Whores

  PERRY FARRELL: I told Warners I’d give them six or seven videos if they’d let me make a film. They said, it’s a bargain. My ambition was to go to Peru, to film and surf down there and of course get into all kinds of trouble, but they wouldn’t allow us to go [there]. And I think they probably made the right decision! If I was trying to make a living with a group of fellows or ladies I wanted to work with, I sure wouldn’t have chosen us.

  ALLAN WACHS (filmmaker, videographer, producer of Gift): I was brought on board by Warners as producer of Gift. I was the pragmatist whose job was to ensure Perry and Casey’s creative vision was realized as much as possible within the bounds of reality. Almost from the get-go there was a kind of antagonism where they looked to me as some kind of formidable, repressive authority figure. I was the eyes and ears of the record company, the people signing the checks. There were major head trips. They had their own scenario as to who I was and what I was trying to do.

  CASEY NICCOLI: We’d already hired these two goons who presented themselves as seasoned filmmakers but they were just fans who really hadn’t done anything. We weren’t involved in the film world enough to know that until it was too late. It ended up a nightmare, because we didn’t really get along with them. They kept trying to say that it was their movie.

  PERRY FARRELL: They gave us a gang of cameras, and a van full of camera equipment, and these two crazy young filmmakers who were making videos at the time were eager to jump into the fun that we were up for.

  ALLAN WACHS: They just struck me as hanger-on types with their own ambitions who were using Perry for their own ends. Maybe they were good for shooting second camera . . .

  PERRY FARRELL: We wanted to do it Spinal Tap-style, and we’d sew the whole thing together as we went. We figured we knew enough trippy people that it was gonna be a hoot.

  ALLAN WACHS: Perry and Casey gave me an outline and ran down what the story was. It was pretty loose, but it definitely wasn’t random either. Many scenes were improv’d, although they did have set goals for what each scenario would accomplish. The shooting concept was mostly setting up in some interesting environment, documentary style, with minimal lighting, no huge crew, and just allowing things to happen.

  CASEY NICCOLI: Perry and I had moved into our own place in Venice, this little two-bedroom house, and we filmed most of it there. It was intended to be very intimate and personal, to do with what happens to people who are under the influence of a lot of drugs.

  ALLAN WACHS: The basic story is about a couple who have a death pact with each other and then the guy comes home and finds his wife OD’d and goes through a major quandary of whether he wants to honor that pact. To live on or to die alongside her? In doing that he goes through the backstory of the relationship, traveling around Mexico, scoring drugs on the street and all the rest of it.

  PERRY FARRELL: We were able to go to Mexico. We got a show down there for Jane’s to cover our travel costs.

  ALLAN WACHS: My main concern was that I didn’t want to take drug addicts to Mexico. They’d keep saying, “Oh no, we’re clean, we just got off rehab, we’re fine.” It was quite dangerous being an unconnected junkie down there, and I just didn’t want to be put in that situation. It also wasn’t safe for the people I was going to be bringing down.

  “CLASSIC GIRL” GOES TO MEXICO

  STEVEN BAKER: We got a video for “Classic Girl” out of Gift, the wedding scene with Perry.

  PERRY FARRELL: Mexico is wild. The people are hot-blooded, the weather is hot, the food is hot. The art is great, too.97

  CASEY NICCOLI: We went to Mexico and filmed our wedding in Catemaco, Veracruz. It’s a big witchcraft town, a very mystical place. We got married there by a Santerian priestess. We had to be cleansed before she would agree to it. They roll the egg over your body. And then they break the egg open and if it’s black, it means there’s evil in you.

  ALLAN WACHS: In the jungle, two hours south of Veracruz, just a little village on this lake was a real witchcraft center on this remote ranchera. The Santerian priestess, Isabelle Aderi, did the egg test on both of them. When she opened the egg, I saw a bloody mess, which means a lot of toxins. She said, “You guys have to clean your act up if I’m going to marry you.” We were planning to come back in three or four weeks for the wedding and she did a cleansing of them. Her son was a qualified medical doctor, MD-equivalent, but also this kind of psychic doctor. Her father, Oscar Aderi, was a well-known psychic healer.

  PERRY FARRELL: The Warners people were scared shitless. The movie cost $500,000. Or $450,000 and going upwards fast. Considering the shape we were in, that was a lot of dough when promo video clips were made for just $80,000.

  ALLAN WACHS: Casey almost died in Mexico City. She was drinking beer and shooting tequila with the guys and she went into convulsions and had to be rushed to hospital. The emergency room nurse came out and said, “I can’t find a vein anywhere on her entire body!” Casey was just like totally shot up everywhere. Everything was collapsed. Her arms and face were just oozing with pus-filled scratches and bruises. . . .

  CASEY NICCOLI: I was on drugs and was not in my right mind. Neither was Perry.

