Whores

by Brendan Mullen

  JOHNNY NAVARRO: They took a break. Everyone was fucked up. There were times that Dave didn’t even remember what he did. I would come to the studio where he was supposed to be recording his leads and bring dope.

  STEPHEN PERKINS: We’d try to pull [it] together and Dave would call and say, “Oh, I can’t make it.” Perry would show up two hours late. Because of drugs. They were just more into getting high than working.86

  DAVE NAVARRO: I have absolutely no recollection. I couldn’t even tell you who was in bad shape, but I’m certain I was one of the culprits.

  PERRY FARRELL: Me, too.

  TOM ATENCIO: Dave was in and out of rehab during the recording of Ritual . Nobody was visiting him. Nobody talked to him when he was in rehab. I was the only person who went to see him. They were totally dismissive.

  DAVE NAVARRO: My memory of recording Ritual lasts about five minutes. In my head, we spent five minutes in the studio.

  JOHNNY NAVARRO: There were nights where Dave threw up all the time. I used to go to work on heroin, so did Dave. As soon as you mainline you’ll never go back. Now this was fun because I’m a mainline junkie and Dave’s a mainline junkie and we’re just fucking junkies. When Ritual was made, Dave and I were full-blown mainline heroin addicts shooting dope every single day. Dave was also going to the methadone clinic. He was trying to maintain his intense level of usage, but it was all about do you have any? Yes. We started hanging out with this guy in a trailer park in Northridge, the dude was a sick hardcore junkie. We’re not talking about like weekend chippers, not people you meet after a show, not people that you’d go to their nice house in the Hollywood Hills to do a little dope. We’re talking about mainlining like every single morning 7 A.M., first thing you do when you wake up is get your fix, shoot it up and then figure out your day after that.

  PERRY FARRELL: Much has just been erased from my memory because I was loaded all the time . . . those days I don’t remember that well.

  ERIC AVERY: At the time I was clean and so I was kind of like what the fuck is this? What am I doing here? At the time we were doing Ritual I was taking astronomy courses at Santa Monica College.

  BAD MANAGEMENT WOES

  Circa January 1990

  CHARLEY BROWN: While the booking agency side was solid with Marc and Don, band management was a whole other pit of snakes. I could always tell when Perry was changing management. Whenever anyone said no to him he tried to fire them. We [Triple X] lasted the longest. Three years.

  MARC GEIGER: They went through seven managers in my lifespan, which is definitely a story unto itself.

  PERRY FARRELL: Gary Kurfirst managed the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, and Bob Marley. We wanted to be with his company because, once again, I wasn’t sure about the man, but I was sure about the artists.

  CHARLEY BROWN: Geiger said this was a once-in-a-lifetime band . . . right before he screwed us and set the band up with Gary Kurfirst.

  CASEY NICCOLI: Gary did absolutely nothing. He didn’t have to. So they had to fire him. . . .

  PERRY FARRELL: Here’s a guy on the East Coast and we’re on the West strung out and running wild. We don’t even know when the next paycheck is coming. We obviously badly needed help, and it’s our own damn fault I’ll admit, but if you’re taking ten percent for keeping us together then, goddammit, earn your ten percent.

  TED GARDNER: I was the original tour manager for Jane’s Addiction on the Nothing’s Shocking tour [when] the band’s current manager Gary Kurfirst was fired. Then Ron Lafitte came in for a couple of weeks and was fired.87

  STEVEN BAKER: It wasn’t well advised. Gary Kurfirst was the manager and all of a sudden it was Rob Kahane and Ron Lafitte.

  PERRY FARRELL: Ron was connected to a company by the name of Lippman-Kahane who saw that we were hurting. They said, “Look, we’re going to pick you up, clean you up.” I wasn’t interested in being clean. Next thing they knew I fled from rehab and I’m running around talking up my next big adventure, a movie in Peru, but their ambition was just to get me to piss in a cup weekly. Somebody wasn’t going to get their way, and I did not end up pissing in any cups. They were in the picture for maybe three weeks or . . . it could have been a year, I don’t remember them being around that long.

  STEVEN BAKER: They were finished with Gary in their minds [though not contractually], and they were moving on to Ron [Lafitte]. Ron was very involved with the band at that time, especially with Perry. Gary certainly had a lawsuit. You can’t just up and leave . . . he has a deal with the band. Gary was like, “Hey, I have a contract with you, I’m going to continue managing you. You can have that guy over there manage you . . . fine, if that’s what you want, but I’m going to continue getting what I’m supposed to get.”

  CASEY NICCOLI: And then they hired Tom Atencio. Tom had a couple of big English bands, like New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen.

  TOM ATENCIO: Kurfirst had New York arbitration in his contracts, so he proceeded to haul Perry’s ass in front of a labor arbitration court, where he played out the drama of the victim sayin’ in effect, “This fuckin’ kid is a junkie and a liar. I’m a New York businessman, I’ve done this and this and this, I’m a square shooter with ethics, your honor . . . exercising my rights to protect my interests . . . and this jack-off dope freak over here is just trying to weasel out of a very clear contract!” The labor board awarded Kurfirst full rights to his contract. Fortunately, I was able to cut a reasonable deal with him to let me have enough of a percentage so that Perry wouldn’t have to pay more than he should for management.

