DISGRACELAND - Jane’s Addiction (Pt. 2): Nothing’s Shocking, Not Dead Teenage Girls or Onstage Brawls

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

An onstage brawl in Boston. A dead teenage girl turned into art. Warehouse shows and a freak scene bankrolled by transgression. Listen to find out how Jane’s Addiction helped build the alternative n...ation – and how the freedom that they worshiped eventually turned into control, violence, and collapse. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠ To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:01 This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. About freaks and frauds. About the underground going mainstream. And about some of the people who dragged it there. It's about sex, drugs, and a teenage girl whose memory was turned into a shrine
Starting point is 00:00:45 for the alternative nation. It's a story about Perry Farrell, the outlaw who built a church for the weird and then crowned himself as its high priest. And it's also about the cost of control, about what happens when the carnival barker becomes the cop. This is the origin story of Jane's addiction, so it's a story about great music.
Starting point is 00:01:11 Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Venice Beach Sweat Box, MK, 2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Vision of Love by Mariah Carey. And why would I play you that specific slice of multi-octave vocal run cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on August 21st, 1990. And that was the day that Jane's Addiction released their second studio album, Ritual Dalo Abitual,
Starting point is 00:01:51 a record inspired by the tragic death of one of Perry Farrell's muses, a death that foretold much darker days ahead. On this episode, freak scenes, alternative nations, outlaws, weirdos, Perry Farrell, and Jane's Addiction. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. Jane's addiction lied. It turns out that everything was shocking. Or I should say that everything still had the capacity to shock.
Starting point is 00:02:56 Even in 2024, when we, the audience, the fans, those who had seen it all before, especially that well-worn chestnut of a tale, the one in which a band always splinters apart from the inside out, we sat there on a day in September, miles a gate, jaws on the floor, watching on our screens at the smartphone footage. taken at the previous night's Jane's Addiction show in Boston. There's singer Perry Farrell, dressed like Johnny Depp on Safari, striking that rock star pose, standing 10 feet tall and letting the music shoot through him like lightning.
Starting point is 00:03:34 To his right, Dave Navarro rips into a guitar solo during the band's song Ocean Size, a fan favorite, and a favorite of mine as well, I guess because I've always been a fan. Anyway, Perry, he's on stage grunting into the mic, rhythmic, tribal, finally in step with Eric Avery's bass and Stephen Perkins' drums, after a night in which his timing had been alarmingly off. The grunts become shouts, and then they become screams. Perry turns to Dave and quickly closes in,
Starting point is 00:04:07 body-checking the guitar player with hate in his eyes. Dave is momentarily stunned. What the fuck? And then Perry is screaming again. Or this time, not into the mic, but in his guitar player, Dave Navarro's face. Fuck you! Dave has to stop shredding for a moment so that he can hold up his picking hand and keep Perry at bay as the singer is pushing into him again.
Starting point is 00:04:33 What? That word, what? It keeps cycling through Dave Navarro's head and coming out of his mouth. It's the only word that he can think of at the moment. Perry, on the other hand, is done with words. He goes full jock now, his elbow pushing into Dave again
Starting point is 00:04:49 like a right wing pushing past the defenseman into the crease. And then Perry winds up quick and throws a stiff right hand at Dave's chest. It connects with a thud, and suddenly the band's guitar tank, Dan Cleary, jumps into the fray and pulls Perry away. But Perry doesn't want to be pulled away. So Eric Avery, the bassist, has to throw down his guitar,
Starting point is 00:05:09 get Perry in a headlock, and start punching him repeatedly in the stomach in order to subdue him. Meanwhile, Dave Navarro takes off his guitar and places it gently down on the stage, but not before turning the volume down so that it doesn't feed back, you know, the sign of a total professional even in the turning eye of chaos, and after which, Dave just walks off stage. But those of us watching all of this transpire on our screens,
Starting point is 00:05:33 again, Miles Gap and Jaws on the floor, we're all thinking the same thing. I think I just witnessed the end of Jane's addiction. Now, as I said at the top of the episode, This moment, which was quickly disseminated all over the internet, was capital S shocking, no doubt. But for anyone who's ever been in a band before, a touring band, a band with numerous, wildly different and frequently competing ideas of creative direction, you know what it's like. Even I had to admit that, yeah, back in the day when things got heated, I could have been one bum note away from either being Perry or Dave in that situation. But cooler heads typically prevail in moments like these.