  ALLAN WACHS: They were so lucky to have the crew that they did. I got really good people for them. I don’t think they realized any of it. I was basically dealing with inexperienced people trying to get a finished product that could potentially be shown to a mass market, further complicated by the fact that Perry and Casey weren’t always totally forthcoming about what they wanted to do and some of their hangers-on would do weird things like try to steal the film package from the production office.

  PERRY FARRELL: At one point we were literally on the lam with the cameras. They were sending people to repo them, so we just hijacked the gear and took off in a biplane to this island off the coast of Mexico. We were basically filming on the road to get all the ideas we needed before they finally caught up with us and took the cameras away.

  ALLAN WACHS: The higher-ups at Warners weren’t sending out cops to repo their cameras. It was basically me trying to keep tabs on the production. People would come around our production office and try to break in to steal the cameras. We knew some of the equipment was in the hands of drug addicts and people who didn’t really know how to use it. One camera just didn’t come back. One of my favorite moments during the concert in Mexico City was watching these two joker hanger-on guys shooting B cameras onstage. We’d have runners giving them mags when they’d run out of film and you’d be watching to see how they were doing. You’d be tapping these guys on the shoulder and they’d be looking at Perry and they’d say, “Get away, get away . . . I’m shooting!” But there was no film in the camera.

  PERRY FARRELL: We just kept on filming it, [until] . . . WB finally says, cut these guys off, end this nightmare now . . . they’d even assigned an additional camera team to us, to make sure that we got something.

  ALLAN WACHS: When I came back from Mexico, I was done. I didn’t want to have anything more to do with it. Jonathan and Valerie took over postproduction. . . .

  JONATHAN DAYTON (filmmaker, videographer): On some level, Gift was a little bit like Apocalypse Now. They went into the jungle and they made this movie. They came out of the jungle and had all this footage but they were fed up with each other.

  VALERIE FARIS (filmmaker, videographer): Perry hated the producer that Warner Brothers had hired so much. There was such bad blood they said there’s no way he can finish this, maybe Jonathan and Valerie should come in.

  JONATHAN DAYTON: The producer didn’t like them and they didn’t like him.

  ALLAN WACHS: After they came back from Mexico, they shot Been Caught Stealing and the concert at the Hollywood Palladium with Jonathan and Valerie. We were already so far behind schedule as far as having anything to coincide with the release of their album that deadlines didn’t matter anymore. I would have loved to see it come out a couple of years earlier when it was more timely, but overall, I think the film came out as good as it could, a
mazing considering all the adversity!

  CASEY NICCOLI: It took forever to get it out.

  ALLAN WACHS: There was a lot of footage. . . .

  PERRY FARRELL: Now we were left to edit it.

  VALERIE FARIS: Once Perry saw that we were benign and weren’t going to try to take it over, that we just wanted to help them, things got more relaxed.

  JONATHAN DAYTON: They just needed somebody to help them get it together. We set them up at the Holiday Inn in Santa Monica where they were living. We bought them a deck and a TV so they could log the footage . . . we were basically just assisting.

  ERIC ZUMBRUNNEN (film editor, edited Gift): I got pulled into working with Perry and Casey when they were transferring the film to video. We would work a little bit on Gift, intermittently, between the videos and touring. It was very sporadic. I’d go to their hotel in Santa Monica and work for a week or so there and then at other random places all over town, whenever they were off the road I remember one time waiting eight hours for them to show up. With Been Caught Stealing Casey didn’t even show up for the first three days.

  PERRY FARRELL: We installed one of those Avids into the tour bus, and every night we’d be editing the tapes on the highway to the next city. That’s why it took so long.

  ERIC ZUMBRUNNEN: Perry and Casey would work on stuff while they were away. They’d just send the tape to me and I’d put it together, basically following what they did and then finishing it up. They did the Classic Girl video that way.

  ALLAN WACHS: It took three years to complete Gift because they’d keep losing the offline tapes.

  VALERIE FARIS: We never experienced the fuck-up part of Perry, really. For the most part, he was just so full of incredible ideas and so much fun, always sharply focused knowing for the most part exactly what he wanted to do.

  ERIC ZUMBRUNNEN: Perry was a really nice guy. Casey was really nice and during that whole process I could see their relationship deteriorating. They might be having an argument or something that would throw our whole workday out of whack. There certainly were times when people were passed out or not showing up and maybe not the most lucid they could have been. They would have creative differences, too, but it wasn’t at all a horrible experience from my perspective. It was mostly something really fun to work on.

  JONATHAN DAYTON: Allan Wachs was the overall producer, and Eric Zumbrunnen’s genius as an editor was that it all flowed and made sense in the end.

