Whores

by Brendan Mullen

  MARTYN LE NOBLE (musician-songwriter, member Thelonious Monster, Porno for Pyros, Jane’s Addiction, The Cult): I had already quit Thelonious Monster. Perry wanted to make sure that he wasn’t pulling a bass player out of another band. So he called Pete and Bob and asked them. I guess I was the last guy to come in.

  PETE WEISS: The Monster was a farm club for other bands, you know ... like with [John] Frusciante and Chad [Smith] going into the Chili Peppers, and now Martyn’s going into Porno for Pyros. Guys who hung out with us until something better came along.

  PETER DI STEFANO: We were smoking crack cocaine and shooting heroin. Stephen didn’t do any of the heavy stuff. He’d just smoke his weed. When you first start with that serious hard narcotics shit, it works for a second.

  PERRY FARRELL: In Jane’s I would wait until after the show [to get high]. In Porno I couldn’t even sing if I wasn’t on the pipe. I couldn’t get out of bed, I couldn’t move without it.

  PETER DI STEFANO: I’m one of those guys, the only way you stop is if you put me in jail or hospital. I’m like Scott Weiland or Robert Downey, Jr. You’ve got to lock me up or I won’t stop. I’ll lie for it, die for it, steal for it. It’s just too powerful for me.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: Perry would say, OK, on Monday the tour starts—this on a Wednesday—so let’s party until Friday, then we kick and on Monday we go on the road clean, which kind of worked for him, but not for me. Monday would come around and they’d be banging on my door and I would be passed out, strung out to the gills still. Perry would get clean, I would be loaded and then I would get clean and he would be loaded, so it was always a really unproductive, crazy, really miserable world which just got worse and worse.

  PERRY FARRELL: In Jane’s I’d see that we were off on tour in two weeks and I’d kick . . . it was important for me to be good onstage ’cause heroin cuts your notes out. Your throat can’t open up. Even though everybody thought I was a junkie in Jane’s Addiction, which I was, I was still able to pick my spots so I’d be able to sing good.

  PETER DI STEFANO: We were partying with Kurt Cobain, smoking rock backstage at The Palace in Hollywood right before a Nirvana show. I remember him saying to Perry, “Who’s this guy?” Perry goes, “This is my new guitar player.” We were all talking about how great smoking coke was. We smoked it with him and then he went out and played his ass off.

  PERRY FARRELL: You’ll have to ask [Courtney Love] why she made [after-midnight] calls asking me to talk to Kurt about his continued depressed state. She might have admired the fact that I could break away from what I was doing, and take care of my business. I [always] had a way of getting out of bed and of going to work when I had to. She called me up for two reasons, one she was looking for him, and I don’t know, you never really know what’s in Courtney’s head. She also asked me if I’d talk to him and I didn’t really feel I had the right to. That’s a very personal conversation. I had met Kurt a couple of times, but I didn’t think I knew him that well that I could take him to the side and put my arm around him.

  JOEY ALTRUDA: Perry asked me to play bass at a session for Porno for Pyros after my regular gig [Jump with Joey] at the King King. So I show up after two in the morning to Crystal Studios, what an aptly named place! Perry and Peter were doing heroin and crack.

  PETER DI STEFANO: We wrote the first record in Venice and recorded it in Hollywood at Crystal Studios.

  JOEY ALTRUDA: It was fun to just hang out and chill, but after awhile I got tired of screwing around and just wanted to play the song and go home. Perry was showing us how this thing would go on the guitar. We’d say, “Just show us the basic idea.” We’d get it right away, but then he’d change it and do it differently. Or, he would miss it. Or he wouldn’t be able to play the thing. It was 6:30, 7:30 in the morning and we were still dicking around with this really simple lick, but he’d keep changing it. The sun was up when I finally got out of there. . . .

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: I cowrote pretty much all of the stuff, including “Pets” but never got proper credit. Perry had a very interesting structure. We went into the studio and recorded the whole record. Then Eric Greenspan, the attorney, came in and said, “We’ll structure it like this. I suggest you get your own attorney.” After Eric Greenspan left, Perry said, “When Dave and Eric got their own attorney, that’s when I broke up Jane’s Addiction.” He was like, “You can get your own attorney, but if you do, this band will probably not exist.”

