DAVE NAVARRO: I got a demo tape of their songs and just learned them real fast and went down and jammed and was pretty much welcomed into the family that night.
PERRY FARRELL: Everybody knew how great Dave was, his reputation preceded him. What an incredible talent. Who wouldn’t want him to play guitar in their band? What a stroke of good luck to find him!
STEPHEN PERKINS: The first song Perry, Eric, and I ever played with Dave altogether as a four-piece was “Whores,” and at that moment, for me, the sound for Jane’s Addiction was born. And it hasn’t changed since. We were like these stoner teenagers with long hair, but we all got an instant sense of freedom from each other.
PERRY FARRELL: I thought, “Omigod, they’re adorable.” Stephen and David. I called them Jane’s Teen Rock-a-Babes. They were like exuberant teenagers all the time. What great energy.
DAN NAVARRO: There was a lyricism—and fury—to both their playing that balanced Perry’s outrageousness.
STEPHEN PERKINS: When you hear Dave’s guitar, like John Frusciante, there’s a sadness. But there’s also gladness. Dave’s an expressive person, an emotional person. And you can hear that when he plays.
PETE WEISS: Jane’s Addiction could never have continued long without Perkins. You gotta have that one guy in the band that’s just always there and can go with the flow. Because if so-and-so and so-and-so are arguing, Stephen is always there cool and calm. He’ll always just show up with his drums and do the show with a big smile on his face.
DAN NAVARRO: There’s an additional creative element beyond accomplished musicianship and youthful energy that can’t be overlooked in the Jane’s equation. Dave and Steve also helped make Perry palatable to those inclined to find him strident.
CARLA BOZULICH: David added a lot in terms of the writing, but he also added this metal edge which sealed the deal for the band and made them irresistible.
PETE WEISS: You can’t undervalue Stephen’s keeping that band together—of course there’s no Jane’s Addiction without Eric, either. . . .
THE ERIC AVERY DEEP BASS GROOVE LINE
STEPHEN PERKINS: Eric with his amazingly cool bass lines and his deep sense of the groove was the best. He was so solid I could go crazy on my drum parts. Eric enabled me to be “Keith Moon.”. . .
ERIC AVERY: We had tribal drums and I was writing purposely simple four-note bass lines that I just repeated over and over. I would start playing that and everyone would jam on top of it. Perry or I would say, like, “That’s cool. Can we maybe not have that thing there . . . maybe a little more of this and less of that?” Perry would write words, and it would all just sort of come together.
CARLA BOZULICH: The uniqueness of Eric’s bass and Perry’s voice together created the basic sound that is Jane’s Addiction . . . without Eric there never could have been any success for Jane’s Addiction. Eric had written the music on his bass, years before he met Perry.
CASEY NICCOLI: Eric could play superb . . . huge melodic grooves, but he couldn’t make them into complete songs. Perry could cherry-pick the best grooves, and make songs out of them.
CARLA BOZULICH: Those bass lines are what turned into the music for ninety percent of the first two albums. These grooves were expanded and embellished upon by the others to make completed songs, something he could never have done himself—none of them could have done what they did without the other. At the time I don’t think Eric could have come up with a melody line by himself that would have really worked, or a chord progression that would have fit.
Huge melodic grooviness. (Karyn Cantor)
FLEA: The music of Jane’s Addiction revolves around Eric’s bass playing . . . which is technically very simple. In all the songs, you really feel the bass at the center. He was no virtuoso at putting down fancy speed chops, but conceptually he was absolutely incredible, melodically and groove-wise. There’ll never be anything like it again. It’s one-of-a-kind bass playing.
ERIC AVERY: My first jam with Perry eventually turned into “Mountain Song.” Later, Perry said he thought that I was either a genius—because I didn’t do anything other than play the same notes over and over—or that I just didn’t know how to play at all.
BOB FORREST: The bass [in Jane’s] is just something that you’re never going to forget. The bass is dark, spooky . . . the lead instrument. Like Joy Division. And David plays such solo-ey stuff that you need the bass to be there all the time. Most of their early songs are arranged jams centered around a bass.
