MODI FRANK: Perry also wanted two topless chicks in the balcony painted in Fellini makeup, all white with black nipples. Perry told me it was all about performance art. Angelo was going to do some poetry, and then Perry was going to do some poetry. The band was only going to play a couple of songs and then the waitresses and the diaper men were to come out. Casey said, “We want to shoot Perry making out with the band.” Everybody was willing to make out with Perry, no problem. Stephen and Dave were, but if you look closely you can see Eric cringing.
PERRY FARRELL: We figured it [Soul Kiss] would definitely trip people out. Just to mess with people. And because the shots were quick, it would cause your eye and your interest to go in—was that [really] them kissing each other?
ERICA PAIGE: Everybody was making out with everybody on the set. I thought it was extremely funny. It was totally intended to cross the line. Casey has a real dark sense of humor. She’s hysterical.
REBECCA AVERY: That was very, very weird where they’re all kissing. It’s me and Stephen kissing and Dave and his girlfriend kissing and then they all start kissing each other. My brother and my boyfriend kissing each other on camera, how weird was that?
BRYAN RABIN: Take the sexuality out of it, gay or straight. I think that it was about expressing themselves and blurring out those lines. I don’t think he did those specific acts just for shock. Yes, it was provocative and yes, they knew that they would freak some people out. Yes, he knew they were theatrical acts, but I don’t think that he thinks in such black-and-white terms. I think Perry lives in a completely different place and I think he really does believe what he speaks.
REBECCA AVERY: But it’s rock ’n’ roll, whatever, I guess. Eric giving his book report from the toilet. There again he’s fucked up. Just watching that and seeing him scratching himself was too weird. Dave and his eel. It was a fake eel. He had put it in the tank specifically for twisted comic effect.
MODI FRANK: There were no dressing rooms at the Probe, nothing with a mirror in it. I had to stick this fancy makeup guy in a broom closet with these two dopehead chicks selected by Perry and Casey. I’m downstairs prepping and he [makeup guy] comes running out of the broom closet shaking and crying and screaming at me in front of everybody that he’s never going to work for me again. I said what’s wrong? He said, “Those two chicks have track marks on their arms and it touched my sponge.” Then Perry goes, “I want me and Casey in a bed of roses naked like we’re dead.” OK. We finally get the flower bed ready and Casey and him get naked. Perry kept saying, “What do you think? Do I have a big dick? Can you see it at that angle? Do I have a big cock?” I’m shooting in Super 8 with no sound and I go, “Yes, you have a big dick, quiet, you’re supposed to be dead!”
BOB MOSS: There were a lot of regular rocker/stoner people there, no Hollywood art punks or Melrose fashion freaks in sight. They were stoner kids really into the fact that Jane’s kinda vaguely sounded like Zeppelin, dude. They assumed it was going to be a full-on Jane’s Addiction concert because that’s how Perry billed it on the flyer. Maybe chaos was the point because chaos was what he got. It was a crazy night.
The “Mountain Song” video shoot at the Probe, host club to the promoters of Scream and Cathouse at different times. (John Eder)
MODI FRANK: Perry didn’t bill it as a poetry night. He billed it as Jane’s Addiction. People expected the band. I almost punched a guy out in the front row because he was yelling right into Angelo’s face to get off. Perry comes out and says, look this is Angelo Moore, he’s one of the greatest L.A. band guys ever, give him a little respect.
BOB MOSS: Glen Meadmore was one of the performers besides myself. Angelo Moore, a few other people were hired. The “Diaper Guy” was my given character! One of the girls from the scene was the “Diaper Chick”—we were both the “Diaper People.” It was sillyassed fun until this crowd of front pit gnarlers turned awful bellig’. “Who the fuck is this fag in the diaper? Where’s Jane’s Addiction?” Shit, man . . . there was nowhere to go. There’s no dressing rooms at the Probe, nothin’! I couldn’t go to the men’s room. People in that audience would have dealt with me and my “faggot ass” real fast. I had to use the women’s room to clean my makeup off!
MODI FRANK: So now Perry goes onstage to do his stint. The shout-out is coming from the audience: “Shut up and sing!” Perry gets pissed off and was heckling them right back, “You don’t know what art is. This is art. We worked really hard to put this together. You don’t appreciate anything.”
BOB MOSS: Perry got pressured to bring the band out. Finally they cut the show short. They ran out and I had to run out with them and dance with my partner and they scrapped the rest of the show. They didn’t even do a full set, but I guess they got a good take of “Mountain Song,” right? Otherwise, the whole night was an abortion.
MODI FRANK: Finally he threw his hands up and said: “Fuck it, let’s play.” And so Jane’s ended up playing a whole set that was just stunning. The dancers came out and threw the tampons. The night finally exploded into a full-blown Jane’s Addiction set. The audience went nuts. They finally got what they wanted.
Circa September 1988
PERRY FARRELL: We went to Dayle Gloria’s place for a barbecue and there’s Iggy Pop on the floor listening to our record—“Pigs in Zen.” There’s one of my idols, listening to our music. I got too nervous, so I just left. Didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. Dayle followed me with Iggy and said, “Where are you going? I want you to meet Iggy.” He said, “Man, I think you guys are hot stuff, I want you to come on tour with me.”
