Whores

by Brendan Mullen

  Perry, Peter, and Stephen outside Shangri La. Warners publicity shot. (John Eder)

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: We paid all the expenses out equally, but if you look at the publishing contracts you see that Porno for Pyros is all Perry Farrell; so when it says on the records, “All Songs Written by Porno for Pyros,” it means it’s Perry Farrell’s company, he’s the sole owner, and so he doles out the publishing as he sees fit. Basically, he screwed everybody out of their publishing. I was the only one that quit and so they settled with me, a pretty small settlement. Perry was really eager to settle because he didn’t want Peter and Stephen to find out that this was how the business structure was set up. Basically, the longer you stayed in Porno for Pyros, the more money you owed the record company.

  DAVID J: They were really stretching creatively on the second Porno for Pyros album. They were recording at this place where the band lived, some bungalows that once belonged to Elvis Presley in Malibu.

  PAUL V.: It was a long drive to Shangri-La in Malibu from my HQ in Silverlake. Roger would be like, “Oh yeah, they’re working on something very cool, it’s a good day to come up,” so I’d drive all the way up the coast and either Perry’s door was locked shut or there’s no one there. I’d talk to TJ, the guy who was co-producing the album with Perry. I’d be like, “Can you please, please play me something, anything?” He’d play me these little dribs and drabs of stuff, but remember I’m the one that’s got the record company breathing down my back. What’s going on up there? I really could not give them any tangible information or progress report because there was nothing to report. It was all very quickly making me look stupid. Peter used to drive me crazy because he had no spine. Great person, a fun guy to be with, but Perry sort of had him wrapped around his finger. Peter would worship at the feet of Perry, his idol. Because of the drugs Peter wasn’t about to get sober when his hero wasn’t. It was an endless cycle of everybody whacked out of their mind.

  DAVE NAVARRO: Flea and I played on the second Porno for Pyros record. We’re still friends with all those guys. It was great to see and play with Perry and Stephen again. I’d met Peter Di Stefano before, but this was the first time we played together. Peter comes up with great ideas as a guitarist, and it was great to jam with Steve again. Everything was fluid and loose. When Perry sang, I got the chills. There’s something about playing with him that’s magical. It’s like playing with nobody else in the world.

  DANIEL ASH: I got a call from Perry’s manager or somebody, saying hey, Perry wants you to come down and do some guitar for the Porno for Pyros record so I said great, fine, I’m there. Then I told the other two, David and Kevin, about it and they said we want to come as well, let’s all go. So we all went down and we all ended up playing on the track.

  DAVID J: The track was “Porpoise Head” and it was a documentation of one of Perry’s extreme wigouts. He was living life very much on the edge at that time.

  DANIEL ASH: I don’t know what went on behind closed doors. We were recording with them one minute and the next minute we looked around and the whole band had disappeared.

  PAUL V.: When we needed a video for the first song “Tahitian Moon,” Perry’s like I’ll direct it. We’re going to be in Tahiti so we’ll just get footage from that. It was a total mess. They were high all the time. They had a film crew that cost a ridiculous amount of money, but we were barely able to pull together the kind of video MTV was demanding if they were going to play you in heavy rotation. It didn’t need to be a million dollar video but it needed to not look like a home movie. Roger had literally saved Perry’s life when they were in Tahiti. Perry was so high one night he drifted too far out into the ocean and just couldn’t get back in. Thank God, Roger was able to rescue him. The lyrics to “Tahitian Moon” are all about that episode.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: I ended up playing on about eight songs. They’re beautiful songs. Mike Watt played on some of it and it’s amazing. David J. played on it, too. It’s a great record, really beautiful. It’s really a shame that no one gave it the attention it deserved.

  PAUL V.: Kimberly Austin is a wonderful artist. She has one arm and Perry loved her work. . . .

  DAVID J: We were recording the Sweet F.A. album and I had a song partly inspired by him . . . “Clean” that I wanted Perry to sing vocals on. It’s about drug addiction and the chorus is “When are you clean?” He agreed to do it and the night of the session he didn’t turn up. Stephen played percussion and I ended up doing the vocal myself. We heard later he had gone on a bender and was howling at the moon.

  BOB FORREST: I went to visit Perry when Porno for Pyros were making the second album in this big house in Malibu. Since I was the homeless person crashing there, I was nominated to go with him to look under the house to see if anybody’s there in the crawlspace!