ERIC AVERY: Peter Hook from Joy Division probably was the largest influence on my playing.
DAVE NAVARRO: Clearly Eric’s bass lines were the signature sound. His playing provided a whole dynamic that transcends words. He had a grounded, repetitive, rolling sonic quality, but extremely melodic, that was unusual for metal-influenced players like Stephen and myself to connect with and add to.
FLEA: Eric is one of the greatest rock bass players ever. I’d put him in the top five or ten, for sure . . . up there with Jah Wobble, Entwistle, John Paul Jones, Jack Bruce, Mike Watt . . . for the bass lines of “Nothing’s Shocking” and “Ritual.” A lot of the songs start with just the bass. As soon as Eric would play two notes the crowd would just go nuts.
BASIC MUSIC LESSONS/CONCEPTS
PERRY FARRELL: I was a singer who didn’t know how to play guitar. Casey taught me some basic song things, some basic chords on her acoustic guitar.
CASEY NICCOLI: I played self-taught guitar and I’d had a couple of lessons in music theory in high school. I couldn’t sing, but I could play guitar. I knew a C, a G, and a D chord.
PERRY FARRELL: I discovered that writing on an acoustic guitar is a wonderful way to start. If you can get a song structured on an acoustic guitar to sound good, you can expand it out to electric surely. I wrote a lot on acoustic guitar. It’s a beautiful experience to play acoustic at small parties. You’re hanging out at somebody’s house and you can always pick up an acoustic guitar and just kind of jam any old time.
BOB FORREST: Punk rock was getting an amp and playing as loud and fast as you can, but Jane’s Addiction introduced acoustic guitars—or re-introduced them in a big way for the first time since . . . say . . . Zeppelin III? Acoustic guitars were slowly coming back in to hard rock because of the influence of Daniel Ash from Bauhaus and now . . . Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction was doing it. . . .
DAVE NAVARRO: I’m much more impressed by Daniel Ash than by [the big chops guys] like Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen. I don’t own any of those records and would never purchase one. But I’m amazed by their playing. Steve Vai does get incredible sounds. I’m not a sports fan, but when I see an incredible athlete I’m impressed.
DANIEL ASH: That’s nice to hear. Dave Navarro is a much more technically proficient guitar player than I am. I always just treated the guitar as a piece of wood with six strings to make noise and write songs with rather than trying to copy Hendrix or whatever because I knew I would never be able to do that anyway. Hendrix had already achieved the maximum and I couldn’t get close, so why go in that direction? I would go more in the direction of a band like, say, early Devo, which was sort of going the punk way of simplifying everything. The simplest things are the best musically, as are most things in life, but I think Dave plays a lot more like Page than he does me, that’s for sure. I don’t mean that as an insult, because the guy’s great.
DAVE NAVARRO: Ash is no technical wizard, but he knows what’s needed in each song, and that makes it so much more beautiful for the listener. Daniel Ash and Robert Smith of the Cure are my favorite guitarists. [The Butthole Surfers’ Paul Leary is another influence], I love the guitar sound—how it’s just kind of all over the place. I don’t want to call it sloppy, but it’s almost anti-guitar. I think the best formula for playing guitar is no formula at all.26
DANIEL ASH: I wasn’t into Zeppelin at all. I appreciated Hendrix and I also loved Mick Ronson. Ronson could say so much more with three notes than anybody else could with three dozen. My favorite ever guita
r solo is the end of “Moonage Daydream.”
PERRY’S LYRICS
CASEY NICCOLI: Perry could take other people’s words and rewrite them. Like if you said something funny, all of a sudden, it became a song. He kept tons of journals. He wrote all of the lyrics himself.
DAN NAVARRO: Perry captured that time period and the sense of things in his lyrics. No one else was doing that at that point. They were making a beautiful noise and it was rollicking and they were great to see live, but I wasn’t getting the message [from any other band] the way I was from Jane’s. What was being said was monumental: “Pigs in Zen,” “One Percent,” “Jane Says,” “I Would for You.”
