PERRY FARRELL: I was in a testy mood. Dave was sick and wanted to bail. He just didn’t wanna play anymore.
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Somehow he’d bailed out on the bus and all the transportation people that were going to go to Irvine Meadows. So he calls me, he’s like, “This is Dave . . . dude, I’ve got a little situation.” He’s like, “Can you and Arty pick us up?” Sure. My friend Arty Nelson who’s only got sixty days of new sobriety picks me up in his Jeep Wrangler. We drive to Westwood to pick up Dave and Tania. Dave comes out wearing a cape with a hood over his dreadlocks and Tania with her fucking PVC pants and her boots and her huge fucking dreads. As we’re driving from Westwood to Irvine I break it down to Arty that we have to make a stop; so all four of us drive into Pico-Union and score some shit there on the street, and Dave fixes and I fix and Tania fixes, not Arty.
PETE WEISS: Perry was like “Dave’s too sick to go on, how are you guys holding over there?” I brought him a little bit of Persian to get him on. I said, “Dave, you know you gotta cut it with lemon?” So he has someone bring up twenty cut lemons. I said, “No, Dave . . . just a little teeny bit.” I was like, “Dude . . . how can you know you’re going to be on tour and not have it together?”
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Dave was doing three or four grams a day, sometimes more. We’re talking up to 700 dollars of dope in one day. I didn’t have the resources or the time to be able to do that. Dave would just shoot nonstop. He was addicted to bangin’ as much as he was to getting loaded. He really liked—any junkie does—the fucking ritual of fixing. He liked it so much that he would fix and then he would go smoke a cigarette and then he would come back and fix again. He’d end up with these incredible fucking tracks down his arm. “Your arm’s like hamburger,” I’d say. “Dude, what are you doing? You can’t get any more high.” He’d say, “I just like the fix.” There was always the risk that he would OD and he did a bunch of times.
DAVE NAVARRO: Ultimately I had to leave during our performance, and I don’t remember who got physical with whom first, but I’ve since apologized to Perry because I feel that I was responsible for shattering something that he’d worked so hard on. The opening night was a rough night for me to behave so irresponsibly. . . .
ERIC AVERY: Perry and David got into a fight onstage and it cut short our set. Dave was out of his mind on Valium and shit and one of the two bumped into the other one and the other got upset and so then they started taking runs bumping into each other. Then it turned into literally them entangled falling off the side of the stage fighting.
CHRIS CUFFARO: Toward the end of the set, Dave just snapped and threw his guitar into the audience and stormed off, knocking over stacks. Perry walked off after the song was finished and they just started wailing on each other, punching each other out. Ted finally jumped in and broke it up. We didn’t know if they were going to come out for an encore. The crew reset the stuff back up and they came out again and started playing, but then Dave started body-slamming Perry while he was trying to sing. Dave knocked over his stacks again, took his guitar, and launched it into space . . . again.
TOM ATENCIO: Ted was weeping like a baby. He was blubbering, “It’s all blown up in smoke, everything that I’ve been working for, for two years. The whole fucking tour is going into the shitter.”
PERRY FARRELL: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with losing your temper, you can always make up.
ERIC AVERY: I was nearly clean and I was like, “This is the first night?”
HENRY ROLLINS: It was so wonderful to play and then get to see the Butthole Surfers and Ice-T back to back, and then later on, see Jane’s Addiction—every night.
ERIC AVERY: I had a blast because I would go out and play on the encore of “Head Like a Hole” with NIN, and I’d play one song with the Rollins band earlier in the day, sometimes I played drums with the Buttholes.
HENRY ROLLINS: The highlight [of the first Lollapalooza] for me was Jane’s on the second night in Dallas, it was one of the greatest nights of live music in the last century. Ask anyone who was there.
TOM ATENCIO: The only real Lollapalooza was the first one. I think that was the genius one where you had a really eclectic mix of counterculture. Not a single cheesy band on the bill. There was no crass commercialism then. It was fun. Thankfully, we also made a shitload of money.
INGER LORRE: Dave always liked older women. He had a thing about Siouxsie Sioux. . . .
ERICA PAIGE: Dave was hanging out mostly with Siouxsie and Budgie on that tour. He looked like death. As a friend I was really worried. It was like watching someone dying, literally. He had a lack of regard for life and was having no joy anywhere. Dave’s a really smart, funny guy and it was like looking at this empty, hollow person in the body of this amazing, vibrant guy I once knew.
CHRIS CUFFARO: Dave was always in his closed dark world behind sunglasses. They were all in their separate little worlds. Stephen’s energy was the glue that kept it all together. Eric just came and did the shows and left. He didn’t want to be around. If you’re trying to stay clean, the last place you want to be is hanging around Jane’s Addiction backstage before a show!
ERICA PAIGE: [Dave’s fully blown addiction] wasn’t anything that was secretive. Once I was house-sitting for him and went to pull out a box of cereal and syringes fell on my head. In the van driving to the show, it wasn’t being hidden at all. Someone was sent out to buy bleach. It had reached the point that everybody knew it was happening. When I walked into this hotel room [in Seattle] everybody was racing to get ice to revive him.
