Unlike most music, Ninties alternative rock is the child of a specific and immediately identifiable stylistic parent-Jane's Addiction. Dave Navarro was the first guitarist to disrupt rockcrit categories by combining unabashed heavy metal influences with the texteral guitar sensibilities of Eighties post-punk. And singer Perry Farrell pioneered the smack-brained, peirced, tattooed, androgynous gutter-splash posturing that later brought many of his successors fame, fortune and, in some cases, early death.
In the early Eighties, the Brooklyn-born Farrell moved to Los Angeles and started the Goth-inflected band Psi Com, which became a minor sensation on the local scene before falling apart mid-decade. From its ashes rose Jane's Addiction, one product of Farrell's involvement with a group of friends attending Notre Dame High School, in the L.A. suburb of Sherman Oaks. Navarro and drummer Stephen Perkins were best friends. "We met at Notre Dame, the guitarist recalls. "We were both in the marching band together-in the drum section. We played what's called the tritones-you know, three different drums that you wear in front of you."
Navarro started playing guitar around age 12, when he formed what he describes as "a really awful Cream and Hendrix cover band." He grew up on the two types of rock radio that dominated Los Angeles airwaves at the time-the classic rock/hair metal "KLOS" format and the RIck Carroll "KROQ" Eighties alternative sound. Navarro drew inspiration from both: "When I was really young, Hendrix, Page and those kinds of dinosaur old-man rock guitarists were a big influence on me, as far as technique goes and just being impressed by thier talent," Dave told Guitar World in 1991. "But more than those guitarists, I'm really influenced by Daniel Ash [of Bauhaus and later Love and Rockets] and Robert Smith [of the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees]. After a while I stopped listening to rock music altogether and spent my time listening to classical music and talk radio."
Navarro grudingly admits to have gone through a brief phase of Van Halen/Yngwie emulation. In fact, when he and Perkins met, they formed a short-lived speed metal band: " we were in high schol and were playing the Troubadour and the Roxy. I gained a lot of experiance that way."
The birth of Jane's Addiction was, according to Navarro, "very incestuous. Stephen had hooked up with Perry through Eric Avery, the bass player. Stephen was dating Eric's sister, Rebecca, who was my ex-girlfriend. I had introduced Stephen to her. Eric asked Stephen to play in Jane's Addiction. They needed a guitar player and Stephen said, 'My friend Dave's really great.' He called me up and asked me if I'd be into it. I said, 'Sure.' They gave me a tape , and I heard a few songs and really liked them. Stephen picked me up at my apartment in Westwoodand took me over to Perry's place. That was the first time I met him. He opened the door and said, 'Hey!' He was really excited and happy-and really young. we went inside and started playing a groove that is now known as 'Mountain Song.' Perry said, 'Wow, that sounds completely different.' From that point on, I was in."
Jane's Addiction's opening salvo was a self-titled live album, recorded at the Roxy and released on the indie Triple X label in 1987. The rough-and-tumble version of their signature tune "Jane Says" and uninspired covers of Lou Reed's "Rock and Roll" and the Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil."
"I've always hated the Rolling Stones," says Navarro. "Doing that song arose out of one of those situations where you're trying to write a song, and all of a sudden somebody starts singing the words to some other song on top of it. We did that song as a joke, and it ended up on the record."
Crude as it was, the album, and Jane's live gigs around L.A., created a big-time buzz. A deal with Warner Bros. soon followed. " At the time we got signed, we had a bit of a bidding war going on with the major labels," Navarro recalled. "They all pretty much wanted us, so we got creative control. Other labels offered us more money thatn Warners, but we wnet with them because they were willing to let us do what ever we wanted, production-wise, with the artwork, videos...everything."
The band proceeded to make full use of its freedom.Nothing's Shocking, its 1988 Warner's debut, contradicted its title by shocking a great many people. First there was the cover: an arrestingly tranquil image of nude Siamese twins, one sporting a nipple ring on her perfectly rounded breast. A crown of flames rose from the twins' jeweled headdresses. By deliberately mixing up deeply ingrained cultural notions of beauty and deformity, Farrell seriously disturbed the sort of folks who take umbrage at any artwork that isn't doggies with big, sad eyes. Farrell's peirced and tattooed drug-addict-in-drag image offered a similarly unsettling juxtapostion of effeminancy and machismo. And the music inside defied then-accepted notions of cool and uncool. Sure the Cult, (originally Southern Death Cult) pushed Goth in a metal direction a few years before Jane's Addiction. But there was something far more outre in Farrell and his friend's attempt to combine heavy metal riffage with artistic pretensions. Jane's Addiction's music had the desperate, vengeful defiance of a really ugly drunken drag queen stumbling on stage to sing "Auld Lang Syne" in a rough leather bar.
