Jane's Recovery

“Jane’s Addiction fuckin’ opened up doors and helped everybody make their things happen, y’know?” So said Dave Grohl last autumn, attempting to put Nirvana in perspective.

And true enough, histories of the Seattle explosion often undersell the importance of the Janes and the first Lollapalooza tour. In the summer of 1991 – the summer Nevermind was recorded – Jane’s Addiction were the most subversive and innovative rock band on the planet.
Led by a libertarian leper messiah who called himself Perry Farrell, they were the band Axl wanted Guns N’ Roses to be: hedonistic, visceral, volatile and downright dangerous.
Then there was the music, a tribal hybrid of metal bluster, hot funk, goth dirges and world music that managed to unite LA metallers, punk misfits and dreadheads alike. Inspired by the eclectic line-up of the Reading festival, Farrell, drummer Stephen Perkins and the band’s booking agent conceived of the Lollapalooza tour, a travelling alternative reservation featuring Ice T, Henry Rollins, Siouxsie And The Banshees and The Jim Rose Circus, plus all manner of transgressive and eco-conscious sideshows (Farrell even contemplated inviting the NRA aboard, just to provoke a debate). Jane’s Addiction headlined each date, at that point precariously balanced between international breakthrough and heroin implosion – this writer still meets backpackers who testify to the final date in Hawaii being the best gig they’ve ever seen.

By the following year the band had split, but their influence was everywhere: in the Northwest explosion, in travelling themed festivals like HORDE and Lilith Fair, in countless funk-metal imitators. Farrell’s shock tactics even presaged Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson.
“I think if you look at the list of bands on Lollapalooza there was a huge tidal wave of music, and someone had to put it somewhere,” says drummer Stephen Perkins, holed up in Detroit on a day off from the resurrected Lollapalooza, featuring the reformed Janes, Queens Of The Stone Age, Incubus, The Distillers and more. “I also feel like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, the bigger bands from that generation, are the flowers and Jane’s Addiction is the soil. I think we’re the fertilizer, we’re the shit!”

The band’s initial split was regrettable but inevitable. The quintessential LA act, (the name refers to a prostitute who bankrolled their early days) early club shows were dark carnivals of transsexual strippers, fire-eaters performance art and substance abuse. Indeed, the members’ formative years read like The Black Dahlia: Farrell’s artist mother committed suicide when he was a boy, and Dave Navarro’s mother was murdered by her boyfriend, whom the guitarist was close to: he found the bodies of her and her friend in a closet, bound, gagged and disfigured. Here was sex and death, drugs and gang violence and ménages-a-trois: the stuff of age-old Californian nightmares.
After the split in ’91, Farrell formed Porno For Pyros with Perkins before immersing himself in techno and DJ culture as well as the Torah and the Kabbalah. Dave Navarro founded Deconstruction with Janes bassist
Eric Avery (replaced in the latest line-up by Chris Chaney) and spent a couple of years moonlighting as a Chili Pepper. There were intermittent reunions over the past six years with Flea on bass (“on the Jubilee tour we collected $120,000 and took the money to Sudan and freed 7000 slaves”) but in 2001 the three principal players decided it would be pointless to continue touring without a new album, so they holed up in the studio for the better part of a year to record Strays with veteran Bob Ezrin, producer of landmark records for Lou Reed, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd and more recently Nine Inch Nails.

Strays sees the band shed much of the bizarro art rock trappings that initially distinguished them from the pack.
“Well, y’know, the other records were just a documentation of what we sounded like live,” Perkins maintains. “This time we had to go in the studio and write the songs without a live audience. And then, when we finally sat down to put the sequence together, even more cutting of the fat was needed because of today’s short attention span, because today people can download your music a month before the record comes out, because everything now is above ground and nothing is underground. We got to the point quicker, like an Iggy Pop lyric: ‘I wanna be your dog’; you say it and then you move on.”

Strays is out now on Capitol