Whores

by Brendan Mullen

Teenage Eric. (Courtesy Rebecca Avery)

  ERIC AVERY: I graduated from St. Paul’s Elementary in ’79-’80, which would have been eighth grade. Chris Brinkman was my best friend from grammar school. He went to St. Paul’s with me. He was like a total mentor-hero figure. Artistically and musically, he was everything to me.

  He was just one of those people that was really touched by something different. He was a really great painter and a really great sketch artist.

  I connected with him over 50s Beat poetry. We wrote poems and read them at coffee houses. My personal creative adventures started with Chris and by his example. He became the first guitar player for Jane’s Addiction.

  REBECCA AVERY: In Westwood we lived right next door to this family group called The Weirz. They had a big influence on Eric. There were eight or ten of them, sisters and brothers, this whole family that was a band and they toured around. They used to practice in their garage. I think that might have been where the clarinet first came from. The guitar and bass came later. Same with the piano, he would just do it by ear. I was just amazed at this natural talent. He would just teach himself everything.

  ERIC AVERY: The Weirz inspired me to play music because they had all these instruments lying around. I was twelve years old. It was like having a musical playground literally next door. There were three different horn players, a drummer, a bass player, guitar, vibes, any instrument you could think of all in this big house. I think I started on drums. One sister, Maria, was the bass player. I remember distinctly the way her amp looked. It was like the classic kind of Ampeg stack and I remember her plucking like an open E and it just rumbled to my core. I was astonished and inspired. Hooked on the idea of bass. Before that I’d sort of tinkered with my dad’s out-of-tune guitar, getting picture diagrams of what to do with your fingers and stuff like that. I was this intensely uncomfortable unsocial kid who just needed something to do with myself, by myself, but it wasn’t until I connected with the Weirz that the idea of plugging an instrument into an amp and it being loud became a reality. The Weirz would play the Troubadour and these weird church social type things and I would do the soundboard for them. I never took lessons. I started jamming in garages. I remember guys showing me Smoke on the Water . . . Zeppelin songs, Rush songs, stuff like that.

  PETER DI STEFANO (musician, surfing bud of Avery, member Porno for Pyros): I went to St. Monica High School with Eric from tenth to twelfth grade. We used to play volleyball together and we’d ditch fourth and get two bottles of Olde English 800 and lay on our backs at this park just chuggin’ away and laughin’ our asses off during lunch. Then we’d go back and play volleyball. I don’t remember him getting expelled. I don’t think he was a bad student. He was just an alcoholic . . . having a good time until, just like me, he eventually just spun out.

  REBECCA AVERY: Eric got kicked out of pretty much every high school he went to. It was Loyola, gone. SMC, gone. He would get kicked out and I don’t remember exactly why. One time he was drunk like in the middle of the day on a school day. I think he was at SMC at the time. He was out on the street directing traffic and got arrested and I think that was it. I forget what he did at Loyola.

  Eric Avery with dark clouds hovering. Already a troubled young man. (Courtesy Rebecca Avery)

  ERIC AVERY: I was always in hot water over fighting or poor academics and attitude . . . or never even showing up. I was truant all the time. My high school career was a slow descent from an all-boys academic school [Loyola High]. I got kicked out and went to St. Monica, which was still private and OK; got booted again and went to Santa Monica High, same thing . . . kicked out and then went to Uni [University] High where I took the GED.

  REBECCA AVERY: Eric was already a troubled youth. He’d started drinking at a young age, probably in eighth grade. He was angry, a bit out of control. He was really rebellious, talking back to teachers who thought he was “unfocused.” Eric liked to refer to our parents as “the parental units.” They really didn’t have a whole lot of control, and they’d get really upset. They really didn’t know what to do. There would be huge fights if they’d come home and Eric would be drunk, but in the end, Eric always did what he wanted to do. He’d much rather play music and listen to music—he listened to a lot of music—and he loved to party and surf.

  PETER DI STEFANO: I remember going out with girls and playing in a garage band together. Eric played bass and I played guitar and this guy Sean Sullivan played drums. We never got further than the garage because Eric quit and I didn’t see him for a while . . . then he joined the band with Perry, and the next thing I know he’s on the cover of L.A. Weekly, the headline said, “Best New Band . . . Jane’s Addiction.”

  ERIC AVERY: Peter and I were close friends. Surfing friends who played music together. There were like three or four of us. We played bad covers of Rolling Stones songs and stuff. We played some parties and barbecues and things. It wasn’t until Flower Quartet that I started really listening to interesting music when Joy Division came out.

  REBECCA AVERY: I used to hang out with Eric a lot and his friends. Pete was around during the St. Monica’s time drinking and smoking pot and listening to music. And surfing. High school is when everybody started booming with their musical interests. Bands started forming and playing parties and stuff like that. Eric taught himself to play bass, the guitar, the piano, but I think he took lessons for clarinet, the very first instrument he took up with. Eric had a band in high school called Flower Quartet. Peter might have been in that band, too. Chris Brinkman was probably also in it, his closest friend who OD’d.

