Oral fixations A new history of Jane’s Addiction and an old tale of the rise and fall of punk BY JAMES PARKER

The first thing to be said about the concept of the oral history, as it applies to rock biography, is that Sigmund Freud — damn him — has triumphed again. For what purer display of Freudian oral fixation could there be than that provided by an assemblage of gobby, gossipy, pleasure-craving musicians all spewing off to some gratefully enabling recorder? American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Feral House), Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (Penguin), We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of LA Punk (Three Rivers) — the din of colliding ego trips rises from all three. The second thing to be said is that the oral history is a sign of the times: a racy, trashy, sub-artistic form in which the author has become a producer, marshaling his oodles of raw content, generating his pseudo-narratives in the editing suite. And the book itself becomes not a text but a spectacle: reality TV for rock fans who can read.

The current maestro of rock-and-roll oral history is transplanted Scotsman Brendan Mullen, who with his new Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction (Da Capo) makes his third contribution to the genre. (The first two were Lexicon Devil, a history of the Germs, and We Got the Neutron Bomb.) Whores is entertaining, basely fascinating and — almost despite itself — informative. Mullen, the founder of the infamous LA punk rock hole the Masque and a seasoned hipster, knows how to talk to musicians — both rock stars and fuming failures. And he gets good stuff. His subjects preen and bitch and justify. Crack pipes, blow jobs, see-through unitards, it’s all here; the eldritch light of decadence plays gleefully across the pages of Whores.

But there’s also a surprising amount of insight. The band’s music, for example, stands freshly revealed when we learn how Eric Avery came up with those elementally brooding bass lines all by himself, in a garage, and how drummer Stephen Perkins and guitarist Dave Navarro were plucked, enormous-haired, from a high-school heavy-metal act called Dizastre. And how Perry Farrell, 10 years older than his band mates, was a fashion mutant besotted with English Gothdom — Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure. Put it all together, pour on the drugs, and you get a creepy shamanistic rumble shot through with metal licks and underpinned by a majestically lonely bass: Jane’s Addiction!

No amount of background can explain Perry Farrell’s voice, that thin, witchy tone singing about oceans and mountains and three-way sex. Knowing that his dad was a groovy jeweler named Al Bernstein who spent the ’70s "walking around Miami Beach . . . with a Fila headband and a bikini bathing suit with gold around his neck" is helpful, as are Farrell’s accounts of his own fashion experiments ("I was in a Paisley Underground band for about a minute. I got a paisley shirt and I combed my hair down into bangs, and then I thought, ‘Shit, this is pretty shortsighted.’ ") But in the end Farrell defies the conventions of straight biography.

In the opposite corner from Mullen and his method stands Clinton Heylin, whose From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock (originally published in 1993 but now making the rounds in an updated Chicago Review Press edition), is very much not oral history. The Birth of American Punk Rock may include great fat chunks of direct-speech testimony from Lou Reed, Richard Hell, and other important players, but the voice of the author is supreme. "Like other forms of ‘art,’ high and low, the history of popular music contains its fair share of fractures . . . ," drones the opening sentence. From the Velvets to the Voidoids makes quite a to-do of its own thoughtfulness, its own grasp of nuance. Every second paragraph begins "If . . . ," ‘Yet . . . ," "Although . . . ," "Despite . . . ," or "However . . . ," as Heylin pirouettes between idea and counter-idea. And in a lengthy Postlude to the new edition, he puts on a pedagogic frown and takes the oral historians to task for their various cop-outs and improprieties.

In particular, and for obvious reasons, he's dissatisfied with Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain for 1997’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. I was once taught Latin by a withered old man whose delight it was to punish classroom misbehavior by bringing down an enormous dictionary on the head of the offender; this is Heylin’s tactic. "The lack of any authorial introduction," he writes, " . . . [or] bibliography of debt or discography of sounds — nope, not even an index — makes this [Please Kill Me] a true exemplar of postmodern nonfiction — small-h history, and sod the context. Adrift in an ocean of opinions, the reader must decide what to believe from the whole jumble of lies and damned lies. No qualifying phrases here, no messy historical inter-relationships, just one misunderstood maverick after another."

He's right about most of this: the oral history tends to lack context, sloppiness and subjectivity abound, the afflicted ramblings of some muso are no substitute for the facts, etc. "In my original interviews," he writes, "I was frequently obliged to correct musicians in mid-interview, lest the order of things become inverted." (How they must have loved that!) The problem is that big-H History, even when written by one so stringent as Heylin, is just as unreliable, just as susceptible to ego-driven error. Getting the facts straight, filling in the background, knitting your theorems together, you can still miss the story. Here’s Heylin on late-period Stooges: "They unwisely reassembled in London in the summer of 1972, after David Bowie offered to produce an Iggy Pop album. They continued to produce music of stark primitivism but recorded only one more studio album, the disappointingly restrained (indeed ill-named) Raw Power, which suggested that Bowie’s main forte was sanitizing genuine innovators for public consumption, particularly when taken in association with the results he achieved on Lou Reed’s Transformer."

Freud would call this "anal history" — all the facts, whatever their shape, are squeezed through a single, jealously pinched aperture of authorial perspective. The signature style is one of mincing and incessant judgment: what a shame that the Stooges were deprived of the benefit of Heylin’s counsel in 1972, when they "unwisely reassembled." He gets it wrong about Raw Power — an album a three-year-old could tell you is not "restrained" — because he is too busy making his case against David Bowie. Committed to this display of analytical muscle, he's led to his final loony act of equivalence, in which the gay chamber rock of Transformer, tart and bejeweled, is given the same sonic value as the shrieking, bacon-fat-on-the-tape-reel high-end barrage of Raw Power. (That David Bowie worked on these two now classic albums within months of each other proves that he is a solid-gold genius, or at least a very savvy producer.)

Which, then, is to be preferred? The weightlessness of the oral history, with its fluff and noise and trivialities, or the gravity of the critical work, with its tendency to land heavily in the wrong place? As my shrink used to say, "I think what we’re looking for here is a balance. . . ." Clinton Heylin has performed a historical service with his monastic dedication to "the order of things," just as Brendan Mullen, juggling his quotes, has fluked his way to certain fugitive truths. The awful fate of Alternative Rock is presaged in the final pages of Whores when Dave Navarro’s cousin recounts in numbing detail the course of Dave’s romance with Carmen Electra. "There’s a call on his cell phone and he’s like, ‘Dude, it’s a fucking friend of Carmen’s right now and they’re all together and they want me to come down and meet her. Should I go?’ " Go, Dave Navarro, go, and take our childish dreams with you.