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: Jane’s music reminds me more of heroin and Porno reminds me more of crack. I know firsthand that Porno for Pyros was on crack all the time. . . .

  PETER DI STEFANO: The first record it worked perfect, smoking rock and shooting heroin. . . . Matt Hyde and Perry co-produced the record. It took a couple of weeks of writing and two weeks of recording. That was it. The songs were all written coming off drugs. During drugs we never wrote.

  Circa April 1992

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: In Porno for Pyros . . . there was always drama going on around them. Martyn was always scoring drugs in weird places and getting into fights, getting into trouble.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: I take a lot of responsibility because I was a complete asshole. I was a junkie. I was unreliable, I was selfish, I was a jerk, just like everyone else, out of control.

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: Porno for Pyros had a much more street energy to it, like Martyn lived in a house with some Crips and stuff. . . .

  MIKE WATT: The name Porno for Pyros comes out of the Rodney King riots in L.A....

  PERRY FARRELL: We [Martyn, Peter, and myself, not Stephen] went out and did our thing and rioted as well. We wanted to feel the street and the rush of what was going on. So we headed over toward Crenshaw. We were toting guns, that was like the years when I thought it was cool to carry a gun.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: We all got guns. I was in my own world of insanity. I was putting out fires with a garden hose and toting a gun at the same time. . . .

  PETER DI STEFANO: That was the excitement during the L.A. riots. We went to South Central. We drove up the 10 to Crenshaw, got off, made a right, and just started partying right after the Rodney King verdict went down. I used to always carry a 25 anyway, and Perry also got a hold of a gat, I can’t remember what.

  PERRY FARRELL: We’d watch each other’s backs and bust into stores along with the other locals. That’s where I got all the furniture and bric-a-brac in my house. I don’t have it anymore.

  PETER DI STEFANO: We drove to this bank building [name omitted] and shot it all up. No one was in there. They’d closed it up and left so we didn’t hurt anyone. No cops anywhere in sight. Then we shot up this electrical plant and when we were done with that we just looted all these stores.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: Palm trees were on fire, the liquor store on the corner was on fire.

  PETER DI STEFANO: Fire and smoke everywhere. It was a crazy drug rush, total adrenalin. Perry decorated his whole house with looted stuff like couches and tables. It was a wicked time and a wicked record came out of it.

  April 4, 1992

  PETER DI STEFANO: The first official [Porno for Pyros] gig was the Magic Johnson AIDS Benefit at the Hollywood Palladium. The Chili Peppers played, The Beastie Boys and Fishbone played. . . .

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: Perry had this vest on with no shirt underneath and a chain in his pocket and suit pants and he looked really great. I thought Porno for Pyros was going to be this real sort of mellow thing. He was playing that harmonica type thing he plays and the music had this kind of ethnic feeling to it. I was blown away. It was my favorite Porno for Pyros show of all of them.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: The tour for the first record was great. “Pets” was on the national CMJ charts. It was fun, and it was miserable at the same time. It’s hard to tour when you’re a junkie. The music is not that important. Everything comes secondary to getting high, having to get well, which is a full-time job and nothing else gets done. There were wonderful moments, great shows, but also horrible shows and just misery.

  Circa 1993

>   PETER DI STEFANO: The first Porno for Pyros single was “Pets,” but the record company didn’t pick it. They said “Pets”? No way, because the first line is “Children are innocent and teenagers are fucked up in the head/adults are even more fucked up” . . . but after Jed the Fish [DJ at K-ROQ] played the record in its entirety and everybody was calling in for “Pets” they very quickly changed their tune. The success of “Pets” helped the first album go gold.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: After we finished the record, we took a trip to Bali and I’d been awake for almost two weeks. I was so out of it I was seeing things crawling on the floor. I spent a day and a half on the floor. I couldn’t move the left side of my body. It was completely paralyzed, my face, my legs, too. On the way to the airport Ted Gardner had a stack of contracts and said, “You’ve got to sign these.”