STEPHEN PERKINS: When I hear Perry’s lyrics, that’s how I express my drum part.
ERIC AVERY: Just great fucking lyrics, that’s where Perry’s untouchable.
DAN NAVARRO: None of the A&R people could see or hear it at first. No one got it that Perry was telling stories about his childhood and his parents. Jane’s was not only a thinking man’s thing, mostly because of Perry’s lyrics, it was also a “feeling” man’s metal.
BOB FORREST: Emo-metal anyone?
THE STYLE SECTION
PERRY FARRELL: When you’re in a rock band, your best stylist is your girl.
JANE BAINTER: Perry was really focused on one goal . . . to be a rock star dressed to stun. He was different then, but he wasn’t as different as he was when he got his piercings, when he got his scarification and he began braiding his hair a year later. Perry was really into African tribalism and the ancient ritualistic arts of different cultures. He said the scarification was done by some anthropology professor at UCLA.
Perry Farrell was reportedly bummed that his African scarification cuts healed without permanent scarring, bushman style. (Chris Cuffaro)
DAVID J: Perry told me about his scarification, how he’d got 200 cuts on his body because he wanted to experience the ritual. Once you’ve gone through that kind of pain and you have this record of it on your body you can psychically tap into that experience to be stronger in the face of future adversity. He was very disappointed because the welts didn’t come out like on black bodies. They didn’t have that effect on his body.
If you look very close, he’s got hundreds of these cuts on his body. It seemed like there was something very shamanic about it. He would really get into these other states of consciousness.
JOSH RICHMAN: He was [one of the] the first white guy[s] to have dreadlocks. [One of] the first to have piercings.
PERRY FARRELL: I got pierced because you’re hanging around with a lot of art punks, and a lot of them were gay and into this mild to heavy bondage. They were so cool, I just wanted to adorn myself right alongside of them. Eventually I took all my piercings out. I was out there surfing with a tit ring, and the next thing you know I ripped my nipple off. And then every week one of my ears would turn into like a rose bud, it would get so swollen up. The clincher was, one night I came home from a gig blazing on acid, and I wanted to get my nose ring out but the membranes inside my nose had all swollen up. I tried for probably four hours to get this damned aching nose ring out. I finally got it out the next day after I passed out and so I finally said, “Forget it, it’s just not worth the energy.”
JANE BAINTER: Xiola Blue, this girlfriend of Perry’s before Casey, first wore her hair in braids, and she probably influenced him to put a ring in his nose and a bow in his hair. That immediately made him stand apart from everyone else in the scene. . . .
PERRY FARRELL: I would borrow corsets and things from Casey. You wore a blazer and a corset . . . with boots and a wacky hat and gloves, and you just went down Melrose to mix it up and meet some people.
INGER LORRE (lead vocalist, Nymphs): You’d see Perry peacocking on Melrose in Doc Martens with boxer shorts over long johns.
ERIC AVERY: Casey definitely had a huge impact on Perry and therefore a profound impact on us as a band. She has a great aesthetic sense so I’d check with her, “Is this fucking thing stupid?”
INGER LORRE: Perry and I both had that style thing going on at the same time. We never talked about it. He would say nice things. He’d say, “Nice hat!” and I’d say, “Nice gloves.” We just nodded to each other: “You look good.” It was never like, “Hey, Inger, can I borrow a hat pattern?” And I never said, “Hey, dude, stop dressing like me.” When a man does it, it looks like his own thing.
DAVE NAVARRO: We were very much into thrift shopping. Garments became communal. On different photo shoots you’ll see a hat that was Perry’s in ’89 become mine in 1990. Or some pair of pants that were once Stephen’s on Eric. A lot of it looks goofy now, but it wasn’t intentional. The visual de-unification didn’t put us into a category which I think helped the longevity of the band.
