pro-Tooled production
touches and not nearly as much guitar soloing as you might expect from a
shredder like Navarro -- but also of Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell's
first-ever solo album, the celebratory, techno-tinged Song Yet To Be Sung
(Virgin). But though neither Navarro nor Farrell seems eager to pre-empt
the classic Jane's Addiction material with any of his new solo tunes (Farrell
says they're just doing one track from his new album), a Jane's tour is still
likely to be a better marketing vehicle for those discs than two separate solo
jaunts. That's because, like all great bands, Jane's Addiction are more than
the sum of their individual parts. And even though one of those individual
parts (bassist Eric Avery) is being replaced on this tour by Porno for Pyros
bassist Martyn LeNoble, the interest and excitement generated by this Jane's
tour far outweighs anything Farrell or Navarro might have accomplished on his
own.
Jane's Addiction may not have delivered the musical blueprint for the
alternative rock that revolutionized radio and pop culture in the early '90s.
That honor belongs in part to the Pixies, in large degree because they embodied
so much of the wry, pomo attitude, the uncool cool, and the balance of muscle
and melody that defined alternative rock, and also because they inspired the
song that fired the first shot, Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit." And
Nirvana were by almost any measure the band who brought alternative to the
masses. But it was Jane's Addiction who secured alternative's first beachhead
on mainstream turf and built the infrastructure that Nirvana would later
utilize on Nevermind's quick trip to the top, by getting radio
programmers and the powers that be in the industry used to a band who didn't
play by the old rules. Jane's Addiction were an LA glam-metal outfit fronted by
an art-damaged punk whose twisted sensibility colored even their most
straightforward power riffs. And "Jane Says," the most accessible tune from
1988's Nothing's Shocking (Warner Bros.), was a tender tale from the
other side of the other side -- the place where the punks and weirdos, not the
metalheads, hopelessly hung out. In short, Jane's Addiction were the original
alternative, the band who planted the notion that kids might be looking for a
new way to express their alienation.
Jane's didn't really stick around to enjoy the full force of the alternative
explosion. The band released only three CDs -- 1987's Jane's Addiction
(Triple X); '88's Nothing's Shocking; and '90's Ritual de lo
Habitual (Warner Bros.) -- before calling it quits. "The interesting thing
about Jane's Addiction," Navarro recounts, "is that the creative period was
very short. All of our material came from within like maybe the same year. I
remember having [Ritual's] `Three Days' ready for Nothing's
Shocking and we kind of unanimously decided that it was too soon to put it
out. We needed to consciously slow ourselves down. I think we stopped at a good
point because it never got too slick and too produced."
The quick disappearance of Jane's Addiction and the failure of any of Farrell's
post-Jane's groups to match the intensity of Nothing's Shocking or
Ritual has only fed the band's legendary status and the demand for
reunion tours, the first of which featured Flea on bass and dozens of sold-out
shows. "I'm grateful that people still care," Navarro remarks, "but I'm not
surprised. We've been around for a long time -- I mean, I don't think we ever
really broke up; we just went off and did other things. So we're in a cool
position because a lot of the people who want to come and see us grew up with
us. There's also a nostalgic element. We end up getting a nice mix of the
people who have never seen us, the people who always wanted to and never did,
and the ones who remember the old days."
The old days were, by almost all accounts, a little messy. If Navarro's book
and Farrell's semi-autobiographical film, The Gift, are any indication,
then the rumors of hard-drug abuse reflected the reality of the a situation
that couldn't have lasted much longer without someone's leaving in a casket.
(There's at least one point in Don't Try This at Home where it seems
Navarro's about to exit the narrative in just such a fashion.) But not only
have the band re-formed, the individual members have done some reforming of
their own.
"We're much more mature and much more professional now," offers Navarro, who
doesn't think that should take away from any of what made Jane's great to begin
with. "How can I put this? Let's see . . . the way we were
living became less pretty and less enjoyable over time. The ratio of enjoyment
versus pain just becomes very lopsided. I think that drugs were a by-product of
the time, but I don't think that any of those types of lifestyles were the
inspiration for our music to begin with. I'm speaking off the top of my head,
but I think a lot of the reasons for that lifestyle had to do with our own
inability to deal with what we had started. It also had to do with ego, fear,
and uncertainty. I don't think it was in any way inspirational for the band. If
anything, I think it was detrimental. Truthfully, with any kind of abusive or
compulsive behavior there is, in my experience, a window where it seems to be
working. But it's not a very big window. And then, sooner or later, you realize
not only that it's only a window but that you're not looking out it anymore. It
becomes stained glass. And then you realize that it becomes a stained-glass
window in a jail cell."
Navarro feels that the dynamics of the band have changed in other ways. "We're
all doing it now because we all want to. I don't think anybody feels locked
into it in any way. We all have other forms of expression and other interests:
Perry and I both have our own records, Stephen's in his own band, and Martyn
has played with everyone in the world. That's a real blessing because we're
truly doing it because we want to. I'm not saying that we ever did the band
when someone didn't want to be doing it, but we never were in a situation where
we had outside influences that we could bring to the band.
"A band is kind of like a co-dependent relationship where you spend all the
time you have together until you start getting a little tired of it and
drifting apart. Generally someone's left wondering what he did wrong to make
things drift apart, but it's just the way life is, and we're no different. But
we've never been in a situation before where Perry had his DJ electronic
influences, and now I'm relying on the guitar less as my main source of
expression. And Stephen and Martyn have played with a million different people,
so we have all those new experiences that we've all cultivated.
"It's almost like, when we first all met, we all had our own outside things
that we brought to Jane's Addiction like pieces of a puzzle. So we've kind of
come full circle: we're back together in the same way we came together in the
'80s. I mean, when we first got together in the late '80s, we all had different
musical directions that all came together. And now, however many years later,
we all have different musical directions that are coming together like pieces
of a new puzzle."
Unfortunately, at this point there is no new Jane's material. "There are ideas
and talk," Navarro reveals, "but we need to get through this tour to see if
that's feasible. As much as there are reasons for us to get back together,
there are also reasons we didn't stay together. And I think we're all walking
on eggshells trying to make sure those reasons don't exist anymore. I don't
think that they do, but I can only speak for the moment. Whatever happens is
cool with me because I feel that my friendships are all in line. And the
musical compatibility is really great right now. I mean, even if the worst-case
scenario is that this is the last tour that we do, I think this is an
opportunity to do it in the right mind."
There are also plenty of ways in which bringing Jane's principal members
together is more complicated than it ever was before. "The four of us are on
different labels with different management. But with my own thing it's totally
fun and simple, and the truth of the matter is that I don't care how many
records I'm selling. I'm sure it's not very many, but I don't care. I mean,
I've never really cared. But it's a different kind of not caring. In the old
days, when I didn't care, it was more like 'Who gives a fuck?' with a negative
connotation. And now, I don't say, 'Who gives a fuck,' because I'm really
grateful to be doing this. The worst thing that can happen is that I don't sell
any records and I'm not very good live. I can get through that. That's okay.
It's not the end of the world. I've gone through harder things than that. So as
long as I'm enjoying myself, I really don't care about any of that."
Jane's Addiction play the Worcester Centrum this Tuesday, October 2. Call
(617) 931-2000.
Issue Date: September 28 - October 4, 2001