  I said, “I don’t want to sign them. Can I sign them when I get back?” He started yelling at me, “Do you want to stop the release of this record for another six months? Do you want to make sure this record doesn’t come out on time?” I was so high I couldn’t even read. I’d been awake for so long that I just sat in the back of the limo while he was flipping the pages and signed everything.

  GOOD GOD’S URGE

  Circa 1996

  PAUL V.: John Eder the photographer always wanted to work with Perry. We said OK, we’ll do some press shots. Maybe he can come up with something great for the album cover. So of course the photo shoot was an excuse to have a party at Shangri-La at night and everybody was on hash and mushrooms and he came up with this great concept of making a skirt out of the oranges, this sort of ethereal feel.

  JOHN EDER: The first suggestion was that they all take mushrooms and go out and look for flying saucers in the hills down by Zuma or something, which was a ridiculous idea for a photo shoot. Then they wanted to throw a party at Shangri-La with weird costumes and stuff. The house was really chaotic because they were moving out. It was the last night they were supposed to be there and some other band was coming in the next day. These girls came dressed as brides but they were so fucked up they were absolutely undirectable. Juan Manuel, this really fabulous designer from Argentina who’d worked with them on clothing and stage sets throughout their Porno for Pyros career, made that dress out of oranges that’s on the cover. That cover shot with Christina Cagle was one of the last shots of the whole night. We had to beg her to get into that thing because she just wanted to lie down. As soon as the guy with the mushrooms arrived, things started to get increasingly chaotic and weird. People were getting really, really wasted. One of the girls was seeing monsters and had locked herself in the room where the makeup girl’s stuff was. They had to crawl through the window. At the peak of pandemonium we had all these people in crazy South Seas outfits, sort of Fellini meets Sergeant Pepper’s gone Tahiti kind of feeling. Everybody’s screaming and yelling and going wild and I’m trying to direct them and the main light suddenly falls on my head. It gets knocked over by this pizza guy, who’d wandered in and gone back out to his car and got his Happy Snap, so we had to kick him out and go back to shooting. Suddenly there’s a tap on the window and it’s the cops. The sheriff of Malibu is out there. They said there’s a guy in the hospital who said he was up here and he said he took some stuff called GHB—and we’re not going to arrest anybody (because it wasn’t illegal at the time) but we need a sample to take to the doctor. The party went to like 2:00/3:00 in the morning. Somebody else had to get carried out and rushed to the hospital from the same stuff. I guess if you drink on top of it, it will wipe you out.

  JOHN EDER: The cover with Christina Cagle was one of the last shots of the whole night. We had to beg her to get into that thing because she just wanted to lie down. (John Eder)

  PAUL V.: Working with Porno for Pyros was literally like holding a stick of dynamite and pinching a fuse three quarters of an inch before it goes off in your hand, but even on his worst, most drugged-out day, Perry was still one thousand times more creative and more real than someone else who is put up on this place of being the artist. He doesn’t have to try. That really flows from his brain through him. It’s a real energy that’s inside him.

  PETER DI STEFANO: The second record the drugs turned on us. We were tore up and trying to find God and health and going to islands and that’s what that record is about.

  PERRY FARRELL: With Porno, it all just caught up with me. I needed a lot before I could even go on. I never left my house without crack and some dope.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: I was so messed up. I was suicidal, I was miserable, I couldn’t get clean. I wanted to get clean.

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: Porno for Pyros time . . . was just like this huge crack binge. Perry would get real close to overdosing on cocaine . . . he was smoking rock all the time.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: The second record took forever. I didn’t stay around until the end. I accept responsibility for my share of being a fuckup, I’d be gone missing for weeks at a time. I’d say I had an errand to run, I’d say, “I’ll be right back” in the middle of recording, but I was just going to cop. Three weeks later they’d get a phone call that I was in jail. From jail I ended up in rehab, from rehab I ended up in a psych ward, back into rehab.

