Whores

by Brendan Mullen

  TED GARDNER: There was a sense of elitism. We felt that we could do what we wanted and have the bands that we wanted and we weren’t going to be dictated to by anybody. We never took corporate sponsorship. It was a case of let’s sink or swim on what we believe to be good bands, not what we think is going to be commercially successful. We never sat down and said can we sell more tickets? How can we make more money? Let’s put another dollar on the ticket. We were very much about the music and bringing it to the attention of a lot of people. Radio started to change. MTV started to change.118

  LOLLA ’95

  LEE RANALDO: In some ways, the tour [Sonic Youth] headlined in ’95 killed Lollapalooza because I don’t think it was as full as some of the others. We had a lot to do with who was on it. We were really happy with the bill, the Jesus Lizard, Pavement, and Beck. Maybe it got to be too much to sustain it. Maybe Perry got tired of dealing with it.119

  TED GARDNER: We made money every year. Some years we made more than others, but we never lost. Never stiffed a promoter. Every band got paid, all the crew got paid, and I cashed a check at the end of the tour, as did Perry, as did William Morris.120

  PERRY FARRELL: Finally Ted just stopped caring. Or I just stopped caring by my behavior. The worst thing that happened for me was that I lost the respect of the people who worked around me. And they decided to make all the decisions without me in mind. I had no chance to balance the show out. That’s when the art got lost.

  MARC GEIGER: We also had different views on Lollapalooza’s historic importance. Perry saw it as a creative outcropping of Jane’s being able to put on their best carnival experience. Lollapalooza had a lot to do with the ending of Jane’s. Don and myself just thought Lollapalooza was something much bigger than Perry’s “carnival” experience.

  TED GARDNER: After the seventh year I was going, “Enough already, I don’t want to do this anymore.” And Perry had also reached that point. Marc was gone already, the dynamic had changed. We got lazy, we got fat. We forgot what the core of Lollapalooza was. We started to look at how can we make it bigger? “Can we get The Beatles to headline? Oh no, one of them’s dead.” We had gotten very, very good at seeing what kids wanted and liked, but we had stopped doing that. Things like Ozzfest and H.O.R.D.E. came along, and Lilith Fair, and Warped. They took the traveling circus concept, and fine-tuned it to a specific demographic.121

  LOLLA ’96

  ADAM SCHNEIDER: Perry left William Morris [Agency] and Lollapalooza in a very public dispute over the booking of Metallica to headline Lollapalooza in 1996.

  TED GARDNER: Metallica was one of those moves where everyone howled, “That’s so wrong!” Geiger set that one up.122

  CHRIS CORNELL: [Booking Metallica] ended up a really bad idea for two reasons. One, it had a pretty big effect on the fraternal aspect. Metallica had a large entourage that were used to touring all over the world as Metallica; where everything’s always about Metallica, and that was the way that they ran their show at Lollapalooza. There was a lot of tension with their crew. It was one of those situations where you’re so huge that there’s this machine that’s just rolling and rolling beyond your control. The band was always trying to hang out and get things going on, but their crew was putting police tape across their trailer so you couldn’t just walk in and say, “Hey, how’s it going?” because it’s fucking police taped off! Even though I had a pass as a singer in the band that played before them, the guys wouldn’t let me go on stage and watch them.

  ADAM SCHNEIDER: We had the opportunity of booking other bands that I won’t name that would have made it a slam dunk. It was with total respect to Metallica. Metallica is its own thing. It just wasn’t tailored to the Lollapalooza aesthetic now defined by Perry. He just wouldn’t do it. He wanted a show that he could stand behind and look back and go those were the artists that I wanted to work with at that moment in time. Perry is always very aware, he’s always taken the long view of how this will look in history. How is this going to look in the books?

  CHRIS CORNELL: Number two, it was a bad idea because of the audience. There were a lot of Metallica fans obviously. With Soundgarden, there was a fairly good crossover. We did very well with their audience. But there was also a percentage of the Lollapalooza audience which would tolerate Soundgarden, but not Metallica. And so there was this huge division.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: Lollapalooza quickly became corporately co-opted. It was good for what it was, but it was a cheap carbon copy of what had been going on at the beginning. Eventually it became like a parody. It was literally parodied by The Simpsons—Homerpalooza.123

  PERRY FARRELL: I wish I’d have been one of the cartoons. They didn’t even get me in the episode.

  DON WALLER (veteran rock journalist): Lollapalooza came back in 2003 after five years with Jane’s Addiction headlining, and grossed $13.7 million from 25 shows, according to Billboard. High production costs and/or low ticket sales—depending on whichever spin you wanna put on it—led to the cancellation of a few shows, but most dates apparently performed well. The lineup was Jane’s, Queens of the Stone Age, Incubus, Audioslave, the Donnas, and A Perfect Circle. The 2004 lineup didn’t have a chance; it was scrapped to avoid a total financial bloodbath.