Clearly, a new chapther in rock had begun. Repugnant as they were to some, Jane's Addiction were eagerly embraced by others, among them metalheads who were previously unable to get into alternative music. Farrell's apperant desire to "take the world in a love embrace" strucka responsive chord with heartland American youth. Here was a whiff of bizarre sexuality without the slightest hint of disco decadance. The words Farrell projected in his strident yowl lacked the literary "taint" of Eighties alternative heroes like Morrissey, Nick Cave, the Cowboy Junkies, or Robin Hitchcock. Farrell's vision was more savage and much more primal.
And-as it turned out-far more accesible. Nothing's Shocking went Gold, and with its success Jane's Addiction paved the wy for the new "mainstream alternative" of the Ninties. But the band seemed hell-bent on not living long enough to spend all the money. tales of their self destructive behavior grew to legendary proportions. Perry Farrell was rumored to be a former male prostitute and AIDS victim. The band reportedly shot heroin as openly as some light cigarettes. The truth, says Dave Navarro, is that "Jane's Addiction created its art through a self destructive process, whereas the Chili Peppers create their art through the healing process. That's something I needed to learn about."
Life on the edge did not prevent Jane's Addiction from releasing a follow-up album in 1991, Ritual de lo Habitual. in fact, their fast-lane lifestyle may have inspired them. The album was more diverse, expansive and challenging thatn their first effort, and the cover art created another uproar. This time the offending image was a sculptural collage by Farrell, depicting him on a bed with two lovers. The three figures were grouped as a Catholic icon-a carnal Holy Family-and surrounded by talismans, fetishes and images from the folklore of L.A.'s impoverished Latino population. It's hard to say what was more conterversial: the sexual or the religous overtones. The back-cover photo depicts a bottle of methadone stashed among herbal magic potions and folk remedies arranged on a botanica (a store that sells religious articles for the practice of Santeria, a Carribean-based folk religion). The cover was banned in many places. As a remedy, Farrell desighned a substitute cover-a plain brown wrapper with the First Amendment of the Constitution printed on it.
Ritual de lo Habitual offers a variety of moods ranging from despair to transcendance. Navarro had clearly grown as a guitarist in the three years between Ritual and Nothing's Shocking. Where side one of Ritual ripples with aggresive distortion, side tow showcases the guitarist's beautiful, clear and clean textures.
Powered by the hit "Been Caught Stealing," Ritual outsold Nothing's Shcoking and went Platinum. Meanwhile, Farrell was rapidly becoming the spokesman for a generation. In 1991 he organized the first Lollapalooza festival-sort of a Woodstock with a mosh pit-and birthed the concept of the "Alternative Nation." What would later become standard alterna-rock uniform-tattoos, nose rings and white-boy dreadlocks-was very much Perry Farrell's cast-off stage attire from Jane's Addiction.
By this point, the band was rapidly moving towards the past tense. Farrell hinted heavily to the press that Ritualwould be the last Jane's album. Navarro announced that he would leave the band after completeing the Lollapalooza tour. Relations between that guitarist and the singer had become extremely strained, with arguments and even violent episodes erupting more and more freguently. Deep in the throes of a herion addiction, Navarro was in a state of profound despair. In a 1991 Guitar World roundtable internview, only moments before he entered a rehabilitation clinic, Navarro told the Butthole Surfers' Gibby Haynes:
"Sometimes the only way I can get through a tour is by closing my eyes and imagining, 'Yes, if it comes down to it, I have the money and the ability to take a cab to the airport and just fuckin' blow out of here.' But instead I'll put on my Walkman, play some Butthole Surfers and get my aggression out that way. Sometimes it's either the Walkman or slash your wrists. You guys have saved my life."
It is perhaps for the best that Jane's Addiction broke up when they did. Otherwise, Navarro could have easily gone the way of Kurt Cobain. As it was, he was able to conquer his drug dependancy before moving on to fresh triumphs with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Meanwhile, Farrell continues to be an influential youth-culture hero as the leader of Porno for Pyros. The void left by the demise of Jane's Addiction was quickly filled by Seattle grunge bands. While not quite as colorful, by and large, as Jane's, the Northwesterners satisfied a growing demand for a brand of alternative music that was riff heavy but avoided the theatrical posturing of traditional heavy metal. The big Ninties "heavy alternative" bands, from Nirvana to Pearl Jam, to Smashing Pumpkins, all know that the road they traveled to huge success was originally paved by Jane's Addiction.
"I think that Lollapalooza, which was our final tour, was a great way to end Jane's Addiction," says Navarro. "We went out on top. I'm very happy and proud to have been a part of something that everybody scrambled to imitate. That's always better than being one of the scramblers."
-taken from Guitar World magazine March 1996.
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