  STEPHEN PERKINS: The second record had all the songs written in Tahiti, in Fiji, in Mexico, all those songs and experiences came into the new record, that’s why it’s more exotic folkie and island-sounding. Less hard rock, ’cause it was written in Tahiti on an acoustic guitar.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: I didn’t want to go to Fiji. They were going there to clean up, and [at one point] I was already clean. The last thing I wanted to do was watch two guys detox on the island. The really sad thing was the day they got back clean from that trip, I went and copped and did my disappearing act again.

  PETER DI STEFANO: Fiji was another detox, buff and shine, another way to go and get off of dope without facing what we really had to do. It was always another excuse to get another surf trip. We spent a lot of money on these trips. They worked but only temporary. They’d help clean us up, we’d get strong, come back and then start partying and getting stuff done, but then we’d crumble in three or four weeks. We’d go out on another trip for a week, come back, work another week, crash again.

  They’re all laughing and asking why I’m shooting them in the garage with stars in some backdrop when there were real stars in the sky outside. (John Eder)

  In the thick of it all. (John Eder)

  PAUL V.: I would think that if they could just come back one time and stay in that creative mode long enough to finish this record . . . but it was always just like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. They would soon have to go away again.

  PETER DI STEFANO: We went to Porto Escotino, G-Land in Indonesia. We went to Java, we went to Sumatra, and we lived on a boat for a week in the Indonesian islands. We went to Bali two times. We’d been to Taberil, which is a small island off of Fiji. We’d been to Samoa. We’d been to Costa Rica, and then we’d been to San Blas, Santa Cruz, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico a lot. We went on probably ten to fifteen trips.

  PAUL V.: Good God’s Urge was basically all about a two-year surf trip with a little bit of intermittent recording occasionally going on. I couldn’t get any help from Roger to reel them in because Roger was a surfer. Roger got to surf in Bali and Hawaii and whatever. He was like a pal that got to go play.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: We began recording the second album at Shangri-La Studios in Malibu where The Band filmed some scenes for The Last Waltz, the in-between-concert footage. Eric Clapton tracked a record there called “Shangri-La” and it’s got a picture of him in the pool room looking extremely skinny and unhappy. Clapton was out of his mind there, the worst time of his life. The guy in The Band hung himself a few years later. We were the most unproductive ever there. Skinny Puppy the band there before us were never able to finish their record. They said Elvis used to stay there when he was shooting movies before he completely lost his mind. Some blues guy shot his dog there because he thought there we
re people outside or something. It seemed like the house had a curse—everyone who recorded or hung out there eventually lost their minds.

  PAUL V.: I came in for the second Porno for Pyros album that took two years to make, and it probably took two years off my life! I thought, “This is such a cool move” because there was going to be two of us co-managing the band—myself and Roger Leonard. My role was more like the record company liaison guy because I had the background in radio, marketing, and promotion, while Roger would babysit the band and deal with their day-to-day drug-related dramas. Perry thought it would be good to have somebody from the inside who understood the band and all the problems and quirks to be the buffer between them and the label. It all very quickly turned into a nightmare. It was an extremely difficult, impossible situation for me. While Roger had 24/7 access to the band—he was like their surf buddy and always got to be the cool cop—I was stuck playing the party-pooper bad guy. Kind of like opposing parental roles; like, with Roger playing mom, we get to go surfing, we get to stay high, we get to go out to play all the time, but with Paul, it was like, boo, it’s mean old man time! Here he comes now, dad the big drag, the buzzkiller, just bummin’ everybody out . . . he’s gonna make us do a video, he’s gonna make us talk to some journalist for Spin, he’s gonna make us go shake hands at some doofus radio station. He’s gonna want to hear the tapes. I had to enforce all the business side of it that they just didn’t want to do. Perry didn’t want to do anything, although on some other level if I wasn’t bound by this job, I can’t really blame him [from being resentful about] having to deal with these people, sort of like kissing babies and shaking reptilian hands when you’re trying your best to be creative with the music and you’re out of your mind on all manner of narcotics. . . .