DESOLATION CENTER: Psi COM opens a Proto-Burning Man Desert Rave
Circa January 1985
Flyer for the Desolation Center show. (Bruce Licher)
STUART SWEZEY: I was putting on the Desolation Center shows . . . which mixed live music and installations, like around ’83-’85. The first one was the Minutemen and Savage Republic. Mariska and I were also organizing these events where we took people out in buses to the desert to see experimental bands. Mariska was always great with these absurd projects. Extreme industrial performers like Boyd Rice would play and Mark Pauline [Survival Research Laboratories] would blow things up. He’d detonate stacks of old refrigerators and stoves in the middle of the desert.
LEE RANALDO (member, Sonic Youth): They put those shows together really well. You had to get directions out there and they didn’t release the map until the day. We played one of them out in the Mojave Desert. Psi Com opened. It was one of Sonic Youth’s very first Los Angeles area shows. A very trippy night, that’s for sure. We hung out with Perry that week, Perry and all his pet snakes and tarantulas.6
AGENT AVA: We drove all over the backwoods of L.A. getting one ticket to get directions to get another ticket to get another map and so on. We drove this old ’55 Chevy, some cool old hoodlum ride, cruising the desert looking for these old cafes to get maps, meeting characters left and right. Eventually, we scored the final map and made it to the jamboree.
PERRY FARRELL: Stuart and Ken Swezey and Mariska would put together these gigs mixing local SST bands like the Minutemen with bands on Bruce Licher’s label [Independent Project Records] like Savage Republic. . . . They also hooked up with touring out-of-state bands like the Meat Puppets and Sonic Youth. They’d go out to the desert or take a boat trip around San Pedro Harbor. I was a volunteer ticket taker. People would bus out to see Mark Pauline blowing metal things up in the middle of the desert at sundown while this crazy German band [Einzurstende Neubaten] would be hammering away on concrete-splitting pneumatic drills.
STUART SWEZEY: Perry begged me to open one of the Desolation shows, and I was like, I don’t need another band. And he was like, “We’re just going to do this quick tribal drum thing, on and off, it’s gonna be really cool.” And I was like . . . oh, OK, sounds kinda fun, but when the time came it was basically all Perry . . . with guitars, and he was like a total stage hog, and a lot of people loved it, but a lot of people didn’t because it caused everything to run late. Perry was saying, “I’m going to do my rock star thing, and I’m going to do it for an hour and you’re going to have to drag me off.”
AGENT AVA: Out in the middle of the desert, the freaks came out at night for mostly SST bands. The flyer was printed on cardboard. Psi Com, Redd Kross, the Meat Puppets, and The Minutemen. The sun started to set. It was so very beautiful. Redd Kross drove up covered with boa feathers in this battered old funky ’50s convertible with fins. They were sitting up on the back dash with the lights on and everything, completely ripping people’s peace, shredding our desert serenity. I remember thinking, “This is gonna be wild!” All of a sudden Psi Com took the stage and it was dark, no stage lighting yet. The moon and the stars were out. Perry looked gorgeous, like this slowly pirouetting reptile with a Pinocchio face, he was like a clockwork clown, a wind-up doll from a Fellini movie. . . .
PERRY FARRELL: We had a very fun, demented, and youthful view of how to put these shows on. That’s where I cut my teeth watching how these guys did it. All sheer high-energy excitement from day to day waking up and it was your own campaign. We didn’t expect to be signed by anybody. The closest prayer we had was Slash [Records].
ENTER: CASEY NICCOLI
CASEY NICCOLI: The first time I saw Perry was at a Psi Com show, and I immediately had this attraction. I said to my friend, “I want to have his babies.” A year later, I had broken up with my boyfriend, and I heard through some mutual friends that he was attracted to me, too.
So I went to a Psi Com show and handed him a little note that said, “Instant Mashed Potatoes” and that was it. We started dating.
PERRY FARRELL: I thought Casey was a stunner the first time I saw her. She was like a punk Elizabeth Taylor. She stopped the show. She wore dresses and heels. Her hair was all chopped and dyed black. She was managing Rik L. Rik and going out with the drummer from Lions and Ghosts. I’m not a guy who steals girls, so I would look at her from afar and think, “Gosh, what a lovely girl.” [Eventually] she sought me out and told me she was moving out and breaking off with this fellow and needed a place to live.
CASEY NICCOLI: I was born and raised in Bakersville. When I was sixteen, I traveled to the Whisky to see the Ramones. I [was] very much into the Hollywood punk-rock scene before I met Perry. I loved Iggy Pop, X, the Ramones, and a lot of bands that Perry had never really been into. He’d never heard T. Rex . . . or Iggy . . . all these bands that eventually became his biggest influences. I was a geek and the punkers at my first Ramones show made fun of my dress. Then I went to an X show and some punk-rock girls tried to beat me up in the bathroom. After that, I very quickly wore bondage pants and totally dressed the part. I ended up moving to L.A. during ’79, when I was eighteen.
CARLA BOZULICH: Perry got really into Iggy and the Stooges around this time. . . .