  REBECCA AVERY: The first time Eric went to rehab he was a high school senior. He did not want to go. It was a really big deal. Around that time, too, he found out that he had a different biological father. It’s something my parents thought he was aware of. Eric is in my parents’ wedding photos, which is really interesting, but none of us ever went like, “That’s weird, why is Eric in mom and dad’s wedding pictures?” He was like the ring bearer or something. It came out when one of my mom’s sisters said, “Do you ever think about your biological dad?”

  ERIC AVERY: I had repressed any memory of it. When my aunt asked me about it, it was sort of like a shock, but it wasn’t really. This feeling was welling up in me. “What do you mean, my real father?” It was as if I were learning it for the first time. I wasn’t really. I had seen my genetic father for the last time when I was like six or seven maybe so I should have had a memory of him. I had totally repressed it. When it came out it was very dramatic.

  REBECCA AVERY: That sort of triggered a tailspin; he just went completely out of control. He was maybe seventeen, a really delicate age when I think he already had confused identity questions. It traumatized him, it sent him over the edge. That’s when my parents finally said, we’ve got to do something.

  ERIC AVERY: I had run away for maybe two or three weeks and the same night I came back, my parents had an interventionist come in. He was introduced as like a family friend but sort of convinced me that I had a problem and I went into rehab that night.

  REBECCA AVERY: We did the whole thing with the interventionist and the entire family sitting in a big circle and we’d all talk about the situation individually. . . .

  ERIC AVERY: I met my biological father as an adult. I was at a screening of Lawrence of Arabia with my present parents and he came up to me during the intermission because he recognized my mom and dad and he said, “Eric Avery?” And I said, “Yeah.” I assumed he was a fan. That was around the time I started to get recognized on the street. Then he introduced himself as my genetic father. That was the last time I saw him.

  CARLA BOZULICH: Eric and I were aged sixteen or seventeen; we were both in our first drug treatment programs when we met.

  REBECCA AVERY: Carla was around a lot because she was dating Eric. Chris Brinkman, also hung out with us. We went dancing to the Odyssey all the time.

  JANE BAINTER: Before I ever met Perry, I was living in this studio apartment on Fraternity Row
in Westwood where Eric, Chris [Brinkman], and Carla [Bozulich] lived. I was a few years older. They were all like sixteen. Eric and Carla had just met in alcohol rehab. They were very close.

  ERIC AVERY: It was such a bleak time. It was like one room with mattresses on the floor. Jane was working at the flower market where she had to be up by three A.M. to get there at four. She would shoot speed everyday to go to work. I was bussing tables and playing music and that’s when I first started shooting drugs regularly. I got into speed because Jane was around. I’d been real squeamish about needles at first. Speed led me to doing heroin. The first time I shot drugs was when I was seventeen back east, and it was coke and it was a one-off thing. It had nothing to do with Jane. I was experimenting with heroin at that time, too.

  PSI COM RECORDS AT RADIO TOKYO

  Circa March 1985

  AGENT AVA: It was probably Perry who dropped off the L.A. Mantra tapes or maybe it was Ethan James, the Radio Tokyo guy. It had some SST bands on it and Psi Com. I immediately carted the whole tape up and played it in its entirety on my next show [Demolisten KXLU.FM].

  PERRY FARRELL: In Venice you might see a really nice restaurant, and the very next place is somebody’s house and weeds are growing. And that might be Ethan James’s house. He blocked the windows with mattresses; that’s how you knew it was Ethan’s place. You go in and it’s a recording studio. Ethan’s prices were negotiable if you were a first-time band with no money; but you had to do it in one or two takes. He was mostly doing porno movie soundtracks to subsidize all the avant-garde obscure shit he really liked to do.

  FLEA (musician, member Red Hot Chili Peppers): I saw Psi Com at a private party on some ranch near Magic Mountain. The singer came out, and it was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. He was absolutely out of his mind on fire, shaking and quivering, every muscle in his body was doing a different dance. It was insane. I couldn’t believe it. I was like “This guy is out of his mind, who is he?” And it was Perry.

  PETE WEISS: The first time I saw Perry Farrell was at Jula Bell’s—she had a barn painting party out in Apple Valley, two hours outside of Los Angeles. We painted half of a barn red. We were all on mushrooms—and Celebrity Skin played, an early incarnation with John Goodsall from Brand X on guitar, and Cujo on drums. And then, this band we didn’t know started playing. It was Psi Com. Perry with the hair and the braids, dancing like there was 10,000 people there. We were all just gawkin’ at him, trippin’ our brains out, wonderin’ what’s this guy gonna do next?

  FLEA: I never knew that was him until years later [when I first saw Jane’s Addiction]. I put two and two together, and when I became friends with Perry he said “Oh, yeah that was me. . . . I was on acid that night and had a blast.”

  PSI COM DISCONNECTS

  PERRY FARRELL: I was breaking off with Psi Com. Casey had seen us a few times. She was working at a Stop Smoking place which gave her access to needles and things like that. . . .

  CARLA BOZULICH: He was going through this furious change, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It was that dramatic. He told me, “I’m changing my name!” And I was like OK, yeah. And he said I’m changing it to Perry Farrell. And I was like, huh? And he goes, get it—Peri Pheral, Perry Farrell—get it?

