DAVID J: Perry flashed his knob in California at a big gig. He got his bonker out for the crowd.
CHARLEY BROWN: It was the biggest show of the whole tour, our first, and homecoming for everybody. We were still nobodies at this point. Love & Rockets were rock stars with semis and massive crews and everything, and we had a minnow, our little motor home, and this one metal-head roadie guy Sarj, who hated Jane’s music, and myself.
REBECCA AVERY: Perry was getting temperamental and for whatever reason didn’t want to go on that night. It’s a little late! Here we are, everybody’s here in their seats. They weren’t getting the same response they were used to at the Scream when people were flipping and going nuts over them. Love & Rockets audience were just kind of uninterested, they thought Perry was just too weird. There was also a little booing. Just a few people would yell, “Fuck you, get off the stage, you crazy freak” or something really nasty, but I don’t remember it being that big a deal, it didn’t seem like something he couldn’t have easily handled. It wasn’t like a thousand people yelling, “You suck!”
CHARLEY BROWN: Perry didn’t want to go on because in his mind the band was broken up. It had nothing to do with not wanting to open up for Love & Rockets. It was the last show. He’d just had enough of it and said fuck it. He was ready not to play.
REBECCA AVERY: Of course, the show had to go on in the end, so he was like, pouting, “Fine, but I’m doing it with my dick out.”
CHARLEY BROWN: We were spare-changing their crew the whole way, literally panhandling for help, so the last thing I wanted to do was fuck up their big moment. But it was a big moment for us, too; French TV was there filming, and so Perry came out in these wafer thin stretch pants, kind of bicycle pants, made out of balloon material.
DEAN NALEWAY: He had his usual corset on over these rubber pants that he’d cut a hole out of so his penis could hang through. . . .
CHARLEY BROWN: . . . at a very strategic moment the pants burst, and being the showman that Perry is he continued for at least two more songs to a packed house.
DEAN NALEWAY: By the end he’d thrown the corset into the crowd and he was dancing around with his dick bouncing up and down. Campus and city cops streamed up in droves to arrest him for indecent exposure. Perry ran upstairs to the dressing room, and we had to hide him in a closet until they gave up.
CHARLEY BROWN: It was like one of those classic Lenny Bruce-Jim Morrison moments where the pigs are freakin’ in all corners, ready to shit-can the show and arrest him for obscenity. I panicked, ran up to Casey, and demanded her panties, which she quickly gave to me, and I ran to the stage and slingshotted them to Perry . . . which he slipped into and played the rest of the show in. As soon as they finished their last note, cops were all over our shit. French TV was trying to film it all. Cameras were coming at us and cops were violently pushing them away. They drug us outside and Perry was cowering like a little kid holding up these sweaty fragments of rubber, saying, “It just broke, I didn’t know what to do.” I got the job of calming the cops down and making it all go away. Thank God he didn’t get arrested. After they let him go, I was still dealing with the cops. I was dealing with Love & Rockets and I was dealing with their tour manager. I was dealing with our agent because it flipped everybody out.
DEAN NALEWAY: We were like, “No, no, it wasn’t on purpose. His pants split.” The cops were like, “Okay, well, we need to see the pants to make sure that they ripped.” And we’re like, “The pants are on him, and he’s gone! He’s already left the building.” Finally they let it go and didn’t press any charges, because they couldn’t prove it wasn’t accidental.
PERRY FARRELL: I would always just tell them my pants split. So they have to kind of think about it. I used to always wear rubber, so I always had the excuse. When rubber splits, it really splits.
NOTHING’S SHOCKING ALBUM
Circa January-April 1988
Nothing’s Shocking sessions at El Dorado Studios, Los Angeles
ERIC AVERY: Warners put together a group of producers that we just kind of picked through. The guy who did Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite album was on it, but we were like, “Not right for us.”
PERRY FARRELL: I liked Dave Jerden’s work on [the Brian Eno/David Byrne album] My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, so I was excited to work with him.
DAVE NAVARRO: Dave Jerden is fantastic. He was a great producer. We had a great experience with him. We steered the ship a lot [ourselves] and Dave’s job was to capture it. And I think he did that very well.
ERIC AVERY: Jerden was such a fucking godsend for me personally. I’m so glad we chose him. He really helped me in every way. I remember him saying, “You’re gonna be around for this. What’s going to happen to you for the next couple of years . . . get ready for a hell of a ride. Strap yourself in, man, and keep your eyes open.”
DAVE JERDEN: I totally jumped at the chance to make a record with them. What other band since X . . . and then, even further back, The Doors and The Velvet Underground, could have segued from songs about killers and despair to singing beautiful tender love songs about summertime? Perry gave me a tape of all these bits and pieces of music. It had this feeling like our entire culture was in there, distilled into one idea and that idea became Nothing’s Shocking.61
STEPHEN PERKINS: Nothing’s Shocking was a combination of everything in the world today. Even back then there was reality TV when [serial killer] Ted Bundy was representing himself in court.