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: I remember that night! It was right before I quit. Bob and I got arrested the next day. Perry was so paranoid, so freaked out that you couldn’t communicate with him anymore. I would constantly tell him that he was just seeing things. There are no people in the bushes, there’s no one here trying to kill you, but Bob was playing along with that and crawling under the house. In Malibu the power goes off a lot and one time my alarm clock was flashing and I remembered that I’d put batteries in there so I opened it up to see a little wireless microphone in my alarm clock. It just sounds insane, but that’s how it was. Another night I’m sleeping in bed and I wake up suddenly and Perry is standing over me with a knife, his hand shaking, and he had these crazy eyes and he goes, “Hide this for me,” and he put the knife under my pillow. I was like, “Oh my god, he was going to kill me if I hadn’t woken up right at that moment. . . ”

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: Perry was so paranoid he had cameras everywhere in the house. Martyn said Perry had some bizarre dream, something to do with a little kid getting raped, and he was in such a state he couldn’t distinguish reality from the dream. He was always thinking there were people lurking around. Martyn always thought there were cops outside. “Cocaine psychosis” we used to call it.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: We had armed bodyguards with submachine guns and shoulder holsters in this tree house and Perry was running around naked with a gun one night. These two hired goons were just laughing their asses off at us, milking it for all they could get. They’d be like snickering, “Hey, Perry, you know, I think we saw something last night—” that would be, like, another five grand . . . or whatever, and Perry would be just oblivious.

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: Martyn and I were hanging out all the time together. We’d be shooting up all day long in a room together, not a very glamorous life, but we were serious drug addicts who had to be doing heroin all the time just to feel normal.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: During one of my MIA episodes I drove back to the Shangri-La house, but was too embarrassed to go in because I was so high and out of it. I went into the garage and heard them walking into the kitchen, Peter, Stephen, and Perry, and they were talking about this asshole and what were they going to do with him. I decided that I should hang myself in the garage. I found some guitar cords and made a noose and tested it, but I was so fucked up that I lost my balance and fell.

  JOHN FRUSCIANTE: We were just not healthy; they sent someone over to the house and they sent back a report that Martyn’s not good, John’s not good.

  MARTYN LE NOBLE: I had one hand still in the noose and I just hung there suffocating and trying to scream for help. They walked back into the kitchen, but no one could hear me. It was the worst way to die. I ended up swinging with my hand between the noose and my neck until I was finally able to pull it far enough from my neck and to swing my feet on top of this old refrigerator in the corner. I didn’t want to quite hang myself yet because I still had a bunch of drugs to do first! I was so embarrassed after I’d heard them talking about me that I just snuck out and disappeared again for a few more weeks and ended up in psych wards.

  PETER DI STEFANO: We didn’t even get a fair chance to tour behind the second record to promote it. So
sad, such a great record gets neglected, abandoned. . . .

  STEPHEN PERKINS: Unfortunately, we never toured real hard, we never got involved with pushing the record and trying to break it. I thought the songs were wonderful but we never spent the time and energy pushing it.

  PETER DI STEFANO: We never even made it to a third record. The third record would be a cross between the first and the second. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to do it. We have a third record written. It’s in my head. I have ten songs written, Perry’s got the words and everything.

  TED GARDNER: Porno was not given the opportunity to grow by critics and audience, because of the magnitude of Lollapalooza and the success of Ritual.132

  MIKE WATT: People really had a negative view on these cats, outsiders. All this lame-o pre-opinion, pre-judge shit.

  PAUL V.: When Good God’s Urge came out it just landed with a thud. First of all it was sort of a mellow record. I personally think that five years from now, people will go back and listen and hear how genius that record is and how beautiful it is. It was way ahead of its time.

  PERRY FARRELL: Musically I feel like we [Porno for Pyros] were extremely underappreciated.

  WOODSTOCK ’94

  PAUL V.: It was like two days away from Woodstock ’94 where Porno was booked to play the second day. We all got on the flights to New York we were supposed to get on. We wanted to be in on the Thursday just to be there a couple of days early, but Perry didn’t take the flight. This was when Perry was really deep into the drug stuff. . . . So Friday we thought, OK, no big deal, Perry will take another flight. Perry doesn’t take a flight on Friday. Saturday comes around and we think, OK, Perry will take the flight today, but he still doesn’t show up. Turns out he’s in San Francisco. Doesn’t know how he got up there or why he was there but there he was. We were flipping out. What the hell were we supposed to do now? We were all like this is it, we’re going to get sued. Porno’s not playing, we’re off the bill. We’re fucked. Roger got him a limo or a car, or something, and got them to the airport, then we had to charter a special flight from San Francisco to New York, which cost another ten, twenty grand, at least. He finally arrives at like three in the morning. Then we had to shell out for a helicopter to take us upstate New York and it was raining the whole time. Woodstock ’94 was this slithering mudfest and it was one of the worst sets they had ever played. Perry had been up for like five days straight doing drugs. Peter I think was high. I don’t know about Martyn. We had to rent stage suits so we went to Western Costumers. Martyn was wearing this real cool green and yellow zoot thing and Peter got some wild suit on, too . . . Perry got this beautiful fluorescent purple number. Peter and Martyn never returned the suits. When you rent from a costumer they charge like $5,000. Poor Perry, if you watch the Woodstock footage, you can just see in his face like tension and exhaustion. It was all just bad, negative energy. They were playing some new songs from the new album that weren’t really done yet. There were a few really great moments, but for the most part it was really sad. It was like this band should be on top of their game and they’re barely grasping for air.