Starting point is 00:06:11 dirty laundry remains stuffed way down inside a duffel bag in the backstage green room. And you know that Mick and Keith or Bono on the Edge have had moments like this in their decades of fragile brotherhood. It's only natural. And it's more than a little inevitable. So why haven't guys like that come to blows publicly in the way of the chain's addiction din? Because the Rolling Stones or you two or whoever, they don't have a peri-ferral, a wholly unique, eccentric frontman who made it his job to champion the freaks and the outlaws and the mystics and the dopers and the wanderers, the one in the same Perry Farrow who had once loudly and flamboyantly
Starting point is 00:06:53 brought the so-called alternative nation to the front door of the corporate mainstream, only to grow up and find that that transformative power of freakdom, which he wielded with strung out pride, went and transformed him into the very thing he vowed never to become an authority. he figured. 1984, Los Angeles. The cops were relentless. Two LAPD officers, one on either side of him, asking all sorts of questions. Where was he from? Why was he here? And what did he do for a living? Perry Farrell didn't want to answer that last one. Or I should say, he didn't want to answer truthfully, because if he was being honest, he was a 25-year-old rogue musician, a feral artist, a raconteur out on the margins, a free spirit blown by the wind who'd spent the last six years
Starting point is 00:07:46 living out of an old Buick Regal down in Newport Beach. He made a little money-waiting tables over at Oscars, but he wasn't cut out for shift work or work-work for that matter. He was dubious to the promises made by others. His mother had taken her own life when he was young, and his father had filled the maternal void with lots of young women in hard drugs. But Perry wasn't about to say any of this, to a couple of LA's finest. Instead, he told him he was a successful interior designer with a steady income. And at that, the two cops were satisfied.
Starting point is 00:08:22 They handed Perry the keys to the house they co-owned at 369 North Wilton between Melrose and Beverly just outside Hancock Park and told him that rent was due on the first of every month. The irony was almost too much. Perry Farrow was about to fill this six-bedroom house with other like-minded rule-breaking artists, Musicians, photographers, painters, junkies, their girlfriends, their dealers, 24-7 partying and conniving
Starting point is 00:08:48 and criminal mischief, all of it taking place under the roof of Johnny Law, his new landlord, in an apartment he was renting in a house owned by a couple of cops. At the height of mayhem, there were about 12 people living in what would become known as the Wilton House, including Perry's friend, Jane. Jane's habit, along with her fucked-up relationship. with an abusive dealer named Sergio, inspired the name for Perry's new band, Jane's Addiction, formed after Perry's brief tenure in the post-punk group, Saikon,
Starting point is 00:09:21 even though the name Jane's Addiction was also Perry's Addiction. And I'm not talking about heroin addiction solely, but the additional addictions to life's dark corners, to its tattered lunatic fringe, to sex, to violence, and things far beyond any socially accepted norms. As a band, you didn't need to be able to be able to be able to And you didn't find these sorts of things out in the more hallowed rooms on the Sunset Strip.
Starting point is 00:09:46 The Whiskey Agogo, Doug Weston's famous troubadour. These venues were notoriously paid to play, meaning that you, the band, had to pony up cold, hard cash before the powers it be would put you on a bill. What's that all about? Anyways, Perry didn't want to be on a bill with some slick asshole like Axel Rose, who Perry found to be nothing more than a market corrected second coming of Vince Neal. And sure, some of this could be chalked up. up to sour grapes, as Perry and his band didn't actually have the funds to get themselves to be
Starting point is 00:10:16 able to play the Whiskey a Go-Go or on the Trubador stage for that matter, but they had something else. They had the ingenuity of the fiscally challenged. They had the backing of the criminal underworld. Specifically, they were bankrolled by the earnings of a sex worker who turned her tricks with B-List actors into capital for early Jane's Addiction shows. And soon, Perry, Dave Navarro, Eric Avery and Stephen Perkins were clawing their way out of the underground and knocking on the mainstream's door. The only problem you knock loud enough and sometimes the mainstream answers. Bianca sat on a stool outside the banged-up door of an abandoned warehouse somewhere on the
Starting point is 00:11:29 outskirts of L.A.'s underground. She was naked from the waist up with small strips of black electrical tape covering the nipples of her exposed breasts, a site which attracted welcome attention from passers-by, while also ensuring that the entire operation, which she was overseeing, remained on the right side of the law. Not that she wasn't familiar with the wrong side. Her primary source of income came from the wrong side, from her regular gig as a sex worker. But tonight, she was turning that hard-earned money into a legitimate side hustle.