CASEY NICCOLI: Perry was living in the Wilton House the first night that I went out with him. We hung out there. I didn’t move in right away. It took him a year to tell me he loved me. Sometimes I wouldn’t talk to him for weeks. He would get involved in doing his music or whatever. He used to get up early in the morning and call all over the place to track the radio airplay of Psi Com.
PERRY FARRELL: There were always a lot of people hanging out at the Wilton House. They’d come over looking for some fun, or to try and hook up. If someone was playing that night, that’s where we were all going to go.
KARYN CANTOR: I had a darkroom there and a photography studio, and there were always people around. It felt maybe haunted, but it felt safe. It was a great house; huge, but very run-down. You could go up on the roof. The rent was inexpensive, $200 or less, for huge rooms. It was pretty dirty and messy, like the kitchen was just disgusting.
CASEY NICCOLI: Karyn used to make short films like Rex Appeal . . . a movie about what you could use a big tub of lard for. Me and Perry were in that. And then she made Bakersfield Wedding, which was filmed at my mom’s house, outside, in the backyard.
JANE BAINTER: Perry and I became close because we had our little paradise upstairs. Our rooms were adjoining with a connecting porch.
We could go onto the roof. We had a really big space. It was organized. It was creative. It was clean. Perry’s totally tidy. We had a nicer environment to talk in.
KARYN CANTOR: Once more women moved in we tried to get it more like a home. We arranged cleaning schedules and it gradually became a much nicer place. People were parking cars on the lawn, it was all dirt, and so we ended up planting grass. There was a nice garden in the back.
“The Bakersfield Wedding.”
(Karyn Cantor)
DANUSHA KIBBY: It was a pigsty even when the girls were living there. Perry and Casey would cook once in a while but like the kitchen was definitely not one of those places where you would want to cook. It was more take-out containers everywhere.
JANE BAINTER: There were like seven guys living there at first. I was the first girl. There was this little pink room down by the kitchen and the guys were all like, “Well, Jane should have the pink room because she’s a girl.” We had three big rooms upstairs with like our own bathroom, and it was the other five or six guys downstairs. . . .
ON DRUGS
KARYN CANTOR: Drugs were recreational. It wasn’t a big problem, it wasn’t like, intervention time. It was not a household of people running around shooting heroin all day by any means. People did have jobs.
JANE BAINTER: At one point Casey was working in a medical clinic and supporting them while Perry was free to pursue his creative interest. . . .
STUART
SWEZEY: Perry was a hardworking guy who always had different day jobs. My brother had this soda business and Perry was doing deliveries for him in Santa Monica.
JANE BAINTER: I got a job at a management consulting company in Century City. I was wearing these blue suits with white shirts and pumps and stockings although I didn’t even have a car. Perry drove by Century City when he went to his day job as a typesetter-lithographer in Culver City, so he’d drop me off at work and it was just this real duality—the all-American girl showing up to work in the job that everybody wants, but she’s an after-hours drug addict at home.
KARYN CANTOR: Perry’s job was working on the band and he was very focused on that. Had he been a major drug addict, especially at that time, there’s no way he could have gotten to the point that he did. He made this thing happen, it was not an overnight success story. It was a lot of work, and I saw him doing that work.
CARLA BOZULICH: Perry wasn’t addicted to drugs—he seemed to still have so much spirit, whereas most of the people that I knew had slipped so far into addiction and being jaded that they had no enthusiasm, even for playing music.
KARYN CANTOR: I don’t think Perry was doing [that many] drugs, really, at that time. It was Jane. The other people that lived there weren’t necessarily involved in drugs either, and they just wanted to get rid of her because they felt that it was a problem, sort of like an intervention. It was very unfortunate for Jane that they pushed her out because she did have a very serious drug problem.
DANUSHA KIBBY: I didn’t feel as if I didn’t belong or fit in because I wasn’t using heroin. There were people that were and people that weren’t. There was a house across the street and there was another band that lived there. They came over a lot and they were all addicts. I remember Perry not liking those people very much.
JANE BAINTER: I lived there about a year and I ended up kicked out of the house, voted out because it was run by community and we had these house meetings . . . like that weird reality TV thing. It was three to four, with Perry on my side. Perry was very open and fair, but they were including Chris and some others from downstairs that voted me out. What sucked was the people that they let in after were much worse junkies than I ever was.
KARYN CANTOR: Perry was really upset because he didn’t want her to leave. She and Perry were really close friends and he was the only one defending her. Jane was their scapegoat. It was like “As soon as we get rid of this Jane problem all our problems are gone. It’s Jane’s problem, it’s all because of Jane’s addiction. . . .” Perry said, “We all have one, you know, we all have an addiction, but we all sort of say, well it’s her problem or it’s his problem, but it’s really all of us, we’ve all got one.”