TOM ATENCIO: About a third of the way through Lollapalooza it wasn’t just about the bands, it was this whole countercultural event that was coming to fucking Des Moines, Iowa. We were being interviewed by the morning news on television, the evening news, major TV network stuff. It wasn’t Rolling Stone. It wasn’t fucking Podunk radio. Lollapalooza became a national news event about getting a tattoo and piercing and talking about gay rights.
PETE WEISS: Every night Perry would come out there with his bottle of wine, the place was always electric.
TOM ATENCIO: That mix of smack, coke, and red wine was a little volatile. You never knew where it was going to go.
PERRY FARRELL: The only way I can see that excess is against nature is that maybe when you get intoxicated, you can get sick. Decadence and the back-to-nature impulse are about freedom. You feel free when you hit the great outdoors, and you feel free when you get intoxicated.
STOP!
Circa Fall 1991
PERRY FARRELL (Head shaved to black stubble . . . to a Dutch audience in Amsterdam): I am a Jew by birth! Thanks for hiding my ancestors during the war! No, really, if it weren’t for you people, I wouldn’t be here right now. The folks back home asked me to say thanks. Hey, this is not a Nazi look. This is how we looked in the concentration camps. [Utter silence]. That’s a joke! My name is Perry and I’m into Satanism and sports. That’s another joke—I don’t like sports! I guess you don’t understand my sense of humor. Hey! Do something up there! It either comes out of your asshole, or it gives you cancer. You might as well laugh it out, right? Oh, another joke. I think it’s funny. But then, I’m dying. . . .
ERIC AVERY: I was so fed up I decided to split. I told Dave first because he was my best friend in the band.
DAVE NAVARRO: We were very, very close in the band. I still consider Eric a friend.
ERIC AVERY: I said, “Dave, I’m splitting after this leg.” And he went, “Oh, okay, cool. Me, too.” And then we ran down the hallway and told our tour manager. So the guy says, “I want to talk to you about doing Japan before you split.” I said, “I don’t need to talk to you about it. I’m out. I’m not interested in doing Japan or anything else. I’m done.” We just did one last show in Honolulu, Hawaii [September 27, 1991].
DAVE NAVARRO: It’s gone too far. Our singer is somebody that I don’t get along with or agree with. I respect his right to believe what he believes, it’s just not what I’m into, creatively. There’s
a lot of people working with us and for us, and I don’t want to screw them over. We’ve been doing it for five years and it’s gotten to where my heart’s not in it anymore. I’m leaving and I’m going to do my own thing. I [told my tour manager] I’m out of here at the end of Lollapalooza.111
PERRY FARRELL: I didn’t know Dave and Eric were bailing, but I sure knew that I was.
STEPHEN PERKINS: I knew the band was coming to an end, so I just kind of accepted it. We planned on doing Lollapalooza and then breaking up in Seattle, but we were contracted to finish the tour in Australia and Hawaii. The hardest thing was going to Australia and playing small clubs right after Lolla. It would have been much cooler to break up in Seattle in front of 30,000 people. But we did it, ’cause we never break agreements.
PERRY FARRELL: We weren’t brothers, we weren’t tight, we weren’t a team. I felt that to stay in a situation like that was bullshit. It would be doing it for the money and for the fame and glory. And believe it or not, it ain’t worth that much to me. I want to be working with people that I get off on.
CHRIS CUFFARO: When we were in Hawaii for the last show Tanya [Goddard, Dave’s then-current girlfriend] came down to the bar where I was hanging out with some people. We were like, “Where’s Dave?” She said, “Ah, you know, he’s in his room, he doesn’t want to come out. It’s too bright.” There’s Eric out on the beach with his girlfriend swimming and snorkeling. Tanya was tired of being with an addict all the time who never wanted to do anything else. I think she left Dave and got clean soon after that. . . .
TED GARDNER: Jane’s broke up between tours, last show in Hawaii. We played on the Port Authority in this building without air conditioning. Perry did the whole set naked. Stephen was naked. Only Dave and Eric still had their clothes on . . . . 112
CHRIS CUFFARO: After the first song Perry took his pants off backstage and came back out butt naked. We were all just sitting there waiting for cops to stop this. We’re all like, going, “Any minute, any minute now . . .” and then another song goes by, “They’re going to come now!” Still nothing. It was so hot Eric was standing in this pool of sweat, Stephen got naked, too, behind his drums.
PAUL V.: Perry got totally naked and it was just the right moment. It was the most honest naked moment. It was like, “This is it folks, here it is, The End.”
Perry shows all during Jane’s final night in Hawaii. (Chris Cuffaro)
CHRIS CUFFARO: After they did “Trip Away,” the house lights came on and Perry came back out and went on this tirade about making a difference and then he jumped into the audience. For me, that was like the last breath of the original Jane’s Addiction we knew and loved. (Chris Cuffaro)
ERIC AVERY: That last night [in Hawaii] was the closest that Perry and I got to a fistfight.
PERRY FARRELL: We just didn’t take care of each other.
