Whores

by Brendan Mullen

  PERRY FARRELL: The cool thing about KXLU’s Demolisten show was if you were a local band you could just call in, request your song and if you went down there, they would interview you. Was the world smaller then?

  AGENT AVA: I was out in the clubs every night before I even started working at KXLU (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles). That’s how I first started developing the Demolisten show. There were so many great bands without record deals. People would give me tapes and I would mark up songs I thought would do well. Those I wanted to put into rotation I would cart up on the old eight-track and give to the music director who would add the songs for the week. Record company people would call and want details on the bands. Bands were getting signed off the show.

  PETE WEISS (member, Thelonious Monster): Whatever was on KXLU, back in those days that was the big time—if you got played on KXLU woo-hoo! KROQ was out to lunch, completely out of touch with the ground. Had been for years, but if you got played on KXLU that was the shit. . . .

  AGENT AVA: Demolisten featured songs that would play throughout the weekdays for the sake of people who maybe didn’t tune into my show on Sunday nights because I only had an hour, 6:00-7:00. It was the only way for unsigned bands, or any kind of new band, to get any exposure.

  PERRY FARRELL: I’d be listening to KLXU all day long because that’s where all the good music was. The rest of the world was out of it. This was before KROQ really went into the alternative.

  PAUL V. (promoter, DJ): There really was a true meaning to the term “alternative” at first before it degenerated into a bad joke. It was just a sound and a style that was not being played on commercial FM radio. It was an alternative to the mainstream.

  AGENT AVA: The term “alternative” really came from FM radio in the 70s, I believe. It was an alternative to Top 40 rock ’n’ roll. The songs were much longer so they called it alternative rock because there was more to it; a little more creativity, the songs were longer, and that basically was what FM rock radio focused on. My old KXLU shirt from ’82 says, “The only rock really left . . . alternative radio.”

  CHARLEY BROWN (first manager, Jane’s Addiction): They had college markets in the early 80s and they called it “college music,” but it wasn’t termed alternative yet. Jane’s broke the ground on all of that in L.A.

  PAUL V.: It used to be called “album rock” . . . or “album-oriented rock.” The FM stations that were progressive played album rock in the 70s rather than focusing exclusively on singles and playing that one song to death. The DJ could say, “Here’s the new whatever record . . .” and say, “I like the tracks X, Y, and Z” . . . and just like pick out personal favorites. That just doesn’t happen anymore. Somehow this term “alternative” got rediscovered and heisted by college radio people during the 80s who applied it to new post-punk, indie, or underground-whatever music. . . .

  BECOMING AN OVERNIGHT SCRATCH CELEB

  TEXACALA JONES: Everybody was Goth, rockabilly, or doing the Johnny Thunders-Pistols-Hanoi Rocks revival. . . . Fishbone was going the same way, but with ska in their mix. All of those old Scratch magazines are full of it.

  DAVE NAVARRO: The scene [covered by Scratch magazine] was exciting and decadent, it was also a little dangerous. We didn’t get like A-list Hollywood celebrities back then. We got like C-list. When someone like Angelyne came to a club she was the big name. Everybody else was a local band or a band that was touring through, not like today where Christina Aguilera is gonna walk in. C-list celebs became the really exciting ones. Like if Gene Hackman or Jack Nicholson was there I wouldn’t care, but if Tex [of Tex & the Horseheads] walked in I’d be very excited. It was great. Celebrities your parents had never heard of. (Designed by Donna Bates)

  JOEY ALTRUDA: Scratch magazine documented that period really well.

  PERRY FARRELL: Ruben Blue did Scratch magazine, which became the Rock City News, which is still around today. Here was another person showing up at Kinko’s, writing about his friends and taking their picture . . . and publishing this weekly ’zine. . . .

  JOSH RICHMAN: Ruben documented the explosion of Faster Pussycat and Guns N’ Roses at the Cathouse . . . he also covered Matt Dike and the artsy downtown dance club scene at Power Tools where Jane’s played.

  PERRY FARRELL: Ruben had this perennial smile and a cheap camera, and you waited and hoped that he’d come up and say, “Can I take your picture?” Then you’d make it into Scratch. He could make you an overnight celebrity. Heck, yeah!

  RUBEN BLUE (founder-proprietor Scratch fanzine, Rock City News): Scratch started [’83-’85] as a reaction against in-crowd snobbishness at the L.A. Weekly. I thought there was a whole bunch of other interesting people and bands doing great things, but they were getting ignored in the Weekly’s La Di Dah column because Craig Lee and his circle didn’t consider them cool enough. Scratch was never trying to be cool. Everybody is a star was my basic thing; that meant anybody bold and loud enough to add to what was going on with the after-hours clubs and parties, creatively . . . just swelling the numbers of new local celebs was enough for Scratch.