  ERIC AVERY: I wasn’t in on the legal proceedings surrounding the attempted canning of Gary Kurfirst. We sent Perry off full of vim and vigor. He was going to New York to show those litigators; instead he got his ass handed back to him tied in a bow. . . .

  STEVEN BAKER: We heard that Perry wept in court, that he broke down in tears during the arbitration hearing. . . .

  REBECCA AVERY: They were paying him [Kurfirst] a percentage for a long time. That was another episode where the whole band ended up having to pay for Perry’s mistakes.

  PERRY FARRELL: I hate the motherfucker [Kurfirst]. It’s very easy to point a finger at somebody who uses drugs—everybody frowns upon it—like calling someone a flag-burner. At the time I was using drugs way too much, but the reason was I was completely overworked. I was playing my ass off, more shows than we should have. I had a fractured rib, a broken ankle, a busted-up eye. We’re real physical live and need to be worked like an athletics club—a massage from time to time, a Jacuzzi, a day off. How’s your throat, how’re your calluses? The guy wasn’t around to take care of us. When I got off the road I was wrecked.88

  ROLLING STONE “IN BRIEF”: EX-MANAGER SUES

  Circa April 1990

  Gary Kurfirst, the former manager of Jane’s Addiction is suing the band, claiming it dumped him in violation of a three-year contract that wasn’t due to expire until August 1991. Kurfirst, who also manages Talking Heads, says in a suit filed in Manhattan’s State Supreme Court that he took the band from playing $1,000-a-night stands to gigs playing ten times as much. He also alleges that some band members have drug problems that resulted in “clouded judgement” when they began looking for new management. Kurfirst alleges that as of the suit’s January 25th filing date, lead singer Perry Farrell was enrolled in a Beverly Hills drug-rehab center and lead guitarist Dave Navarro was in a methadone program. Alan Mintz, the Los Angeles lawyer for Jane’s Addiction, says the band has “decided not to finalize any arrangement with a third party until we reach an amicable settlement with Gary.”89

  CASEY NICCOLI: Both sides knew Tom just wasn’t compatible either . . . both sides wanted out.

  STEVEN BAKER: And then Tom Atencio was gone and so finally Ted became manager and he continued right through the first Porno for Pyros record. . . .

  TED GARDNER: At the beginning of the Ritual record Perry said, “You’re now the manager.”90

  CASEY NICCOLI: Ted Gardner was Perry’s tour manager
and sidekick. He was on every tour and Perry trusted him. He’s this big Australian guy. Perry just asked him to be his manager.

  PERRY FARRELL: I met Ted on the back of my tour bus. He had a cold, a running nose, a hangover, and a three-day growth on his chin, and I liked him because he looked like he was a salt-of-the-earth guy, goodhumored, not afraid to punch a man out if he thought somebody was going to give him trouble, and for a number of years we had a great run of it. We’d drink champagne and talk about tomorrow on tour.

  REBECCA AVERY: Ted was a crazy guy. It was a tough job for him trying to keep these nuts somewhat in order.

  PERRY FARRELL: [The cover art] was made with chicken wire, papier-mâché, and we were living in neighborhoods that had these little Santerian curio shops. Bright on the eyes. Earthy. It hit me deep spiritually because of the beauty of the artistry.

  MODI FRANK: It was like Santería meets Mary Magdalen and Our Lady of Guadalupe. Catholic Mexican art meets Santería art. They would make a rosary around Mary surrounded by piñatas.

  PERRY FARRELL: I enjoy the way they gather things to make the shrines and fetishes they have in their homes. There’s a certain primal power there, even if you don’t understand it.91

  DAVE NAVARRO: The Santerian imagery was Perry’s idea. Whether or not he practiced it I don’t know; I certainly did not. But I was a fan of the imagery, and our stage ended up being very ornamental because of it.

  PERRY FARRELL: I was just drawn to the colors and the sly joke of it all. I also responded to the pageantry. I wanted to concentrate on things of value, the necessities of life, the things that make you cry in a film. These people used Christian symbols to goof on their captors because they didn’t want to get flagellated. They posed as Christians without giving up their true beliefs.92

  MODI FRANK: Exene [Cervenka of X] was more elaborate in her lyric sheets and inner sleeves with the Catholic imagery, which is half of Santería . . . basically Haitian voodoo with heavy Catholic iconography thrown in, right? Perry was more elaborate on stage. X would just bring a wooden cross and put it up there, but Perry had candles everywhere. There were never any conversations like, X used to do this or that. He was just coming from his own zone. He just reminded me of Exene in how much he controlled and executed his art.

  PERRY FARRELL: We loved Exene and her aesthetic.

  DAVE JERDEN: After we finally finished Nothing’s Shocking, I got a call from Warner Bros. saying, “We’re very concerned about this record.” And I’ll be damned if I didn’t get the same call after the second record.93

  PAUL V.: I remember everyone at Warners freaking out over the cover of Ritual. It was just laughable: three-way sex made out of papier-mâché? The second version had the freedom of expression clause from the Constitution.