PERRY FARRELL: Jane is a very beautiful woman. She could also be called “Plain Jane”—thick glasses, very outcast, very insecure, a lot like us. I look at her like a tragic figure. She’s a Smith graduate, she’s extremely intelligent, which is very unappealing to most men. She still hasn’t found love, pretty much like us. Every time I see Jane she’s always hopeful that something great is about to happen. “I’m gonna kick tomorrow.” Every time I see her, I just wanna cry. She’d give you her last apple if it was in her lunch sack, but no one appreciates her and she can’t quite get herself together. Jane lives slightly out of linear time. She can talk to you and she can see you, but she’s always slightly somewhere else. Maybe everybody feels like that and that’s probably why people can relate to that song.7
DEAN NALEWAY (Triple X Records): Money was really tight. Everyone was broke. One of Perry’s pet peeves was somebody stealing his food out of the refrigerator. They all had food stashed in separate compartments of the fridge. One time Perry was so pissed about it that he took this package of string cheese and he jacked off on to it and then closed the package back up, put it back in the fridge, and later on somebody ate it! At the next big house meeting, he told them what he did. He was trying to figure out who did it by whose face was going to turn sour. Nobody ate his food again after that.
PERRY FARRELL: Who else is going to move into my house but another artist or another musician? Not some nice sweet girl who’s a bank teller with a steady paycheck. We scared the shit out of anybody else that we’d even consider. It was welcoming for musicians because there was a place in the back to rehearse and we’d always attend each other’s parties.
KARYN CANTOR: Rick Parker [from Lions and Ghosts] moved out. He and Perry got into a fistfight.
CASEY NICCOLI: Perry found Rick’s lyrics lying around and thought they were really cheesy. He went into Rick’s room one night and thrashed it. When Rick came home the next morning you just heard this r-r-r-roar of anger. He came flying up the stairs and threw hot coffee at us. Perry jumped up from the bed and put Rick’s head through a glass door window. I freaked out. I thought somebody was gonna die. I called the cops because I was so scared. I was really afraid for both of them. Cops came and everybody calmed down. Nobody got arrested. . . .
PERRY FARRELL: We were constantly looking for roommates because musicians are so flakey. Six times out of ten they don’t have a job, or they’re moving back to Colorado. Then it’s like, “Sorry, Perry . . . can’t pay rent . . . leaving next week.” So we’d always have to get somebody in fast.
KARYN CANTOR: Eric Avery lived there, too, for a while—next door to Perry, upstairs.
ENTER: ERIC ADAM AVERY
Date of Birth: April 25, 1965
Place of Birth: Los Angeles, CA
Eric Avery as a toddler at the beach. (Courtesy Rebecca Avery)
ERIC AVERY (surfer, musician, songwriter, Jane’s Addiction): I was born in downtown L.A. and grew up on the Westside. My father, Brian Avery, was an actor, and therefore, our family life was very feast or famine because he either had a part and was doing great, or he went for years without a job, and wound up selling perfume outside of Zody’s. Then he’d get another job and we’d be living in a two-story house in Westwood and everything would be great again. Typical for an actor, or an artist in general. He was the guy in The Graduate who was the groom to Katharine Ross and he was in a bunch of stage productions of Gigi and things like that.
REBECCA AVERY (Avery’s younger sister): I’m younger than Eric by three and a half years. We lived mostly on the Westside, including Santa Monica. We moved a lot when we were little. We lived in Westwood on many different streets, Camden, Veteran, Midvale. Santa Monica, Ashton, then again in Westwood. Brooks, Venice, and then Hancock Park. . . .
Pre-teen Eric Avery. (Courtesy Rebecca Avery)
ERIC AVERY: I had a strict Italian-Irish Catholic upbringing, painfully so. I went to Catholic grammar school in West L.A. for the first eight grades. I was indoctrinated in all the usual ways. Fortunately, for me, I was in the far-left version of Catholicism. The priest was on Falcon Crest, this 70s TV soap, playing a priest. It fucked me up just the same, as it seems to everyone, although there wasn’t a lot of caning or anything, it was psychological.
REBECCA AVERY: Eric and I both went to St. Paul The Apostle grade school, which is also where Dave Navarro went. I knew Dave vaguely but we didn’t start dating until he left grade school, like into high school.
ERIC AVERY: I only sort of vaguely knew Dave Navarro as one of my sister’s friends when we went to St Paul’s. I had no interaction with him until later. He was also only there for a little while, too.
MATT PALADINO (musician, former neighbor of the Navarro family): St. Paul’s was pretty strict. You had nuns who’d smack your hands with rulers. There was a uniform: blue pants, white shirts, sweater, or a blazer. We had to go to church every day. We had to study religion, and then a big mass at the end of the week, praying before school started. Dave was there when I was there.
DAVE NAVARRO: We had to wear uniforms and every kid was rich and got dropped off in a fancy car. Lisa Marie Presley was two grades under me, and there was a day when Elvis dropped her off with fucking cops on bikes protecting him.8
ERIC AVERY: Altar boying was my firs
t humiliating performance. I was serving one of my first masses. My family were all there in the front pew. I knelt down on the side of the altar and unbeknownst to me, my gown got caught over my heels so when I went from kneeling down to standing up, I stood down on the back of my heels and it choked my throat with the front of my gown and I went careening back and flew across the floor!
MATT PALADINO: The goal of St. Paul’s was preparation to transfer to a really good high school like Notre Dame, Crespi, Loyola, or Chaminade-Julienne, one of these upper-echelon private Catholic schools.
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