  TEXACALA JONES: Sometimes Ruben would let me go around with him to different places. When I think about Hollywood at that time, even though it’s like Hollywood and it’s a world-famous place, really, to me it was just like this teensy-weensy village where this little Xerox fanzine came out every week, always about these same people. Who the hell would care about these gnarly ole critters ’cept for us? The La Dee Dah column in the L.A. Weekly. Same thing. It was all about the same people who hung out together, which wouldn’t have mattered to anyone if they hadn’t been written up all the time. It was like our little scene but I guess it looked so attractive to some folks, and then everybody tried to get in on it.

  BRIT-GOTH TAKES OVER L.A.

  BOB FORREST (leader, singer-songwriter, Thelonious Monster): [By ’84-’85] most of the cool bands from the original goth era had broken up or morphed into pop groups—Joy Division had become New Order and Bauhaus became Love & Rockets.

  JOSEPH BROOKS: Precursor goth bands like the Banshees and the Damned were still around but they were more identified as old-school punk at the time and the Cure was becoming like a KROQ pop band. The original goth scene kicked in here locally [from around ’83 to ’86], but it was so unlike the dumbed-down farce today’s goth dance clubs have become—where you’ll see people from the outer burbs traipsing around in pirate outfits. Nowadays goth clubs have become scary Halloween office and frat parties! Poor Rozz Williams would turn over in his sepulchre. . . .

  BOB FORREST: All these second-generation bands—Sisters of Mercy, Specimen, Southern Death Cult, Flesh for Lulu—started playing around. I found out later that those bands were only popular in Los Angeles! They’d play L.A. and cause a big stir, but then they went home to play small pubs and bars.

  KEVIN HASKINS (musician, Bauhaus, Love & Rockets, Tones on Tail): Bauhaus was told by the British rock press that we were “goth.” We never coined the term or particularly tried to align ourselves with it. We were just amused at first. We thought, “Hmmm . . . so that’s what we are!”

  DAVID J (musician, Bauhaus, Love & Rockets): Why did Los Angeles become probably the biggest goth market in the world? It’s something that’s bred in dark, dank corners. You don’t have as many of these in L.A. and the whole look of it and the tone of it is something that is otherly, there’s always a big appeal in that. There’s a romantic element to it in its pull to California.

  DANIEL ASH (musician, Bauhaus, Love & Rockets, Tones on Tail): It was very grey in the U.K. in those times, mid-70s to mid-80s. It was a grey, grey time, especially where we came from . . . Northampton . . . It must have something to do with the extreme contrast of where we came from and the Los Angeles environment of sunshine and the beaches. . . .

  Bauhaus takes L.A. after dark. (Designer unknown)

  DAVID J: It’s coming from somewhere strange, not a sunny place in the same way that prior to punk, California was very appealing to English k
ids because it was so exotic, so different.

  DANIEL ASH: We just thought of ourselves as a new English rock band. The only radio show you’d hear “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” on in the U.K. would be the John Peel Show. It was a cult hit, a real underground thing.

  Bauhaus was one of the most musically adventurous post-punk English bands of the 80s whose influence and inspiration on the U.S. “alternative” scene is largely unsung. (Fin Costello, courtesy David J. collection)

  DAVID J: In England, Bauhaus were initially known as “post-punk” and then it became “goth” later on. When we became Love & Rockets, the record label marketed us in the United States as “alternative.” So was Peter’s [Peter Murphy] solo career.

  KEVIN HASKINS: We arrived at the Tropicana Motel—it’s been pulled down now—during the first Bauhaus tour of the U.S.—and this coked-up metal band was having a wild do with Kiss music blasting out across the courtyard. I can still picture us as these four skinny, pasty English guys all in black who’d never even been to California before, just looking in amazement with our bags still in our hands, at these topless blond girls with perfect tans prancing around all these guys with shaggy hairdos jumping off the balcony into the pool. It was like a bad Motley Crue video . . . come to think of it now, it probably was Motley Crue!

  JANE BAINTER: In the L.A. goth scene we wore the white pancake and the black lipstick for a reason. We were fighting so many things that it was almost like we were already dead. We were seen as the walking dead, we were perceived as something that was not a vital part of society. We were fighting the police state, fighting the establishment, fighting creepy fratboy rock, fighting any kind of repressive social behavior. We were young and willing to fight those battles to be creative.

  PERRY FARRELL: There’s a goth link for sure. I liked the style and the music of goth right away. These [goth] kids were rejects. They were people who had been discarded by society, discarded by their family or their school. Any sort of social structure they just sort of threw their hands up, ran away. They were castigated because they were odd or awkward. And those were the people that I wanted to hang out with and sing for.

  THE WILTON HOUSE

  STUART SWEZEY: Perry was getting a group of people together to take over this older building on Wilton. It was going to be this whole arts collective thing.