  ERIC ZUMBRUNNEN: People I know that had never done hard drugs, were fairly repulsed by the explicit drug usage parts. Perry’s cooking it up and talking on a voice-over about how he could write a whole album in a night. Then there’s blood in the syringe and the other gross-out stuff with Casey shooting up while she’s talking on the phone. It’s just unabashed. They didn’t hide anything. They seemed to be living it and were completely fine with representing it on film, adamant about it even. Some people would ask if Gift was glamorizing drug use and I would say, “No way!” It certainly didn’t try to make it seem exciting and cool and rock ’n’ roll. It made it all seem so very mundane, so banal . . . and very, very dirty, which, as any junkie will tell you, is what addiction is really all about. Look at how scuzzy their place was, how messed up their health was. It didn’t romanticize it like Drugstore Cowboy did, but they did seem to have a sense of humor about it; it doesn’t seem like they’re trying too hard to be serious or overly arty, even though there are some very serious things about it.

  ALLAN WACHS: Perry possibly intended Gift as some kind of bizarre morality tale. Rather than saying, “Go out and get high and shoot up drugs,” Casey dies in the story, and he gets hauled off by cops. It’s not like there’s no adverse consequences to their lifestyle. Some of it was pretty brutal. Gift de-glamorizes the whole dope-shooting trip, making it the nauseating ritual it really is. They were slipping back and forth between their own addictions throughout, but credit them with trying hard to say something real about it. I wasn’t there as a censor or some sort of moral judge. People will figure that out for themselves. They’ll want to see it or they won’t want to see it. They’ll want to release it or they won’t want to release it.

  CASEY NICCOLI: We wanted it released in art theaters. In the end, the Warners guys decided to put it out on video without even releasing it.

  ERIC ZUMBRUNNEN: The record company’s point of view was always that it was going straight to video, but Perry and Casey really lobbied hard for a theatrical release . . . they got a week at Sunset 5.

  CASEY NICCOLI: By the time that film was finished, we weren’t together anymore. It took so much out of us.

  PERRY FARRELL: I wouldn’t call the movie the reason that we broke up, but it puts a very, very undue stress on a person to come through with art guaranteed on a deadline. . . .

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: I saw a rough cut of Gift in the early days, like a few scenes from this work in progress. I told Perry I had some music that’s the same vibe as his movie and he said you should bring it over to the studio. We listened and it went perfectly with this other scene I hadn’t seen yet that had no music—the scene with the crawling ants. It looked like I had scored the music to this movie, but the weird thing was I’d already written it and it just fit perfect. Somehow we were on the same wavelength again. There was another part where I play a typical rock ’n’ roll kind of bend and that’s right where you see the poster that says, rock ’n’ roll will kill you. . . .

  THE RITUAL TOUR

  August 1990-September 1991

  ERIC AVERY: I was clean at this point. I felt so apart from the rest of them. I just had this sense of why am I even in this band anymore? What’s the point?

  TED GARDNER: At the beginning of the [Ritual] tour Eric was definitely going to get clean and he was going to stay clean. Everyone else was still using their brains out—not Stephen—Stephen never did heroin.98

  ERICA PAIGE: There were times where David and Eric were really close, and there were times where no one wanted to talk to anybody. Who was hanging out with who would keep switching. Eric was sincerely trying to make some better changes in his life . . . and if you’re planning on getting clean and staying that way, you reassess every area that is around you, the band being one of them.

  ERIC AVERY: Perry still always thought I was trying to sabotage him in ways that just didn’t cross my mind. I was talking to some guy in a bookstore who asked me about the new record, and he said, “What do you think of it?” And I said, “Well, I think it’s a little overproduced actually. I prefer Nothing’s Shocking.” And it turned out that guy was the fucking gossip columnist for BAM magazine, or something, and he goes and quotes me. Then I get this cryptic weird call where Perry’s saying, “We’re gonna have a meeting to see if you’re still in the band.” I was really scared and upset. When I get there Dave and Stephen have no idea what’s going on.

  Drinkin’ Wine Spodee Odee. Pass that bottle o’er here. (Chris Cuffaro)

  STEPHEN PERKINS: The Ritual tour lasted thirteen months, ending in Lollapalooza, and that was the end of the band, basically. Communication between Perry and Eric was gone.

  TOM ATENCIO: Perry and Eric were just never going to patch it up.

  PERRY FARRELL: The thirteen-month tour behind Ritual was half the reason we wound up unable to stand each other.

  ERIC AVERY: Casey was always trying to build bridges. I remember talking to her solo and she was sort of doing the “You know, he really respects you” spiel. And I was like, “I respect him, too.”

  Eric Avery on epic bass. (Chris Cuffaro)

  She was really trying to get us each to see the other’s side of things, the other part where we still had affection and respect for each other.

  REBECCA AVERY: It was getting pretty clear that they weren’t going to be able to stay together. They were going to have to get a divorce. It was like a marriage of convenience. Especially at the end. The closest of us knew that this was it. They weren’t announcing it, but it was like let’s just do these last dates and jus
t agree to do that and part ways.

  BOB FORREST: I saw their last gig at Irvine Meadows at the end of Lollapalooza. They were just awesome. And they weren’t even talking to each other anymore. I love things about bands like that! Eric was standing over one way and Perry walked on another way and Dave was already on the other side. Three humans that don’t talk to each other, but as soon as they hit the opening chords of “Three Days” it was magic, just unbelievable.