  PERRY FARRELL: In Psi Com I had a Mohawk [sic] and three braids, one that was growing down the back of my neck, and I had two growing on the side of my head, right? My hair was braided for so long that the day that I broke up with Psi Com I said fuck this, I’m taking my braids out . . . they had this weird zig-zag dreadiness to them, and I just left them in like that.

  CASEY NICCOLI: Eventually, he just outgrew Psi Com. He wanted something bigger. And more control.

  CARLA BOZULICH: He felt like he had something to say that was meant to be said to large audiences and I think that what he has to say is meant to be heard by large audiences.

  PERRY FARRELL: Psi Com was going through this weird phase. The band just got way too boxed in with the Krishna movement. One of the cats was a Krishna devotee, and he was an unbelievable guitarist. The Krishna issue was a personal thing, right? But it became overwhelming for me when it started to expand beyond the personal. Rich was trying to preach to us, amongst other things, no sex with women other than for the pleasure of Krishna.

  JANE BAINTER: Psi Com were going in different directions. Some of them were becoming vegetarians, anti-sex, anti-drug.

  STUART SWEZEY: Eventually Perry felt Psi Com lacked the level of intense hard-rock energy that the Red Hot Chili Peppers had. Psi Com were sort of like mid-period Cure, and he wanted to just get the hell on outta there. Everybody was looking to the Chili Peppers as the model for success. Perry was for sure. We used to read about them in the La-Di-Da column in the L.A. Weekly all the time. Perry would say, all you have to do in this town to make it, man, is pull down your pants onstage! And he was always really upset that that was what the Peppers did and people loved them for it.

  PETE WEISS: Perry also became well known on the scene for droppin’ trou and flashin’ his schmecker in people’s faces. . . .

  PERRY FARRELL: One day, I just got this feeling that I’m going to outgrow my circumstances, like, “I think I’m gonna make it.” But I had to get another band going, one that was happy, outrageous, and wild. I wanted to be able to sing truthfully. I didn’t want to have to fake being in a bad mood. That’s when I left Psi Com and started Jane’s Addiction.

  JANE BAINTER: I remember Perry saying one day when Psi Com was drifting apart: “Fuck those guys. I wanna rock!”

  NORWOOD FISHER: When Psi Com broke up we were real sad. . . .

  PERRY’S MUSE SOURCES

  CARLA BOZULICH: Perry was a sponge. He was talking to everyone that he thought had any experience he might have missed. If something interested him or fascinated him he just soaked it right up. He’s a genius like that. He can suck it out and make it his own like Bowie and Madonna, but I think Perry has better taste than Madonna. . . .

  DAVE JERDEN (producer-engineer, produced Nothing’s Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual): Perry is like an antenna that picks up everything that’s going on, and then he regurgitates it through his brain. That’s his art.9

  CARLA BOZULICH: Most people that I’d talk to, it seemed like there was a scam at the bottom of it somewhere so that they could eventually score some drugs. Not with Perry—Perry wanted to talk about art; he was interested in people’s opinions. I wasn’t really into his music, but I was taken by his style. . . . I’d never known anybody like Perry who was so determined, so focused . . . a different kind of musician than I’d ever played with up to that point.

  “THANK YOU, BOYS” (1985-86)

  CARLA BOZULICH: Perry told me he was starting a new band and that he was looking for players, and I think I told him about Eric and then he and Perry got together. I think I also told him about some guitarist, and maybe they got together and played but it didn’t work out. And then Chris Brinkman, who was a best friend of Eric’s and mine, tried out.

  I only have eyes . . . (Courtesy Rebecca Avery)

  ERIC AVERY: Carla introduced me to Perry. She asked if I’d seen Psi Com and I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “What did you think?” And I said, “I think they blow.” And she said, “Oh, OK, never mind.” And then I said, “No, really . . . why?” Carla said, “They’re looking for a bass player.” I was on the verge of selling my amp and giving up music. What did I have to lose?

  REBECCA AVERY: Eric came to me with this album by this band I’d never heard of called Psi Com. He played it for me and it was like nothing I had ever heard. I was like, hmmm. That’s definitely different. He was like, “Yeah, what do you think of this music? I think I’m going to play with this guy.”

  CARLA BOZULICH: When Eric and Perry got together, Eric started playing those bass lines and Perry applied his lyrical and melodic ideas. That was the magical combination. As soon as Eric played them Perry really seemed to hear himself in there.

  REBECCA AVERY: Eric technically neve
r joined Psi Com because they were falling apart. He met them and maybe jammed with them once or twice, but it didn’t get very far. Perry and Eric really connected. They both loved Bauhaus. Eric was enthralled by Joy Division.

  ERIC AVERY: When we talked on the phone about me coming in and auditioning for Psi Com, it was Joy Division and the Velvets that we connected on.

  PERRY FARRELL: Eric loved Joy Division and the punk band Flipper from San Francisco. Flipper’s big thing was to stay in one groove without ever breaking it up. They weren’t even trying to put together super well-arranged songs, but it felt great.

  Eric the babe hunk with the grin. (Karyn Cantor)