Whores

by Brendan Mullen

  UNIVERSITY HIGH SCHOOL, WEST LOS ANGELES (PKA UNI)

  Circa 1985

  Dude, where’s my bong?

  MICHAEL ZIMMERMAN (musician, former neighbor, high school acquaintance of Dave Navarro): I grew up in Bel-Air near where the Navarro family lived. My circle was self-destructive, mostly rich kids mooching off our parents and stealing their drugs. I only knew Dave after his mother’s death when we went to school together at Uni High. I’m a few years younger than him. Dave was always the shy guy who ran from me. People around campus at Uni knew what had happened to his mom and there was an unspoken boundary that said never to go there, never bring the subject up with Dave.

  MATT PALADINO: Uni High was probably where Dave met Mike Ozair because Mike also went to Uni, so did Mike Zimmerman.

  MICHAEL ZIMMERMAN: Uni High was very cool, the same school that Darby Crash and Pat Smear went to in the 70s. Attached to Uni was Indian Hills continuation school, where you could smoke cigarettes at the time. They gave you your own curriculum. Dave was in the extension part where most of the cooler students ended up. I personally didn’t attend Indian Hills but a lot of my friends did.

  DAN NAVARRO: Dave already had a reputation as “the hottest kid guitar player on the Westside.” He was a teenager who could outplay his teachers. The Westside is a privileged, high rent district. One doesn’t expect that a kid from there is going to really dive head first into rock ’n’ roll, especially when it’s likely his parents are going to pressure him to do well in school and go to college. . . .

  MICHAEL ZIMMERMAN: Dave was just a cool guy. Girls always went apeshit over him. A classic stoner guitar player who always had the coolest fucking hair. Long, black hair cut a little heavy metal but then he let it grow out and it looked even cooler.

  DAN NAVARRO: The other rock kid wannabes in high school would say, “Let me show you what I can do,” and then Dave would show him what he could do and totally blow them away.

  MICHAEL ZIMMERMAN: Dave Navarro was known as a teenage musical prodigy of sorts. But it was hard to get close or really talk to him. In high school, if you played music you were always in a secret competition trying to be the coolest, the fastest, the best. The first time I heard Dave play I was amazed, knocked out. He came over to a friend’s house. We were all sucking up bongloads of pot and doing coke I had stolen from my dad’s personal stash. Dave tooted some, too, before he played side one of Houses of the Holy, every note, lick, solo . . . all the songs in the same order as the record. When he finished he handed me the guitar and asked if I had anything I wanted to play him. I was stunned. Speechless. Demolished. I think I fumbled my way through Dark Entries [Bauhaus] and some old Bowie song. He was not impressed.

  PUTTIN 19; OUT IN SHROOMSVILLE

  MICHAEL ZIMMERMAN: I saw Dave play in a couple of bands. He’d been a major Deadhead. The first time I saw him live was at Madame Wongs West. It was some horrible hippie band, they sounded like the Dead meets Fleetwood Mac; bearded crusties in denim bib overalls and Birkenstocks! I also remember seeing Dave play in Dizastre, this heavy metal band. They played the Troubadour. It was a fun night.

  MATT PALADINO: There was a brief disconnect of a few years between when I was seeing Dave at least once a week at some sort of family function or just in the neighborhood to . . . there’s Dave sitting at a buddy of ours, Mike Ozair’s house, smoking weed and jamming out on guitar. Mike Ozair went to Uni High with Dave. He took acid, pot, mushrooms, he was a major Deadhead.

  MICHAEL ZIMMERMAN: Mike Ozair was always getting people together. He was the neighborhood party planner, an extremely charismatic leader type of guy. Mike would get these raves together and it’s a legend around 80s Bel-Air and Beverly Glen . . . all-night acid parties [circa ’85-’86] a good few years before acid house and the techno rave scene came up.