PAUL V.: That was a very hard night. It was very bizarre. It was sort of like, OK, when the curtain goes down I’m not going to be able to see my favorite band again. I’m not going to be able to hear these amazing songs booming out of a sound stage again. I didn’t talk to the band. I just sort of watched the show because I knew what they must have been going through. As a fan it was one thing, for the band I’m sure it was a whole other.
DAVE NAVARRO: There were times when Perry and I literally hated each other. We got into fistfights offstage. We once got into a fight on stage during a performance in Australia. But even with that much animosity and hatred flowing between and around us, I still felt really connected to him and everybody else when we were playing music.113
YOKO ONO [summer 2004]: I was exposed to Perry Farrell and his incredible talent by my son, Sean, who brought me Jane’s Addiction and made me listen to it. My bones relaxed immediately. It was my kind of music, totally. It was genius. The next thing I knew Jane’s Addiction was over. Oh, well. Something that was so magical could never be repeated. One night, he graced my show in L.A. and jammed with me and the band. I felt honored. He turned out to be a very nice guy as well. I’m still addicted to the memory of Jane’s Addiction. Go back and listen. It’s one power house. Rocking Schoenberg . . . that’s what it is. (Heide Foley, courtesy RU Sirius, Mondo 2000 magazine)
PERRY FARRELL: I [became] the hero and this scapegoat at the same time. I was hated for breaking up Jane’s Addiction, although I was the one who created it. It’s something I had to do.114
MARC GEIGER: Perry did much more contemplation after the band broke up. There was so much in the short life of Jane’s Addiction which was also clouded by heavy drug use, constant change of management, and all these other things. There was never time for Perry to sit down and reflect while Jane’s was alive.
PERRY FARRELL: The last night I went off the deepest end a fella can go. We’re talking about a ravishing, young hottie showing up with a doctor’s bag in her hands and a wink in her eye, who wasn’t really a doctor, if you know what I mean . . . nudge, nudge. And so I spent, I don’t know how many ecstatic days on the paradise island of Hawaii getting high and feasting on her beauty. [Afterwards] I remember getting off the plane and feeling really light and free. I felt like, man, all that big swirl of energy and attention and work, there’s nothing to it anymore. And there I was on the curb, just waiting for a cab . . . thinking man, that was some chapter, you know. Hell of a chapter.
EPILOGUE: THE JANE’S AFTERMATH LOLLA ’92 (THE SECOND YEAR)
Circa Spring 1992
TED GARDNER: It was Geiger who said, “Hey, why don’t we do this again?” And everyone went, “OK, whatever.” ’91 was the risk, ’92 was the juggernaut. In ’92, this big-time promoter said, “Play my venue and I’ll get you all Corvettes.”115
JEFF AMENT: We [Pearl Jam] had already toured for like a year and they approached us and asked if we wanted to do it. We found out that Soundgarden was doing it and the Chili Peppers were doing it, too, who we had been on tour with. It sounded like a total blast. Lollapalooza at that point was still a brand-new thing for America, the big festival thing. It was an exciting time.
TED GARDNER: We didn’t know Pearl Jam, but we liked the music. We didn’t know Soundgarden, but we liked the band. Seattle scene bands were exploding everywhere, it was a no-brainer to book ’em on there. . . .116
CHRIS CORNELL: A lot of people bought tickets to Lollapalooza ’92 because it was Lollapalooza, not necessarily because Pearl Jam or Soundgarden were on the bill, or Ministry, or Ice Cube, or the Chili Peppers, although it was a moment when Pearl Jam was really blowing up, and Ministry was having their biggest record ever. It’s hard to say. Would the numbers have suffered if we weren’t on it? I’m sure it wouldn’t have been as strong. The idea was to have these vital new bands, but at the same time bands that had a draw, and there just happened to be a bunch of ’em at that time that had roots in the Seattle band scene.
TED GARDNER: In ’92 Lollapalooza really blew up. We put more thought into the music. Five of us were doing A&R. We were looking at young bands that had solid local followings. The Chili Peppers who’d left EMI for Warner Bros. had known Perry for many years and now they were starting to happen. They had a very strong following in L.A. and other parts of California and now they were starting to break out nationally in bigger heartland markets. It was all starting to come together with radio.117
CHRIS CORNELL: Lolla ’92 was one of my favorite tours ever. It was very fraternal. We knew a lot of people on the bill. We knew most of the Chili Peppers, of course we knew Pearl Jam, and we knew Al Jorgensen, whose band is Ministry. Almost all of the Ministry guys were in The Blackouts, which is a Seattle band, which was a huge influence on our scene for a long time.
ANTHONY KIEDIS: The ’92 lineup was way too male, way too guitar-oriented [for my tastes]. I wanted [the all female band] L7 on the bill, and everybody in the agency just scoffed. They said, “They don’t mean anything.” What do you mean? They rock, and they’re girls. It was upsetting to me.
MARC GEIGER: There just wasn’t that much greed at the b
eginning. There was never any corporate sponsorship in terms of maximizing the dollars. And so the band split the money the first year because they were a group. During the ongoing years of Lollapalooza Perry made a lot of money, but the group didn’t, and that may have been another reason Eric was so alienated. He was also a person who was becoming clean and starting to see things with a bit more clarity.
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