  PERRY FARRELL: I turned in the cover artwork, and they said, “Oh, boy, here we go again!” [Warner-Reprise Records CEO] Mo Ostin and [Warner Bros. Records president] Lenny [Waronker] said people were getting arrested for selling albums that any local law-enforcement type decided was “pornographic.” They said retailers were so cautious that the record could wind up selling 1,000 copies. But I refused to budge when they wanted to airbrush out the male genitals. It’s laughable by today’s standards, but it was a scary time.

  STEVEN BAKER: Who wanted to end up like 2 Live Crew? Their records were vanishing overnight from the chains. Clerks were getting busted for selling them to minors. For Perry it was the worst thing ever. How could we not use his artwork?

  TOM ATENCIO: When we delivered the record, the sales department was aghast. They knew they couldn’t get it into the major stores, especially their big crosshair target: the mega-mall outlets. I said to Perry, “You’re going to have to change the cover.”

  STEVEN BAKER: I remember this really emotional meeting in Mo’s office. Our sales guy says, “You know that you’re not going to be able to get in all the stores?”

  PAUL V.: I remember going through that with them. You’re really not approaching this right. You’re approaching it from a greed level. The controversy will help sell more records because now people will know that there’s a cover they can’t see so they’re just going to want it all the more. Work it to your advantage.

  STEVEN BAKER: We finally decided on two covers. Let people who want to buy the original cover buy that, and people who were frightened can buy the other. We came up with this idea of putting the First Amendment on the cover just as this bland document. Very few people bought it. Most people bought Perry’s version.

  TOM ATENCIO: Perry took the record and wrapped it in the First Amendment and told me, “This will be a collector’s item because when the kids find out what my artwork really is, they’ll return these fuckers and they’ll go and get my original. Everybody that’s stopping this is going to get stiffed.” And he was right. Everybody ended up carrying the original artwork by popular demand. The fucking Constitution copies became collector’s items.

  PERRY FARRELL: I only agreed to do a second cover if they’d guarantee to run the original uncensored. Having two different album covers started off as a compromise, but I ended up liking it. I could verbally abuse those people who stopped growing up at the age when you first start dealing with your genitals.94

  DAVID J: I’ve always felt a psychic link with Perry. One time when I was in New York, during the time of Jane’s third album, I got this mad urge to call Perry. It was like 4 A.M. I thought, “There’s something about this bird, I’ve just got to ask him what he’s doing. I think there’s some connection.” So I called him up and asked, “Hey, Perry what are you doing?” And he said, “I’m designing the cover of the next album.” I said, “Does it involve a bird?” There’s silence and he said, “Man, I just put a bird into the picture!” Then I told him why I called. When the album came out, sure enough, there’s a bird and you see three of them in bed. There’s also a tribute to Love & Rockets in the same artwork . . . a heart and a rocket. We went to see Jane’s play in London at the Brixton Academy and he had the original piece of work—this enormous life-sized thing—suspended above the stage. It was all there: the bird, the heart, and the rocket.

  DAVE JERDEN: I went to this WEA convention and Mo Ostin gets up to the podium and says something to the effect of the whole world has changed. Mo Ostin is like the Wizard of Oz, he’s like God in the record industry, and he’s saying, “You guys have made a record that has changed everything.”95

  TOM ATENCIO: The first single from Ritual was already out when I came on. Warners was marketing it as a hard-rock record. I said to them, “Look, this is not a typical hard rock band. This is really an alternative thing. The station who should be playing it isn’t KLOS. It should be KROQ with the new emerging format that is alternative radio.” We fired everybody around it, fired the publicist, fired everyone. Brought in Heidi Robinson to do publicity. I rethought what the record company was doing. I said Perry had to do a lot of press, which he hadn’t done much of before. Perry was completely cooperative with me.

  TED GARDNER: Ritual de lo Habitual was recorded and delivered, and then the band was unhappy for various reasons and it was decided that they would tour and then break up and go their separate ways. That was between the band and myself. No one else knew. We all picked the places we wanted to go—Australia, New Zealand, Yugoslavia, Austria, Vienna. We played Rome at Easter and stayed in this quaint, beautiful hotel two blocks from the Vatican and in the café next door they were selling espresso and heroin. . . .96

  THE MAKING OF GIFT

  Circa 1990-93

  CASEY NICCOLI: Gift was meant to be a full-length feature film. It was like our Gift to the fans or whatever. We had no script. We just had an idea of what we wanted to do. It was going to be reality documentary and fantasy mixed together. Perry and I costarred and codirected it.

  STEVEN BAKER: We [Warner Bros.] funded Gift. We got a video or so out of that. And so it paid for itself. We went half with the band’s management.

  TOM ATENCIO: The record company was
a way for him to finance recording and the making of his home videos. The band consequently became terribly in debt to the label. To cover the advances for the filming, Perry even mortgaged their mechanical royalties from the publishing side. The band was making nothing from the record company or their publishing, but they were making good money on the road. They really didn’t give a shit as long as they were playing and had something coming in.