CHARLEY BROWN: Perry’s dress sense reminded me of an Indian, in a crazy top hat with his dreads and his pierced nose and this corset.
INGER LORRE: I was wearing long gloves past my elbows, because as a female, having tracks on those delicate sweet little arms is just not a pretty sight. Then Perry started wearing those same gloves and hats. He might have had one or two hats his own style, but the big, huge madhatter kind, he copped from me. There was no rave scene yet. I just always loved hats. I didn’t have very much money so I sewed and made everything myself. Some things would come out half-assed and I would always make them in better materials so if they looked weird, at least they were made of velvet so it would give an air of richness. They came out looking madhatterish just because they would be leaning sideways and skewed because I had just started sewing. Then we had the thing where we would wear stripes with the hats and purple and green, the color schemes, magenta, and green and purple.
ERIC AVERY: The initial reaction from the business end was how are you going to package this? It’s not Motley Crue. It’s not Guns N’ Roses. How do you market this? A guy in a corset with dreadlocks, another with pink hair who looks like a punk rocker . . . and then two heavy metal hippie guys from the Valley? We didn’t make for a great, tidy package. People used to comment, “You guys are such a hodge-podge of styles, you look like four different bands.”
DAVE NAVARRO: There wasn’t a unified thread between us. Perry had a whole freakish look of his own, like some skinny, bugged-out goth surfer in whore makeup with flailing dreadlocks. Eric was more traditional punk rock, and Stephen had this crazy Afro hair thing. I was kind of a hippie kid, a little Deadhead gone heavy metal. But you throw us together and it was a patchwork quilt—it doesn’t look like it makes sense, but it keeps you warm.
Perry and Casey. Contemplating the lilies. (Karyn Cantor)
DAN NAVARRO: Perry scared the crap out of me at first. The girdle and the pantyhose . . . the dreads, the crazy doll makeup, and the nose ring, looking like he weighed 95 pounds; definitely not a conventional hard rock voice, not Sebastian Bach in looks. Perry was a freak from the point of view of the hair metal establishment. . . .
KARYN CANTOR: Perry and Casey definitely had an exotic hippie quality in their style. They were making jewelry and selling it at Grateful Dead concerts. I don’t think they were particularly into the music, but Perkins and Navarro were! Dave was a total hippie.
THE JANE’S ADDICTION SOUND “ART BAND” OR “REAL ROCK BAND”?
PERRY FARRELL: Musically, there really wasn’t a neat ilk for us either. There was metal, but we weren’t extreme deathcore metal . . . and we sure weren’t down with those shaggy poodle metal pop types either. There was punk rock, which wasn’t getting major attention, but we weren’t exactly punk anyway. And there was jangly R.E.M.-style collegiate pop-rock, but that wasn’t us either.
Art for art’s sake. (Karyn Cantor)
TED GARDNER (tour manager Jane’s Addiction, later became their manager): The hair band situation was starting to wane. Guns N’ Roses were the biggest band in the world and Poison was still around. Nirvana hadn’t come out. We were riding that pause between the death of one and the birth of another. Jane’s Addiction was a very
different style of band musically, visually. It didn’t fit anything.27
INGER LORRE: Where Guns N’ Roses were great seedy rock ’n’ rollers, Jane’s Addiction and The Nymphs were trying to do art. We used the punk ideology, but what we were doing was more planned out. Although some of it was obviously preconceived, most of it happened very naturally.
DAN NAVARRO: Jane’s was the first possibility that a hard rock band had something of value to say instead of girls, girls, girls, party, party, party . . . Motley Crue-Ratt style. It may have been rockin’ but it was just too clean, and I don’t mean that as positive. FLEA: Jane’s did all this stuff that we just couldn’t have done in the Chili Peppers at that time. Big, long, epic, classic rock guitar solos, slow beautiful ballads . . . pretty psychedelic stuff, acoustic guitars, hand drums, tambourines . . . they worked a much wider musical palette than any other band of the era. . . .
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