  PF’S POST-LOLLA MAKEOVER

  PERRY FARRELL: I used to whip my dreads around for all the solos. I cut them off when the war broke out, the Desert Storm War in 1991. Dreads can weigh you down, and it’s never a bad idea to shave your hair. It can feel really lightening and enlightening. You really don’t know what to do when war breaks out. There’s a real feeling of helplessness. Some people go on a corner and hold up a sign, some people dance on a corner, some people honk. I chose to shave my dreads off.

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: Perry cut all his dreadlocks off. Now he had blond short hair and was wearing like these sharp tailored suits with vests and stuff, a whole new look, like Bowie, Freddie Mercury, or somebody . . . no more crazy, eccentric outfits, he had gotten rid of the ring through the nose, the dreads and stuff because it was such an easy thing for the public to reduce him to.

  PERRY FARRELL: It was a tough thing at first. The first time I went out there without that [dreadlocks], I had to reconfigurate my body to move right . . . consider a palm tree when it sways in Miami Beach. It has this sense of balance and weight that was now just gone.

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: A lot of people feel they have to keep this same image to retain that kind of popularity because that’s what got them there, but Perry just went completely against the grain of how a person normally responds to his success by getting rid of his image completely.

  DECONSTRUCTION

  Circa February 1993

  DAVE NAVARRO: I was not only self-destructive, but destructive of everything around me. I regret my attitudes and my behavior back then, but I don’t regret the outcome so much because that was in ’91-’92. Everything happens for a reason. Perry and Stephen got to do Porno for Pyros and Eric and I went on to do Deconstruction, which was a very experimental album, a lot of non-sequitur pieces of music. . . .

  JOHNNY NAVARRO: The only ramifications were you might die, which [at one point] he might have considered a welcome alternative. Dave had never gone to jail. Never lived on the streets or in poverty. Born and raised rich, Dave had become a successful rock star anyway.

  ERIC AVERY: Before I decided to split from Jane’s, Dave and I had talked about making a record together. We started to do it, then it started to kind of turn into a band [project], but then as we got closer to finishing it, Dave wasn’t really into it and didn’t like what we were doing. He specifically didn’t like me as a singer and kind of got cold feet and pulled out and didn’t want to have much to do with it, so it turned into a minor side project record, just what it started out as. Rick Rubin was just kind of like, just put it out . . . but didn’t want to promote it.

  STEPHEN PERKINS: I was actually gonna play on the Deconstruction record. But when Warners found out that it was everybody but Perry making a record they didn’t
want me to do it. It was on Rick Rubin’s label, which WB was financing. They said, “We don’t want three members of Jane’s Addiction making a record without Perry. We want you to make a Jane’s record—or not.”

  ERIC AVERY: Dave got turned off to the whole record and didn’t talk about it for a long time. Later, he said some guy started going on about how great the Deconstruction record was. It was Taylor Hawkins. Years later Taylor told me about coming up to Dave and trying to talk about the Deconstruction record. Taylor at the time was playing drums for Alanis Morrisette.

  STEPHEN PERKINS: No one was really brave enough to get us in a room, to try to make us work it out. It was sad. Maybe if a manager had said, take a year off then make a Jane’s record, Porno and Deconstruction could have merged somehow to become Jane’s next record.

  DAVE JOINS THE RHCP’S AS THEIR FOURTH/FIFTH LEAD GUITARIST

  Circa 1994

  DAVE NAVARRO: After that [the Deconstruction record], I joined the Chili Peppers.

  JOHNNY NAVARRO: There were always wild times in Dave’s life until the Peppers, when he really got clean and started to go in this new direction.

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: Once Jane’s Addiction stopped, it seemed like I was around Perry a lot in partying-type situations . . . especially right after I quit the Chili Peppers. Perry said, “I understand where you’re coming from because I did the same thing with Jane’s Addiction. You can’t just do something because you’re successful at it. You have to go to the next step and make it part of yourself.” It felt like the healthy thing to do. I don’t know how to explain it but I still think I was right. The worst thing psychologically for people who are screwed up in the way we are screwed up is jumping into the arms of success for its own sake without looking.

  Dave during his days with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

  (John Eder)

  FLEA: We had this massive audition [after John quit] and we saw a million people and it didn’t work out. Then Dave made himself available. He came in and he was just ready to go. He was ready to be in a big rock band and play.

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: The night of Jane’s Addiction last California show was the first time I did heroin. I was so depressed after I quit the Chili Peppers and I had so many things going on in my mind that I couldn’t resolve. The world just seemed like this ugly place. My whole perception of things was completely flipped around where everything that was once beautiful was now ugly. I couldn’t get any enjoyment about being alive anymore. Being on heroin and cocaine all the time, I felt like myself again.

  JOHNNY NAVARRO: The Peppers had already asked Dave once to just come down and play. They jammed and played covers and he told me, “I have a sense they’re going to ask me to join the band.”

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: I’d made this decision to be a drug addict after I’d been doing dope for a few months and all these people were trying to get me to stop. I would always say, ‘Give me one good reason not to do it,’ and nobody could, except for Perry, who I respected so much. He came over to my house in the middle of a crack run. He’d been on a binge for days. He sat in his car and explained, “You’ve got to take drugs and not take drugs. . . . once you do it for a while it’s that much harder to stop and the longer you wait the harder it becomes . . . like if you try to stop now you should be able to do it in a few days, but if you stop in four years or something, it’s going to take a really long time.”