Starting point is 00:12:04 She was the one who'd rented out this dump and was now collecting the $5 cover from any and all manner of Hollywood freak looking to experience something they couldn't find anywhere else. Bianca knew it was a losing proposition. It was 1986, and in Los Angeles, the cohort of freaks, which was strong but finite, had many options for music venues in which they could hoist their flags. There was lingerie on sunset, where you could catch fishbone ska metal hybrid, and the anti-club over on Melrose, where the circle jerks and the tube sock wearing pre-John Fruchampi,
Starting point is 00:12:43 Rante Red Hot Chili Peppers did their aptly named Freaky Styly thing. And then there were the pop-up clubs like Scream and Power Tools, which operated in basements, lobbies, and rooms of local hotels, stomping grounds for only the fringe of the fringe. And so to attract attention here, now for a little-known art metal band called Jane's Addiction, a band that was the perverse inversion of more popular local groups like Guns and Roses, Well, that was a tall order, but that's what the tape on the nipples was for. Anything helped.
Starting point is 00:13:17 And Bianca, for one, wanted to help out her friends. So she posed with her very being an invitation to something illicit and darkly seductive, a cigarette burning between her lips, cash money in her hands, all the while taking the financial hit so that Perry Farrell, Dave Navarro, Eric Avery, and Stephen Perkins can make a name for themselves. Inside, the room was sparsely populated. Smoke machines and flashing lights provided a dramatic backdrop for fire eaters, strippers, hot dog vendors, and of course, Perry Farrell and nothing but pantyhose, leading Jane's addiction through a deafening tribal groove. Since forming the year prior, the group had quickly found a voice as unique as any of their so-called alternative peers,
Starting point is 00:14:05 while also sounding like none of them. And they walked the same wide-open spaces as Latter-day Led Zeppelin, to whom they were frequently compared. And Perry's high-pitched whale was admittedly in conversation with Robert Plants. But if Zeppelin was muscular and mountainous, Jane's addiction was wiry, scrappy, and almost maniacally horny. They sounded as if a post-punk band, Wire or Magazine or Gang of Four, take your pick, had swallowed Zeppelin whole, and then the ensuing indigestion had brought on some sweaty night terrors. It's the music. Or, as the LA Times put it, psycho metal.
Starting point is 00:14:44 That psycho metal was being made mostly by guys who were barely out of high school. The rhythm section, Eric Avery and Stephen Perkins, laid down hypnotic foundations, which Dave Navarro would then smother and effects-laden guitar Shrapnel. And then there was a odd guy out, Perry Farrow, on vocals. Odd guy out in this case because he was the one pushing 30. And also because he was just odd, period. The way he sang, what he sang, the way he dressed or didn't dress, the drugs he did.
Starting point is 00:15:18 He was provocation incarnate, pushing right up against the line of what was socially acceptable and frequently crossing that line too. Not that some of the other guys like Dave weren't doing hard drugs as well because they were, But Perry was the one introducing those drugs to a girl who he allegedly began dating when he was an adult and she was still in her early teens. And to be clear, I'm not saying that's provocative. I'm just pointing it out because it's gross, not to mention illegal. I'm also now getting ahead of this story, so more on all of that in a bit. But a funny thing happened in the mid-80s when Jane's addiction was working hard to be the weirdest most psycho metal band in Los Angeles.