REBECCA AVERY: That was such a big deal at the time, “Oh, Iggy Pop thinks Jane’s is cool.” They were all so excited about that.
JANE BAINTER: Perry talked about Iggy a lot . . . until he got a tour with Iggy and it overshadowed the whole previous thing because the experience was different than the inspiration.
DAYLE GLORIA: I flew to New York and met them there when they opened up for Iggy. It was great. And then I went back on a train with David and immediately bought dope and did heroin for the first time on a rooftop in Greenwich Village with Eric and David. I threw up all the way through the Village.
Circa Spring 1989
STEVEN BAKER: The head of the promotions department at Warners saw Jane’s Addiction for the first time at the last show at the Anson Ford Theater [in April, 1989]!
PAUL V.: I’m like doing cartwheels off the halls of Warner Bros., like, “Please pay attention to this band! They’re the next Led Zeppelin.” I was so desperate I was reduced to speaking in their terms of lame hype lingo because there were a lot of old-timers who thought like ZZ Top was alternative. Nobody ever got fired from Warner Bros. in those days. You’d have to run over the CEO’s kid before they’d even consider it. Part of the problem was that there were too many lifers there. Lots of clueless dead weight coasting along pulling down these huge salaries.
STEVEN BAKER: I remember playing the first album for our radio guys. I purposely only picked the harder rocking stuff like “Mountain Song” . . . things that I thought would have appealed to the rock promotion department.
PAUL V.: These guys came from Top 40, where if you want a record on the radio you’re going to grease some palms. That doesn’t necessarily mean cash is exchanged, but flyaway trips, free dinners, all this stuff you have to do. I don’t so much have a problem with the process. Fine, that’s how it works, but it was just the arrogance and there’s no allegiance to the band. Here we are with Nothing’s Shocking and one of the all-time greatest songs ever written and recorded, “Jane Says.” I’m sitting there going, “My god, this should be a massive, massive hit. How can you not feel and hear this song?” The company eventually did the single but it never saw the light of day outside of KROQ. There was no video for it.
STEVEN BAKER: Roberta Petersen and I were in Ted Templeman’s office, because Teddy had these huge speakers. It was also the right setting symbolically for these guys because Van Halen, the Doobie Bro
thers, the artists that were important to these people and our company were overseen from there by him. We played about four, five tracks. The last note was dying away and Roberta and I are like, “Isn’t this just great?” but all these guys could say was, “Oh, thanks, we have to go to a Van Halen rehearsal” and they just walked out. Not like, “That’s great, that could be a single, we’re going to get behind this.” Not even a single word of encouragement.
PAUL V.: Even if a radio station loved the band and played them and then the band came to town one or the other stations who started to play them also wanted tickets. The bigger station would shut out the smaller station and then the smaller station would stop playing the band because the record company didn’t step in and slap the hand of the big station. Who loses? The artist and the fans. This was driving me crazy, and I really didn’t want to do it. I loved the music but hated the process of getting it played. Basically, you have to kiss ass. You have to talk to a lot of these radio guys. They want everything, and they’ll give nothing. This was still when the format was in its infancy. It’s a thousand times worse now.
STEVEN BAKER: We just sat there going, “We’re fucked.” It was incredibly disappointing, and it also showed you kind of where it was at. We thought, “We’re not playing you guys this quirky new wave thing that new stations could never play, we’re playing you a hard rock record with a unique point of view.” The part of the company that could have been supportive was just not there for them. And that may have accounted for some of the lack of sales for the first album.
PAUL V.: They put out “Mountain Song” and “Had a Dad” like the official singles from the album. It got played on alternative and college, but even on college radio, the other side of the coin, there was some resistance because the band to them sounded too rock ’n’ roll, too metal. Either way, it was an uphill struggle during Nothing’s Shocking to say, like, “Don’t listen to it with those ears, listen to the whole palette of sounds.” And the lyrics, just listen to the lyrics.
PERRY FARRELL: The success of R.E.M. really helped what they now call “modern rock.”
CHARLEY BROWN: Suddenly, organized college radio became a new marketing outlet for major labels after R.E.M. broke. Somebody started calling Jane’s “alternative” and then, fuck it, it became a whole genre. After Jane’s all the labels had to do to qualify for college airplay was call it “alternative.”. . .