  DAVE NAVARRO: Flea called me out of the blue asking if I wanted to try out and I initially declined because I was still recording with Eric, but when the record was done I wanted to tour more than Eric did. Then Flea called me back again to see if I wanted to jam, and I was much more open to it.

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: Perry completely convinced me to stop and then he said, “OK, let’s get you to the hospital right now.” I had this bag of about an ounce of Persian heroin and about an ounce of cocaine and I was just doing as much as I could in the hospital parking lot. Finally we go in and Perry was like . . . saying to the nurses, “Listen, I’m going to be really honest with you, he’s really on a lot of drugs right now so why don’t you wait on giving him any medication.”

  JOHNNY NAVARRO: After Deconstruction didn’t do what he wanted it to do, we were driving around one day and Dave goes, “Dude, I hate to say this, but I want to be a fucking rock star. I want all that that entails.” I was like, “Dude, if you feel good about saying it, then do it, go for it.” He said, “All right, I’m supposed to jam with the Peppers again. If they ask me, I’m gonna do it.”

  DAVE NAVARRO: We were in similar overlapping circles, yet I didn’t really cross paths with the Peppers until like ’89. I always loved to go watch them, because they were such an entertaining act. I don’t remember liking their records so much, but they were always amazing live. That’s how they’d built their whole rep.

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: I once called Perry at like seven in the morning and said, “How do you get snakes out of your eyes?” He said, “What?” I said, “There are snakes in my eyes, how do I get rid of them?” I’d be looking in my bathroom mirror at these little snakes in my eyes. I’d even hear them talk, they’d make weird little noises and stuff. A snake would poke his head out and I’d try to grab it. I’d be reaching in my eyes trying to pull ’em out. I fucked with my eyes so much doing this. I’d sit in the bathroom doing it for hours at a time. My eyes were just shutting on their own and I’d struggle to pull ’em open. No use. I called Perry and told him, “The snakes have shut my eyes.” Perry told me I was off balance, something about too much yin and not enough yang. Perry gave me goggles after that. That was my outfit when I would go up on the roof to wage war against the ghosts. I would have my goggles on and my ski mask and every part of my body covered. No holes. I’d wear sweatpants tucked into socks. You couldn’t get into me on any level anywhere. It made a lot of sense at the time!

  JOHNNY NAVARRO: Dave stayed with the Peppers for four years and that really propelled him to another level. They already had Under the Bridge and the Blood Sugar album, which John Frusciante had a huge hand in creating. . . . John and Rick Rubin together put the Chili Peppers over on this whole other musical level . . . as well as their popularity with the masses. . . .

  DAVE NAVARRO: I came from Jane’s Addiction, and had a bit of history, and some people had heard of me, but the Chili Peppers were so much more enormous and were such a fine-tuned machine to step into. I had to learn how to bring my style into the Chili Peppers. I learned so much from those guys about friendship and musicianship and brotherhood and just doing it right. The Peppers have a great work ethic and they’re spiritually minded, healthy fellas. The Chili Peppers are less of a one-man show than Jane’s Addiction was. No slag to either band. It’s just a fact. Perry Farrell is a very charismatic performer, and a lot of people who went to see Jane’s Addiction primarily went to see Perry. With the Chili Peppers, the attention is distributed a little more evenly on stage. In Jane’s I felt a little more connection between band members, as a foursome. Which is ironic, because I feel like I’m better friends with the Chili Peppers than I was with Jane’s Addiction. I felt completely bonded with them—even if I wasn’t getting along with them off stage.124

  JOHNNY NAVARRO: Dave had never had that level of celebrity, being that recognizable, traveling all over the country, all over the world. It also gave him wealth and power that he’s never been lacking since. When you have someone make a cartoon of you, like when Dave was in the Beavis and Butthead movie doing “Rollercoaster” with the Peppers, he achieved a different level of status in the rock world. There was a lot of weird dynamics in the original Jane’s and the way that Perry foisted his creativity on Dave, which mirrored a lot of the domineering nature that his father had. Perry was like a second father to Dave, and Dave got into rock to rebel from that. As soon as he walked into the Peppers, that didn’t happen anymore, and as soon as he walked out of the Peppers that didn’t happen anymore.

  DAVE NAVARRO: I got a call from Flea: “Dave, in order to continue to make musi
c, we feel it would be better with another guitar player. You’ve started using drugs again. We’ve already lost one guitar player to a drug overdose, and Anthony’s had his struggles and is trying to live in health.”125

  FLEA: I felt like we were adequate during the time Dave was with us. We were doing the job, but we didn’t really connect a lot. What made the Chili Peppers great for me was the fact that we just improvised like crazy . . . we’d get together and sometimes just jam for three hours without even playing any songs. That’s really the force of our band . . . that feeling that we could do that whenever we want because there’s so much music just floating around in the air, but Dave wasn’t into it. He wanted to play songs. He didn’t wanna jam.