  MATT PALADINO: There was this little remote brush clearing Mike found maybe half a mile away from any houses. Mike started having these stoner parties every other week during the summer, where everyone would come on mushrooms or acid or really stoned, bring beers and light a fire, like a camping party with a Moontribe kind of vibe. The Grateful Dead would be playing, natch. Somebody said, “Who’s that guy playing guitar?” I was like, “That’s Dave Navarro—I know him!” Dave was befriending kids a couple of years older than he was. Dave was really down with the inner core of the cool crowd, while the rest of us were like these really young wannabe kids lucky enough to get to tag along.

  MICHAEL ZIMMERMAN: They called this enclave of druggies Shroomsville. It was a really cool walking trail behind these big houses around Beverly Glen and Mulholland by Angelo Drive. You had the laid-back stoner hippie-type people, and juiced-up leather rocker types on speed, you also had preppie types, students. I was the only goth-punk kid. It was a really cool diverse hang. I’d see Dave there all the time. The O’Connell brothers Tom, Jim, and Andy also had legendary parties. The O’Connells were north of Westwood Boulevard in those really cool houses. I’m sure at least one of Dave’s bands must have played there, set up in the living room, or outside by the pool. . . .

  MATT PALADINO: Mike Ozair was a really likeable guy, never mean, just like a big-hearted Israeli hippie guy who never turned anyone away. After school we’d go over to his house to get stoned. His little brother Danny was more my age so I was going over to see Danny at their house and Dave would always be there, guitar in his hands. He’d become Mr. Guitar Man for everybody. His whole life had become either playing guitar or taking a short break from it. Either jamming along or soloing over records, playing old rock songs, radio off, Dave playing, people singing: classic 60s tunes, Zeppelin tunes. With our generation it was 60s and 70s music. We liked the Dead, we liked Cream, Hendrix, the big 60s bands, but we also loved Deep Purple, Zeppelin, and the power rock bands of the early 70s. Pink Floyd was huge in this world. Dave would always throw in The Wall. It’s not so easy to solo and lead on an acoustic guitar, but Dave knew all these Page licks perfecto. Dave totally rocked on the acoustic guitar. Everyone knew Mike O. He was the leader, the motivator that drove people to go see Navarro. If Mike said, “Hey, we’re all going to this Dead show,” everybody went. Same thing if Mike said, “Hey, we’re going to see Navarro’s new band play,” everybody goes.

  MICHAEL ZIMMERMAN: Mike Ozair sort of disappeared into deep Judaism then popped up again reinvented as a rabbi who doubled as a sort of New Age healer and “life coach” motivator type, who got busted and convicted of “oral copulation” with a fourteen-year-old girl.

  ENTER: STEPHEN PERKINS

  Date of Birth: August 13, 1967 Or: September 13, 1967

  STEPHEN PERKINS (musician, member Jane’s Addiction, Porno for Pyros): I was a Jewish kid from the Valley, just bar mitzvah’d, but attending Notre Dame, an all-boys’ Catholic school, when I met David Navarro. Van Nuys High where I was supposed to go was just too rough.

  DAVE NAVARRO: After St. Paul’s I went to Notre Dame High School, where I met Stephen Perkins.

  Stephen Perkins. (Courtesy Rebecca Avery)

  STEPHEN PERKINS: I immediately joined the marching band on snare drum. Dave was already in there playing bass drum. We made easy friends. He confided, “I’m not really wanting to be a drummer, I’m actually a guitar player.” “Let’s get together,” I said, “I’ve been dying to find someone.” Music was a big part of it, but our friendship was sealed by the sense of humor we shared about the way we grew up together in Los Angeles. We became two teen guys making up our own music, our own soundtrack as we went along. . . .

  Mid-teen Stephen Perkins. (Courtesy Rebecca Avery)

  DAVE NAVARRO: I’d pick [Perkins] up every day before school. We’d do coke, smoke pot, and split a six-pack, all before eight A.M.25

  STEPHEN PERKINS: At first it was Gene Krupa. The guy with the big tribal tom-tom thing. Then I slowly turned myself into a rock drummer wannabe, hoping to land somewhere between Moon and Bonham . . . style-wise, I mean . . . not drinking myself into a short life!

  REBECCA
AVERY: I began dating Stephen when he and Dave were in this heavy metal band together. Dizastre had a bit of a following. People would come down to see them play at the Troubadour. They would really rock out and do a good show. They sounded close to Iron Maiden.