NOTHING’S SHOCKING: THE CRITICAL REACTION
BRIAN WARNER (aka Marilyn Manson, rock singer-showman): My first article in my college (Broward Community College) newspaper, the Observer, was a review of that [Jane’s Addiction] show [at Woody’s on the Beach], headlined “Jane’s Addiction Returns to Shock Crowd at Woody’s.” Little did I know that there was a word in that headline that would go on to be used several thousand times to describe my music, and it wasn’t “woody.”72
DAVE JERDEN: When the record [Nothing’s Shocking] came out, the mainstream rock press just trashed it. Rolling Stone said, “this record is unlistenable.”73
TRENT REZNOR (leader, composer, producer, Nine Inch Nails): I really liked Nothing’s Shocking. I sampled a little of “Had a Dad” . . . the scream and the drum fill. And there’s also a guitar loop of that pattern going through the song.74
FLEA: I remember the first time I heard Nothing’s Shocking. Perry had just finished up recording and we were on our way to a friend’s house to watch the big Tyson-Spinks fight. On the way there Perry was like, “Oh, this is my new record, listen to it.” And then I realized what a great, great band they were. It was just a big, weird day. I heard Jane’s music for the first time, Tyson knocked Spinks out in the first round, and then I came home and got the call that Hillel [Slovak] was dead.
DAVE JERDEN: I went into a record store and asked this guy with glasses and a ponytail behind the counter if he had Nothing’s Shocking. And he looked at me and said, “Are you kiddin? I wouldn’t carry that piece of crap in this store.” I knew then we were either going to make a big belly-flop or we were really gonna do something.75
STEVEN BAKER: There were some limitations on the first Jane’s album. We didn’t have a video on MTV and it was not exactly what KROQ was playing at the time. There weren’t that many [alternative] stations across the United States. They didn’t mean as much. They didn’t have as good of numbers as they do now. Nothing’s Shocking did about 200-250,000 the first year.
DAVE JERDEN: Nothing’s Shocking was not a mainstream record, although eventually it found an audience all right [more than a million copies sold]. There’s not one person I talk to today who’s in their early thirties who didn’t listen to that record in college. Nevermind was a fucking classic record, and the press has marked that as the beginning of this big change in alternative becoming mainstream. But it wasn’t. Nothing’s Shocking was. It didn’t have the same sales, but it made the same cultural mark and it made it first.76
FLEA: [Jane’s music] is just massive and epic and deep and original with a bottomless groove and it’s ferociously violent, yet beautiful and relaxing, and the lyrics are great. Perry’s singing is great. The whole band is incredible. It’s just a moment in time that could never happen again.
CHRIS CUFFARO (photographer): Jane’s were [probably] the first band to ever have a full-on mosh pit at Madison Square Garden [since the Violent Femmes circa ’82, ’83 who had kids stage-diving into the pit]. They were so nervous about the pit getting out of hand. There were all these little mosh pits all over the place. Kids going nuts.
TED GARDNER: Jane’s Addiction was pre-barricade. Pre-security in front of the stage. So Cal-style punk stage diving and death metal mosh pit action were merging, like a new extreme sport for jocks coming into its own in a big way nationally. There was an interaction musically and physically between band and audience. We never had bodyguards. Just me and my guitar roadie.77
PERRY FARRELL [onstage at The Cotton Club, Atlanta, GA, 2.8.89]: Ya know, that, uh, bullshit about being thrown out of here for stage-diving is just merely bullshit. My bouncers won’t fuck with you if you don’t fuck with us, that’s the way it goes.
TED GARDNER: The kids that came to see Jane’s Addiction knew that if you got on stage you could dance, you could dive, you could do whatever, but you could never touch the musicians. And everyone respected that and that enabled the band to do what they were doing, which was to perform.78
AXL ROSE WANTING DAVE BAD
Circa April 1989
JOSH RICHMAN: Axl Rose became obsessed with Jane’s Addiction and wanting to get Dave in his band. Axl always wanted Navarro in the band. And never ended up getting him.
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Dave and I really liked Guns N’ Roses. We thought they were really great. We loved the way Slash played. He was the only guitar player in town as good as Dave. No one knew about Frusciante yet. Axl was also a really big Jane’s fan.
PERRY FARRELL: I hung out with Axl one night, he came to our show when we did the seven-night stand at John Anson Ford Theater.
DAVE NAVARRO: Axl called me up and said, “Dude, I had a dream, you and me were rocking on stage together.”79
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Axl was shy, quiet, and polite. He’d come backstage and say hi to Dave. He seemed to like him as a person, as much as he said he liked his guitar playing. We used to call Axl like “The Stalker.” He was calling Dave just about every single day and leaving messages on his machine. He would play a few of them for me.
DAVE NAVARRO: I wanted to take the job but I was afraid of looking foolish and being judged a sellout.80
DAN NAVARRO: Dave’s comment was, “I don’t want to go on the road and be Guns N’ Roses guitar player and play someone else’s parts and someone else’s songs. But if they want to make a record, that’s another thing.”
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Axl wanted Dave to take Izzy’s place. Dave, unfortunately, was strung out at the time and didn’t have a whole hell of a lot going on. He was like, “Dude, should I do it?” I said, “Go for it! It’s fucking Guns N’ Roses
, who gives a shit?” Finally, he said, “OK, I’ll do it.” They announced it on MTV, showed Dave’s picture and everything, but when the time came to start the tour, Dave just did a no show, he just bowed out. He was concerned about going on the road strung out with Guns N’ Roses, not knowing where to score. Dave just didn’t want to be the guy always going to his road manager, “Dude, get me some dope . . . now!”
Whores Page 21