  NOT GAY

  Circa 1994

  BRYAN RABIN: I eventually got to know Dave Navarro personally through clubs of mine and mutual friends. The Cherry Club. It was a mixed crowd . . . gay/straight/bi/tri/transgender . . . whatever . . . it was rich and famous, it was poor gutter kids with style, all of it brought together and we played alt. rock ’n’ roll on Friday nights at several locations. Some glam stuff, some punk stuff, a really good mix of hard rock. The only people willing to dance to rock ’n’ roll at that time were gays and drag queens . . . and . . . Perry Farrell . . . whose star pull during the early days helped boost Cherry’s cachet. Perry was one of our club’s first VIPs.

  JOSEPH BROOKS: At Cherry we were playing retro rock in what had been the Backlot At Studio One (L.A.’s iconic first all-gay mega disco in the 70s), but this was ’94, the straight club community in Los Angeles was really busy with hip-hop while we were playing “Been Caught Stealing.”

  BRYAN RABIN: Dave and Perry came to Cherry a lot during that period because it really embraced everything that they were and are still about . . . being provocative through dressing in a very androgynous way, and flirting with iconic homosexual imagery, classic rock ’n’ roll things. Visually Perry and Dave tried to one-up each other. Perry would come down and dance to his own songs and have a great time. He came like three weeks in a row. Being around Perry was like watching a cult leader at work. He’s an electric charismatic person when he walks into the room. People are drawn to him and are sexually attracted to him. They just want to be part of what he’s doing. I’ve seen straight men get these weird crushes on him.

  INGER LORRE: My boyfriend was always saying, “I’m not gay, but if there was any guy I’d like to be with, it would be Perry.” One time [we were] partying at my place on Commonwealth Avenue with Perry. We just got really, really high. Perry was bugging me all night. A lot of girls think he’s really hot, but he just wasn’t my type so I kind of threw my boyfriend at him instead. He was one of the prettiest boys I ever dated, he might as well have been a girl . . . and that night . . . he just dropped jaw right there in front of me and gave Perry a blowjob on my couch. I was only mildly interested in watching my boyfriend getting skull-fucked by Perry Farrell. I was much more interested in my drugs and getting away from Perry. After the boyfriend did that, I broke up with him.

  PERRY FARRELL: This guy gave me head. I’m not gay, I just wanted to see what it felt like. I thought, it’s gonna be good because he’s a guy. And he stunk. He went at it like he was eating corn on the cob.

  BRYAN RABIN: By most standards Perry shouldn’t even be a front man. He’s a big, tall, skinny Jewish guy . . . but he’s got that X factor, that thing that you can’t quantify, that you can’t put your finger on. He can make you feel like you’re the only person in the room. That’s an obvious classic sort of leader mentality, but he has an electricity that draws you to him in the first place.

  ENIT FESTIVAL (1996)

  PERRY FARRELL: You know I lost a million dollars with that? Yeah, my money. I don’t think I’ll do that again. I was saying, “Screw you all, I’ll put my own money up.” There was no sponsorship. I was happy to do it, I don’t regret it for a minute. So much good talent and such a good time. . . .

  ADAM SCHNEIDER: The ENIT Festival was an early attempt at merging alternative rock with the electronic acts that same year with Porno for Pyros and Love & Rockets co-headlining with the Orb, the Sun Ra Arkestra, and others.

  PERRY FARRELL: A lot of those anonymous electronic producers are extremely talented people. . . .

  DANIEL ASH: We had a meeting with Perry and he had all these fantastic ideas, bring in circus acts and really open it all out and introduce dance music and alternative artists to the rock ’n’ roll artists, and vice versa, if you like, leaning heavily toward the whole dance culture that had been going on in England for quite some time.

  DAVID J: I remember Perry coming up with the idea for ENIT when we were at Timothy Leary’s house. Perry was going off . . . it wasn’t just a music festival, ENIT was going to attract extraterrestrials! These ENIT festivals would be staged simultaneously on other planets and would all be hooked up via satellite. He was going right out there. Tim was up there with him. No limit to his imagination. So far-reaching, wildly adventurous, reaching in all directions. In that way, Perry was a true son of Leary and Sun Ra. I think sometimes, just as with Tim, the drugs got in the way. They were constructive to a degree but then they became detrimental.