DAVE JERDEN: Perry has always been interested in the dark side, and with Ted Bundy, I don’t think you can get any darker than that. He said he wanted to use some Ted dialogue in the song and we worked it in.62
DAVE NAVARRO: We had this song, “Idiots Rule,” that Flea and Angelo Moore and Chris Dowd from Fishbone came down to play on. They had this horn section part worked out that took a Jane’s Addiction song and, somehow, within one pass of tape, turned it into a Fishbone song. So Perry trimmed away some of the fat and it became what it is now. That was my first memory of Flea.
DAVE JERDEN: During the making of Nothing’s Shocking Bob Ezrin came by. He said, “Don’t try to make a record that people will like. Try to make a record that people will hate because then you’re not in the middle. If you make a middle-of-the-road record you’re nowhere. But if you make a record that, let’s say, fifty percent of the people vehemently hate, there’s going to be fifty percent of people who absolutely love it.” I thought, just make it aggressive, and mean, and weird, and nasty as you wanna be. You never know what’s going to please people, but it’s easy to go up and slap somebody in the face and piss them off, always works, and that’s what I think we did with that record.63
ERIC AVERY: I don’t even know if I would hold Perry responsible as much as I would hold the machine responsible. It was an unstated thing that it operated like a partnership . . . that is until it started to take off. We had a meeting to figure out the publishing. I wanted it to be split equally between everyone—I tend to believe in the U2 model where no one person is changing his lifestyle dramatically over anybody else—but suddenly Perry wanted fifty percent for writing the lyrics straight off the bat, plus another portion of the remaining fifty percent for the music. I was sort of going to bat more for Stephen and David because I’m sure I could have gotten a much larger piece of the pie. We were stunned. Dave, Stephen, and I wound up getting 12.5 percent apiece.
PERRY FARRELL: The songs Eric wrote were good songs; they were very simple. They were basic grooves.64
CASEY NICCOLI: Perry could argue, “Well, without me, it would have just been a great bass groove in his garage forever.”
REBECCA AVERY: It was a band of four members and everybody contributed. Eric wrote a lot of music, “Mountain Song,” “Had a Dad,” “Jane Says” and came up with some ideas for lyrics, not specific lyrics, but lyrical ideas for songs. For example, “Had a Dad” had to do with Eric finding out that he had this different biological father. He came up with the guitar for “Jane Says.” And “Summ
ertime Rolls” . . . two of their very best signature songs.
ERIC AVERY: I remember showing him a poem by Sylvia Plath called “The Companionable Ills” and there’s a line in it about how stirrups inspired the spirit out of the mud. Something like that. I forget exactly. We were talking about it and that became “Ain’t No Right.” Perry wrote something like, “I am skin and bones, I am pointy nose, and that’s what makes me try,” which was born from that poem.
REBECCA AVERY: Eric would say, “I have this idea” and then Perry would take that and pen the actual lyric. He’d tell Perry, “This is what I’m thinking musically. This is the feeling of it.”
ERIC AVERY: I came up with the guitar for “Jane Says” and “Summertime Rolls.” The guitar part for “Jane Says” was probably by some guy I jammed with many years before. Then I put the chorus on it so it was sort of born from a jam. But the lyrics were totally Perry on “Jane Says.” That was such a flash of brilliance of his, that’s where his genius lies.
DAVE NAVARRO: We did everything totally different from song to song. Some came from Eric’s bass lines, some from guitar, some came from Perry, some came from drum riffs, and some of them just came from free-form jams. There was really no formula.
ERIC AVERY: It was all jams initially, but there was also a crafting aspect of each other’s ideas. David and Stephen brought the “metal” element. . . .
REBECCA AVERY: Eric was never like, “I want my due, I want my credit for this and that.” He just wasn’t like that.
ERIC AVERY: I thought of my role as assistant creative director, because I wasn’t the most musically proficient and I didn’t write songs in the traditional sense.
PERRY FARRELL: Musically, I help with arrangements, but I could never play as great as them. They’re experts at their instruments.65
DAVE JERDEN: I drove to work at the studio one day a little late and Perry was already in his car in the parking lot with Stephen and Dave, and they were pulling out. Perry says, “The band just broke up. There won’t be any record. See ya!” And I was like, “Wha-a-t!?”66
ERIC AVERY: Warner Bros. called an emergency meeting because Perry said it was going to be his way or no way.
REBECCA AVERY: Wanting to take more than half entirely for yourself and to give the others 12.5 percent each, that’s shitty. I just remember feeling like no one’s standing up to him. Nobody’s saying, “That’s not OK.” They didn’t want it to end there. They were all so fucked up. Eric was still using, so was Dave. In the end Perry got what he wanted.
ERIC AVERY: We actually broke up for a day. Perry said, “It’s got to be this way or I’m walking,” and we said, “Let’s walk.” But we compromised and obviously kept going. David made a T-shirt for our next show that had 12.5 percent spray-painted on it.
