Mon, 31 Oct 2005
Jane's Addiction
Brendan Mullen, Whores:
an oral biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction,
Da Capo
I was at one of the last concerts of the first incarnation
of Jane's Addiction. Banshee Farrell, hyper-guitar Navarro,
the intricate thunder of Avery and Perkins: it was post-punk
art theatre with a decadent beauty that attracted the most
beautiful crowd I've ever seen. There were drugs and pain
and a peculiar sort of redemption and release that shone
like thin beams of light through cracks in the dark, dark sky. You were
insanely in love with the wrong girl? You had bad habits
but a redeeming poetry somewhere in your soul? This was the
place for you, buried in shards of mega-guitar, thundering
rhythms, and non-linear thoughts.
The idea is that adult, conformist society, basically sucks.
That doesn't mean, like the manipulated, psychopathic punks
that you had license to shit on anybody's head that was going past.
It meant that technical crimes were bullshit. It meant that
rules invented by bossy-boots do-gooders were also bullshit.
And it meant that people who were so clueless as to buy it all
were bullshit. Who would believe that in the time since then
and now, things have actually got much worse?
But it actually takes wisdom and discipline to cope with
that degree of licentiousness, or liberty, if you will. The
band and their immediate hangers-on merely constructed a
different prison for themselves and being around them can't
have been much fun.
Where did this band come from? What interesting place brought
them together? In this book, through a series of quotes from
the band and the people around them, you can find out. Where
did Perry Farrell get his name from? Peri-pheral he says. Someone
else says he just took his brother's name. The place was
LA and the vibrant scene one of those things that springs up
at a certain time, blooms, spreads its seed upon the winds and
disappears completely.
There is a lot of talk of drugs in this book but you'd have
to be a complete fool to take any of it as an advocation.
As Dave Navarro says "Heroin ruined my dreams. It turned the
thing I had worked for my whole life into the thing I wanted
to get away from the most." Farrell is more equivical but with
the image he likes to project, I guess that's par for the course.
It's a wonder that the band ever got beyond the seedy clubs
of LA. As the band was being signed, Farrell demanded 50% of the
money, putting the others on 12.5% each. Somehow, the others,
who were certainly not just sidemen, were made to agree, but
it was the beginning of the end. Farrell, in fact, comes across
as a bit of a monster, and the Porno for Pyros guys took a
financial beating as well.
Never mind, it's the music that counts.
If you're a Jane's fan, this book is probably essential.
And I'm glad that Jane Bainter somehow made it through. XX.
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pre Dec 04 reviews are here