  DAN NAVARRO: Dave had just turned sixteen, not long after his mother died, when Dizastre recorded in a little four-track demo studio in my basement that my cohort Eric [Lowen] and I ran. Eric engineered, I helped with basic production ideas. Gave them the name and the odd spelling. I was just going back to my old 60s’ roots of . . . spell it weird and have some fun. It was pretty close to speed metal, moving along at a pretty brisk clip, but not as lumbering as heavy metal can be. God love him, Steve had difficulty keeping time steady through his fills. He was always so excited that when he would go into a fill, he would pick up. Not an uncommon event out of any drummer, but he was only maybe seventeen, sixteen.

  Bonded over Iron Maiden worshippery. Members of Dizastre, a pre-Jane’s teen metal band featuring Perkins and Navarro. (Jerry Jung)

  Date listed on the Dizastre demo: 4/24/83.

  Song titles: Lady Fate, Take My Life and Killers (Iron Maiden cover). Personnel listed: Dave Navarro, Steve Perkins, Brad Jones, and Rico Quevedo.

  REBECCA AVERY: When David was breaking my heart I called Stephen, crying on his shoulder. He was so nice and so sweet. I got to know Stephen really well after Connie died. Stephen was such good friends with Dave, we would just talk about him for long periods of time on the phone. We were concerned about him. We became close friends that way.

  STEPHEN PERKINS: I knew his mom and I knew the guy that killed her. It was too shocking to even grasp, especially for a fifteen year old. As a best friend, I just tried to be there for him. We played music. We talked. Whatever it took to free ourselves from the pain.

  REBECCA AVERY: Stephen and I would talk about Dave and how terrible it was and what could we do and then it sort of grew into a solid friendship. Stephen was very persistent in pursuing me. He just grew on me. He was such a ball of energy and love. We started dating and I fell in love with him. We were together almost five years from when I was like sixteen to twenty-one.

  DAN NAVARRO: Dave was successful even with his first band. Dizastre’s first show had like 400 people at the Troubadour. Dave and Steve were hot from moment one in terms of Dizastre having a huge outpouring at their first show. They didn’t play many times.

  REBECCA AVERY: I think there were sort of two bouts of them doing a lot of shows at the Troubadour.

  WHO KNOWS A GOOD, RELIABLE DRUMMER?

  DAVE NAVARRO: One night Stephen and I went to see Jane’s Addiction and we just loved it. It was a really exciting show. It was in this dingy little upstairs room on Hollywood Boulevard. They had the energy and power that we loved about metal, with a total abandon that we didn’t have any experience with. It was Eric and Perry and the drummer from Kommunity FK, Matt Chaikin, and I think it was Chris Brinkman, or it might have been this guy Ed, on guitar, who ended up in the Lovedogs.

  STEPHEN PERKINS: Dave and Rebecca and I went to a couple of Jane’s Addiction shows together and were completely knocked out. Dave and I knew right away that we could fit that spot better as musicians, but we didn’t think that would ever happen, so we just kept on trying to make our own music.

  ERIC AVERY: I remember them [Stephen and Dave] up front in the pit at the Black Radio show. They were a couple of metal kids, with long hair, and they were just rockin’ out, fist-pumpin’ the air while we were playing.

  DAVE NAVARRO: I consider that show my introduction to the L.A. [post-punk] underground. I was hooked, and as soon as I got an opportunity to play with these guys I jumped at it.

  PATRICK MATA: When I took off to England in ’85, hoping for an indefinite stay, I left Matt behind, and he was really upset and hurt.

  We’d all been doing lots of cocaine. Matt was friends with Eric Avery. So we were all hanging out and unbeknownst to me at the time, Perry apparently got Matt into heroin. When I went to England, he took Matt as soon as I was gone and started Jane’s Addiction with him, my drummer of nine years. Matt didn’t tell me anything about this. It’s like he felt he was cheating on me or something.

  JOSH RICHMAN: Perry badly wanted Matt Chaikin [Kommunity FK] to be the drummer. Perry was influenced by Killing Joke who were really percussive and tribal. . . . Matt as a drummer was also down with the Killing Joke groove, that’s why Perry wanted him. . . .