Starting point is 00:16:03 they began to gain momentum. They graduated from Bianca's independently funded warehouse one-offs and got themselves a real reputation in an otherwise crowded music scene. They found themselves at the center of a record label bidding war. It was all because there were others out there who were just like them. And maybe these others, maybe they were hiding behind a start shirt or inside a three-piece suit. Maybe they were having a three-martini corporate launcher smoking a pipe while wrapped in the warm embrace tenure at UCLA. But deep down, they were all freaks, too. And they, just like Jane's addiction,
Starting point is 00:16:41 were tired of the same old things that the mainstream kept force-feeding them, as if they were some chirping little pet. They were both in Cindy Lopper and Prince and Tom Petty, and Prince was just a horn dog, and Cindy Lopper was nothing but an older punky Brewster. These were safe monoculture-approved versions of the rebel. Jane's addiction, on the other hand, were not. They were actually dangerous. They were actually rebellious. They were actually transgressive. And they were on their way out of the Hollywood underground
Starting point is 00:17:16 and into the storefront windows on America's busy main street. Or so they thought. January, 1987, a long black limousine pulled up along the sunset strip, just outside the legendary rainbow bar and grill. The limbo's back door opened and 49-year-old Jack Nicholson and all his raised eyebrow, Cheshire Cat, grinning glory stepped out. He straightened out his suit jacket, adjusted the black sunglasses that he wore even at nighttime,
Starting point is 00:17:50 and wondered if he'd find that giant mutton shop having Lemmy Kilmeister of Motorhead nursing a Jack and Coke at the end of the bar inside. The year prior, Jack Nicholson had been nominated for his eighth Academy Award for his role as a love-struck hitman in Prissy's honor, which took place just two years after he'd won best supporting actor for termed. of endearment. And now, executives from Warner Brothers were pressing him to play the Joker in Tim Burton's radical new vision for Batman. Suffice to say, at this moment, Jack Nicholson was at the top of his game, not to mention the consummate embodiment of a Hollywood icon.
Starting point is 00:18:30 Jack was only a few feet from the rainbow's door when a scrawny figure came running down the block from the nearby Roxy Theater. Yo! The Scronny guy was yelling now. And as he got closer, Jack saw the clash of clothing styles, the silver jacket, the white boy dreadlocks. And this was a familiar scene. Some homeless dude looking for a fistful of dollars from the A-lister who just stepped out of the shoddy black car. Some stray dog chasing after a Rolls-Royce. Yo, yo, Jack! Scronny dreadlocked homeless guy knew his name.
Starting point is 00:19:05 Jack panicked, looking for his bodyguard while simultaneously gauging how fast he'd have to move to make it to the rainbow's front door unscathed. Jack, my man! The guy was now mere feet away from the movie star. Jack, my band, we're playing over there tonight. With this, the guy motioned back to the Roxy next door. We're actually making a record there tonight. It's our first album, a live album, Jack. Would you come over and introduce us to the crowd?