REBECCA AVERY: It’s like Perry completely destroyed the team spirit forever that day, and I’m convinced they never really came back from that. . . .
ERIC AVERY: It had a profound effect that’s for sure. It really upset Stephen. There was a fracture internally. From what I understand, David and Stephen have since been fine with that kind of behavior from Perry.
ANDREA BRAUER (copyright attorney, no legal or personal relationship to anyone connected with Jane’s Addiction): If Perry wrote all the lyrics to a song and further contributed to one or more of the melody lines, according him the lion’s share of songwriting would not be out of synch with industry custom. If, however, at the time the song was created, the prevailing attitude regarding songwriter splits was “all for one and one for all,” then any attempt by Perry after the fact to adjust those splits would not be justifiable. One thing is certain: When a band parts company on less-than-friendly terms, everyone has their own version of events. It’s extremely difficult to know for sure what’s fair.
MARC GEIGER: As much as people are naive, potentially, about money, there’s clearly a factor of money that always enters into these things.
STEVEN BAKER: It was a very emotional trauma, but they carried on.
CHARLEY BROWN: We got about halfway through Nothing’s Shocking and then Perry got all possessed by money and I got kind of nauseated with the pseudo-rich thing and called him a money-grubbing egomaniac, not the best move. They wanted limousines to take them to a photo shoot. That’s one of the things I got in a fight with Perry about. I was like, “Fuck, man, we’re not a limo band! That’s against everything I thought we were supposed to be standing for!” I come from the straight world of old-fashioned Midwestern values that you don’t spend the money before you get it. First you have to tour like dogs and actually sell these fuckin’ records, and lots of them, before you see any real money. That’s what all of those fucking lame-assed bandanna Strip bands that we hated were all about. Perry was kind of faking it during that period . . . he really was that far south of what was happening. . . .
ERIC AND PERRY FALL OUT
MARC GEIGER: Perry and Eric just fell out.
ERIC AVERY: Things got really bad between me and Perry.
PERRY FARRELL: We had divisions. When Eric decided to become clean, I didn’t decide to become clean . . . probably had a lot to do with it.
REBECCA AVERY: It was weird and getting weirder. Ever since the big showdown over the publishing, things were getting more uncomfortable with everybody in the band all the time. Somewhere around there Eric got sober.
PERRY FARRELL: One minute one guy was healthy and clean and suddenly that meant that nobody else could be unhealthy and unclean. But that’s not the way life works.
ERIC AVERY: During the process of getting clean I started to say I’m not comfortable doing this thing or that thing and that created even more hard feelings.
PETE WEISS: People do drugs and someone in their circle doesn’t do drugs. Even if the person who is not doing drugs will tolerate the people doing drugs, the people doing drugs only want people who are doing drugs around them. They shut out sober people.
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Junkies put up a wall around everyone else who isn’t a junkie. If you don’t run with them, you’re excluded.
DAVE JERDEN: They were going through a really tough time personally. Dave was still having a rough time with the death of his mother.67
REBECCA AVERY: There was friction between everybody except Stephen. Stephen was the only one that was going, “What the hell is going on, guys? What happened? This is all going to hell in a handbasket, nobody’s talking to anybody.” Individually he was OK with Dave and Perry and Eric. They were all not talking to each other.
PERRY FARRELL: It’s not like I can’t say hello to Dave or Eric, but on a personal level, we’re not friends. By that I mean I don’t hang around with them on my days off. Maybe because I’m the oldest, I take on certain responsibilities. But I enjoy it; it’s my forte. I am a control freak, but that’s because I care.68
FLEA: They were having troubles with Eric, and Perry was talking to me about playing bass. This was before Nothing’s Shocking came out. They definitely already had some sort of dissent in their camp at that point. I don’t know what they were squabbling about.
ERIC AVERY: Our relationship deteriorated into an unspoken standoff; kind of like the Cold War, where both sides knew that all-out war would be devastating. It created this weird détente, this non-verbalized agreement not to escalate. So we never did. It’s surprising with all the out-of-controlness that he and I never got physical with each other. We didn’t even yell. In more roundabout, passive ways we’d say things to hurt each other’s feelings.
CHARLEY BROWN: The guys always fought, they always broke up whenever we left town. They were at each other’s throats. Perry and Stephen always got along, but Perry and Eric, and Perry and Dave were always at odds, sometimes at the same time, sometimes intermittently, sometimes each one would change sides with Perry and go against the other.
DAVE NAVARRO: We happened to have a very emotional lyricist and we’re a very emotional group of guys creating music, so obviously it’s going to come off that we don’t
all feel exactly the same way from day to day about each other and what we’re doing. They were ugly times—some of them. I’m not going to deny that.
ERIC AVERY: Throw hard drugs and alcohol into a mix of enlarged egos and what do you get?
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