  A typical unplugged campfire singalong jam at the Wilton House, something that developed into one of the audience-interaction highlights of the Jane’s Addiction live show even after they graduated from the Scream to big-league rock stages. Pre-show backstage acoustic jamming also became a staple of touring. (Karyn Cantor)

  PERRY FARRELL: I found this place that has come to be known as the Wilton House. I told the landlords—these twin motorcycle cops—that I would love to put curtains here, do the walls a certain color. I got them to believe I was this quiet, shy, gay interior decorator who’d be no trouble. They ended up getting twelve musicians, photographers, artists, their girlfriends, dogs, snakes, loud music, and round-the-clock junkie shenanigans. Cops were crawling around band rehearsals all the time.

  STUART SWEZEY: Perry would spend Sunday nights talking to his dad, pacing around while he was on the phone. He’d get really upset that the old man was putting so much pressure on him to succeed. Afterwards he’d say, “My dad doesn’t understand what I’m trying to do, man. He says stuff to me like, ‘You gotta be a singer like Manilow, Perry. Manilow don’t answer to nobody!’”

  JANE BAINTER, FIRST LADY OF THE WILTON HOUSE

  Circa January 1985

  JANE BAINTER: “Jane Says” was written while I was there.

  KARYN CANTOR (Jane’s first official photographer): One of our roommates was Jane Bainter who’d come out of some big Ivy League school [Smith], who had a really bad drug problem.

  JANE BAINTER: I put feelers out and I heard about this room for rent in this huge house on Wilton. It was at 369 N. Wilton, between Melrose and Beverly. I called up and talked to Perry and he said, “Yeah, c’mon over.” I took over Stuart Swezey’s room, who was promoting bizarre industrial shows in the desert.

  STUART SWEZEY: Before Jane moved in, one of Perry’s house rules was no girls and no junkies.

  JANE BAINTER: It was a gorgeous old house, a Craftsman built in the 20s with wide halls and other nice touches. The landlords were these cops and we were all really paranoid to deal with them since it was still quite bad between cops and punks at that time. But Perry was like, “I’ll deal with them.”

  Jane Bainter finds the wig in time for this shoot. (Karyn Cantor)

  PERRY FARRELL: Around the clock you’ve got bongos and your bass set up and your guitar in your living room and you’re trying to sleep even though the people downstairs are having a jam because they’re all coked out. That was L.A. for me.

  JANE BAINTER: When I moved into Perry’s house, Carla Bozulich had moved in with D. D. Troit a few blocks away. We were within walking distance and we were still hanging out quite a bit.

  CARLA BOZULICH (musician, songwriter, solo artist, member Deathride 69, Ethyl Meatplow, Geraldine Fibbers): Jane and I were very close companions who liked to dress up in funny clothes and do drugs.

  HEIDI RICHMAN: I went to many of the parties on Wilton. Sometimes it was very mellow, other times it was drug-filled craziness. People would come and go. Depending on where they were in their cycle of things, you could have a great time or you could be walking into a bunch of zombied people, all of them jonesing.

  DANUSHA KIBBY (former dancer with Jane’s Addiction): The house was never locked. I don’t think I used my key once. It was like a party house and everyone’s bedroom was like their individual apartment.

  STUART SWEZEY: Perry was very kind of hippie during the Psi Com days at the Wilton House . . . but I don’t remember him smoking pot or heroin, or crack cocaine. Or getting high in any way. That all seemed to come later. . . .

  Connoisseur of the senses Perry smells the flowers at the Wilton House. (Karyn Cantor)

  DANUSHA KIBBY: Perry really liked the idea of the Talking Heads and the way David Byrne had just taken his friends and created this whole kind of art band, this whole scene around them. He would talk about how he wanted to be kind of like David Byrne and make us all famous, too.

  JANE BAINTER: There were two rooms available and, coincidentally, the other person moving in at the same time as me happened to be Chris Pederson [the original Suburbia movie kid from the Penelope Spheeris film of 1983] who I’d hung around with in Europe, but now we were at odds over drugs. I’d done my first drugs in London with Rude Boy Ray, the roadie guy in the Clash movie, when Chris was my traveling companion and he’d been dead against it. When we saw each other again a year later we were still at odds. Chris was very against drugs. He’s like, “I’m not gonna live upstairs around Perry Farrell because I hear he does drugs.” And I was like, “OK, I’ll live up there. No problem.”

  KARYN CANTOR: We were constantly doing things like making films or doing photography. We were always trying to think of creative things to do.

  DANUSHA KIBBY: We loved to stage our own little performances and make home movies for fun and love of art. Sometimes on a Sunday we would dive around L.A. with a video camera and make movies of Perry and Casey and me and Karyn doing crazy things.

  KARYN CANTOR: I was really into making Super-8 films, and so I shot this movie, a mock wedding of Perry and Casey whose mom had just gotten remarried at this house for real, so there was all this leftover stuff. Her mom and her new dad took off for their honeymoon the same night as the wedding. Kelly and Karyn and Danusha came up and kinda took over the house. There were presents all over the place, and the tree outside had strings attached with little hearts.

  DANUSHA KIBBY: There was leftover wedding cake and food and we all took acid and went inner tubing down the Kern River. We got back from that and went to Casey’s mom’s house where we made a video of Casey and Perry getting married in their underwear.