Starting point is 00:19:31 It would be so good, Jack. By this point, Jack's bodyguard had stepped in between his boss and the scrawny silver jacket, a dreadlock guy who just stood there vibrating, looking equal parts strung out and anxious and waiting for a... answer. I'm sorry, the bodyguard said, putting a handout to keep what Jack it clearly clocked as some completely delusional crackpot at a safe distance. Mr. Nicholson doesn't do requests. And then Jack Nicholson was whisked to safety inside the rainbow bar and grill while Perry Farrow walked himself back to the Roxy, where Jane's Addiction recorded their debut live album in front of a packed house
Starting point is 00:20:09 that included members of Fishbone, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Thelonious Monster watching from the audience, but no Jack Nicholson. Didn't matter. The little freak show that Bianca had once financed and that Perry conducted, the nipple tape, the panty hose, the psycho metal that was all kindling. And now a fire was starting to catch somewhere far beyond the strip. And something else followed. Something darker. Something the band carried with them. Something that would take center stage right along with the music. We'll be right back after this. Word, work, word. After sending Jack Nicholson reeling with terror and confusion straight into the safe and capable
Starting point is 00:21:02 arms of his bodyguard, Perry Farrell and his freaks came from mainstream America next. But why did they succeed? Why were weirdos like Jane's addiction suddenly being willfully injected into the bloodstream of Western popular culture? The answer was actually quite simple. It wasn't personal. To paraphrase Michael Azumrad, who is... written extensively about the indie rock that defined this moment in history. When Jane's
Starting point is 00:21:31 addiction signed to Warner Brothers in 1987, all the other major labels opened their eyes to this organic movement that had been steadily growing beneath the surface. And in that organic movement, the major labels saw dollar signs. But even as it was quickly becoming corporatized, so-called alternative rock proudly saw itself as the antithesis to the corporatization of music and art. One of the alternative nation's selling points was its sense of freedom. There was the freedom to express oneself with sounds that were distorted and dissonant. Freedom to ignore long-held and well-established conventions or expectations. And those freedoms could be heard on Jane's Addiction's self-titled debut live album
Starting point is 00:22:14 and then again on nothing shocking, their second album, a studio effort this time, which came out in the summer of 1988 and which features one of the only songs I know about Ted Bundy, but I digress. Perry Farrow flaunted his own freedom every time he got on stage and went full Jim Morrison, tossing aside the shackles of that evening scantily clad outfit, a corset perhaps or a pair of rubber pants, to let both his inhibitions and his penis run wild. But there was a price for all that freedom.
Starting point is 00:22:46 Many record stores refused to carry nothing shocking because they took offense to the cover arm, a sculpture created by Perry and his girlfriend, Casey Nicolai, which depicted a pair of naked, conjoined female twins with their hair on fire. And MTV refused to air the music video for their single Mountain Song because it contained graphic nudity. And that was just the commercial cost of things. A few disgusted retailers, some pearl clutches at cable TV in the age of the PMRC.
Starting point is 00:23:17 The real price. was paid elsewhere. Because when you live with that much freedom, without rules, without limits, and a world of your own making, where anything goes and everything is fuel for your music, your art, eventually someone gets burned. 18-year-old Lisa Chester,
Starting point is 00:23:41 a.k.a. Zyola Blue, walked inside her New York City apartment and dropped her keys on the counter. The place was a mess, but she told herself she'd pick it up later. She had so much on her mind. Her head was spinning. The last few weeks have been a blur,
Starting point is 00:23:57 especially those three days she spent out in L.A. with her ex-boyfriend, Perry Farrell, and his current girlfriend, Casey. Three days of sex and dope. Three days of getting high, shooting up, and listening to the flicker of candle flames lap with the sticky air, while two pairs of naked arms and legs
Starting point is 00:24:14 wrapped around her body. But had she really heard that? The candle flame? Or was it something else? She heard it again now, almost like an echo. It followed her around, like Perry. And even though Zyola was no longer in a relationship with him, it was like some kind of spell he'd cast.
Starting point is 00:24:35 She was young and impressionable when they first met, Zyola in her mid-teens, and Perry ten years older. Perry gave her heroin for the first time. And from then on, she was hooked. She was still hooked. And maybe that's what was calling. out to her. She realized she was sweating. She got out of her gear so she could fix. And a few hours later, she was dead. The freak scene had devoured Zyola Blue. And while she was being mourned,
Starting point is 00:25:09 Perry Farrell turned his grief into something he could memorialize, something that he thought would hold meaning. And the place he chose to do that was Jane's Addiction's next album, Ritual De Lao Avitual. He put the pain and loss on tape, specifically on the record's centerpiece, three days. A nearly 11-minute epic inspired by his three-day trist with Zyola and Casey. And for the album's cover art, he and Casey created a mixed media sculpture out of chicken wire, newspaper, flour paste, and twine that depicted the two of them, along with Zyola during their three-day trist. And the graphic image got Jane's addiction in hot water again.
Starting point is 00:25:51 And this time, the record company created a sanitized, text-only alternate cover to appease the stores that were refusing to stock a record with three naked people on the front. But regardless of which version was on sale at Tower Records down the street, Perry Farrell had done what he had set out to do. He turned a dead teenage girl into a saint for the alternative nation. Zyola's family did not approve. They blamed Perry for glamorizing Zyola's junkie life. They said he was cashing in on a tragedy in order to line his pockets. Just like all those major labels it cashed in on LA's music underground. The Zyola was gone and now she was nothing but raw material.