  PERRY FARRELL: I’d asked the Kommunity FK drummer to play for Jane’s. Everybody in that [version of] Jane’s Addiction had drug problems already, it seemed. Three rehearsals in a row, the guy won’t show up, so you figure he ain’t coming for the fourth. I started to ask around, “Who knows a reliable drummer?”

  REBECCA AVERY: I was telling Eric, “What about Dave and Stephen for this new band with Perry?” He’s like, “Rebecca, they’re just not our style of music. They’re not what we’re looking for.” I was like, “But they’re such great musicians.”

  Stephen Perkins, the “blue sky of Jane’s Addiction.” (Courtesy Rebecca Avery)

  Stephen and Rebecca at prom. (Courtesy Rebecca Avery)

  ERIC AVERY: We were on such different musical planets that I tended to think of Dave as my little sister’s heavy metal friend. As it happened, I actually played with him and Stephen up at Dave’s house a few years before Jane’s, probably during my Flower Quartet days back in high school. They were really young. I remember playing in the living room at Dave’s dad’s house in Bel-Air. They wanted to play Iron Maiden covers and other stuff that just wasn’t my thing.

  STEPHEN PERKINS: Perry and Eric were into Joy Division, Bauhaus, Love & Rockets when I first met them. I was really big on hard rock. I was seventeen and Metallica had just come out. I liked the aggression, I wasn’t too especially hip on the music, as much as feeling the explosive aggression of it all. As a drummer, I thought it was exciting.

  REBECCA AVERY: In the end they went through so many people that Eric finally relented, “Why not? Let’s have Stephen down and give it a shot.”

  PERRY FARRELL: Eric’s sister was going out with this curly haired, mop-headed young kid with soft red boots and a bandanna to hold the curls together, and like this giant grin.

  REBECCA AVERY: After Stephen saw Jane’s at Black Radio, and I already knew he dug them, I told Stephen that Eric and Perry wanted to try him out. He was really excited about it. He really wanted that gig. He just played one song and Eric and Perry just looked at him and said, “Wanna join the band? You’re in.”

  PERRY FARRELL: Stephen showed up with an eighteen-piece drumkit at the audition. He was ready to rock us with a double kick! We were from completely different worlds, but I felt this kid could just rock the shit out of us. He was from The [San Fernando] Valley. That’s what the kids from The Valley looked like and that’s what they sounded like. Stephen was the cream of the crop of those kids.

  STEPHEN PERKINS: Some guys would just bring a little four-piece set to an audition. I brought like ten drums. The first song we played was “Pigs in Zen” and I started pocketing with them. I saw the smiles and their butts shaking, and I just went for it, and they offered me the job right away. . . .

  ERIC AVERY: We gave Stephen a try first, and it worked out great. It was the first time we’d tried someone who was an incredible player. We only knew people who were sort of artistic, certainly not chops guys as players. Stephen not only had crazy chops, he was also totally open to us shaping him.

  REBECCA AVERY: Stephen and I were like, “OK, now that’s settled, now you’ve got to get our friend Dave in there, too! Just give him a shot is all we ask.” And, of course, they loved him to pieces, too, first time they got together.

  STEPHEN PERKINS: After I got in I promised Dave: I gotta get you in the band, I can’t wait to get you in the band. Dave and I had a couple of extremely derivative heavy metal bands. By the time we caught up with Perry and Eric, we wanted to make music like what we were feeling. No more emulati
ng other bands; we were dying to express ourselves creatively.

  DAVE NAVARRO: They apparently had a problem with their guitar player, so Stephen recommended me.

  STEPHEN PERKINS: They had this cat named Ed playing guitar; nice guy, but he wasn’t Dave Navarro. I said, “Look, you gotta bring my buddy Dave down.”

  Dude, easy with the mascara. (Karyn Cantor)

  Spiritual Perkins, the only non-addict. (Karyn Cantor)

  ERIC AVERY: It went so well with Stephen, we were like, “Let’s give it a go with the other guy with mad chops.” Same story.