Starting point is 00:26:35 The emotional clay that Perry was molding in his exploitative hands. Similar claims emerged later when Casey Nicolai accused Perry of stealing her ideas, her input and her influence. Casey made music videos for the band. she made a bizarre docudrama for them called Gift. She was the muse, and those were her clothes and her style that Perry appropriated. But in the end, again, according to Casey, she was essentially erased from the Jane's Addiction lore. By the time Ritual Daylo Obitual was released on August 21, 1990, Jane's addiction had nearly erased themselves.
Starting point is 00:27:16 Eric Avery, newly clean and sober and suddenly, acute, perceptive to the exhausting bullshit of artsy-fartsy freaky dudes on a lot of drugs could hardly be in Perry's presence for more than a few minutes at a time. And Eric's old buddy, Dave Navarro, who used to split a joint, a line of blow and a six-pack of beer before high school every day with him, was now a full-blown junkie. And Jane's addiction wasn't really a band anymore, not in any traditional sense. They had built altars to sex and transgressive self-destruction and to the promises of freak-centric freedom no matter the cost. They were in their own way and also in the same way that many bands are worshipped, a religion.
Starting point is 00:27:59 And Perry Farrell had become their self-appointed high priest. All right, guys, earlier in this episode, I mentioned the band SciCom, which was Perry Farrell's first band before Jane's addiction that he had formed in the early 80s. Now, what I didn't have time to get into here in this episode was this crazy incident in 1985 when Perry was attending this huge free music festival in Los Angeles, part of which was shut down by well over 100 cops, many of them on horseback. And more specifically,
Starting point is 00:28:38 I didn't get into how the ensuing riot actually wound up playing an important part in the origins of Jane's addiction. But if you want to hear that wild story, we've got you covered. As always, you can hear it as part of this week's mini episode of Disgraceland, which is available exclusively for all access members, to become a member and get more content like weekly bonus mini episode. Add free listening and more, just go to disgracehandpod.com for more info and to sign up.
Starting point is 00:29:03 All right. Now for the conclusion to our part two episode on Jane's Addiction. When Jane's Addiction came to their inevitable end the first time around in 1991, they went out with a bang. I briefly covered the inaugural Alapalooza Festival tour in our part one episode on Jane's Addiction, mostly about how the festival doubled as a traveling farewell for Perry, Dave, Eric, and Stephen. But what made Lollapalooza so impactful and so cutting edge was that it embraced a sense of freedom and its curation. It brought together bands that you normally would never have seen in the same bill. For example, here's who took part that first year.
Starting point is 00:29:43 Jane's Addiction, Ice Tea, Nine In In Inch Nails, the Rollins band, the Butthole Surfers in Living Color. In effect, the programming of Lollapalooza was an attempt to tear down some of the walls that have been put up for decades by music obsessives. Music was identity. It defined the social or ideological group in which you fit. It was shorthand for who you were, what you believed in, and what you hated. Therefore, if you rolled with iced tea, chances are you didn't also roll with nine-inch nails. And honestly, it sounds a little nuts now, but back then, if you were into living color, you'd probably didn't give a fuck about Jane's addiction.
Starting point is 00:30:21 Those two bands represented very different ideas, different cultures, different styles of thinking and playing and dressing. I mean, Living Color had a bona fide top 10 hit album, which is something that Jane's Addiction was never able to accomplish. That divide between mainstream and alternative. It's a big part of what I'm talking about. And at the time, Jane's Addiction was often pointed to as the anti-sunset strip band. They weren't slick and radio-friendly,
Starting point is 00:30:46 and they didn't attract jocks and meatheads like their L.A. neighbors, guns and roses. And so in that same year, 1991, before Jane's Addiction called it quits, When Dave Navarro got a phone call from Axel Rose, Dave was torn. Axel was obsessed with Jane's addiction. He loved everything about the band, but most of all, he loved Dave's playing. And Axel had news.
Starting point is 00:31:11 Izzy Stradlin, Guns and Roses' rhythm guitarist, the Johnny Thunder's foil to slash his meat and potatoes, pentatonic scale shredding, was on his way out. G&R needed someone to replace him, and Axel wanted it to be Dave. Okay, so again, at the time, this was practically heresy. This is like Robert Evans calling up John Kesevarez and asking the alternative indie director to direct the mainstream studio film Love Story. Dave Navarro didn't know what to do. Here was the opportunity of a lifetime for any guitarist to join the biggest rock and roll band
Starting point is 00:31:45 on the planet, and to make all the money for Christ's sakes, and to get all the chicks, too, by the way. But Dave knew what would happen if he said yes. He'd be called a sellout, a turncoat. He would expose himself as a phony. No longer a card-carrying member of the freak scene he'd aligned himself with. Sure, he'd get the paycheck, but he'd also lose the street credit. So Dave Navarro said no.
Starting point is 00:32:09 Dave remained with Perry and the others because the stigma of crossing over that invisible divide between the alternative and the mainstream was that intense. Over the years after Lollapalooza, that invisible divide, those walls, they went away. and Dave joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers for one album in 1995. And the Chili Peppers bass player Flea joined Jane's Addiction for their reunion tour in 1997. And Dave even wound up playing on a Guns and Roses song called Oh My God in 99. And in 2024, Dave reunited once again with the band he had chosen to be faithful to decades prior. But just as things had changed when it came to the musical divide over genre and popularity, things had changed within Jane's addiction.
Starting point is 00:32:55 All that freedom at the core of the band's genesis, the freedom of expression, to be whoever you wanted to be no matter what it looked or sounded like, that was gone, almost like it had never existed. Now it was replaced by control. Perry wanted to assert control. According to people in the Jane's Addiction Camp, Perry attempted to control what the shows looked like, involving other people on stage when the rest of the guys just wanted to play, just the four of them.
Starting point is 00:33:22 And when Perry didn't get what he wanted, he lost him. control. We all saw that, the meltdown on stage in Boston, the shove and the punch. But what we didn't see was that it continued backstage. In backstage, Dave confronted Perry. He wanted to know what the fuck was going on. And Perry responded by throwing another punch and hitting Dave in his face. And Dave vowed to never play with Perry again. And the remaining 15 dates of the 2004 Jane's Addiction tour were immediately canceled. But just recently, more than a year after the violent incident, a year in which Perry and the other members of Jane's Addiction spent suing each other, the band released a statement on their Instagram account.
Starting point is 00:34:03 It read in part, after that show, without notice to Perry, we unilaterally determined it would be best not to continue the tour. It made inaccurate statements about Perry's mental health, which we regret. Today, we are here to announce that we have come together one last time to resolve our differences, so that the legacy of Jane's addiction will remain the work the four of us created together. We now look forward to the future as we embark on our separate musical and creative endeavors. Jane's addiction will forever live in our hearts. We are proud of the music we created together. And with that, they can only hope that the legacy of one of the defining bands of the alternative nation wasn't left an utter disgrace.
Starting point is 00:34:48 I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. All right, guys, thanks for rolling with me through this Jane's Addiction episode, Part 2. If you haven't heard, Part 1, Yikes, get back there and listen to that one. Yeesh. Get to Part 1 before the part 2. Listen to Apple Podcast listeners, get auto downloads turned on, so you never miss an episode of Disgraceland. Give Disgraceland a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and Winston-free merch.
Starting point is 00:35:22 The question of the week this week is, is Jane's Addiction, the band the best embodies the 90s for you? Who is the most emblematic band of the 1990s, in your opinion? That is a tough question to answer. So many great bands that define that era. Hit me up 617-90666-6-638, voicemail and text, to let me know your answer to the question of the week. I'm available on Instagram and everywhere else at Disgraceland Pod,
Starting point is 00:35:47 and here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes, page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a disgrace land all-access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now
Starting point is 00:36:07 by going to disgracelandpod.com. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at Disgracelandpod, and on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at disgracelandpod. Rockerola.

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