Bands that burn hot and fast like Roman candles—they’re closer to the truth of rock and roll than well-adjusted veterans. Jane’s Addiction weren’t meant for the long haul.
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Bands that burn hot and fast like Roman candles—they’re closer to the truth of rock and roll than well-adjusted veterans. Jane’s Addiction weren’t meant for the long haul.
They arrived like a stink bomb, jolting the giants of hair metal off their late-Eighties pedestals.
Anticorporate in nature, they nonetheless stole MTV’s limelight, cramming vegetables into unlikely places and dashing for the supermarket door in the legendary “Been Caught Stealing” video. They turned their fans into happy thieves. If you were into punk or metal—a culture-jammer or a tripped-out hippie chick swirling in the front row—you could love them. They pointed toward something rawer on the horizon, the flannel-checked shape of grunge.
Twenty-five years after their bitter, premature 1991 farewell (after only two studio albums), the band’s twin magnetic poles—volcanic lead guitarist Dave Navarro and soulful singer and lyricist Perry Farrell—still have disparate views about what exactly went down.
“As far as I know, we were just doing what we did,” a no-bullshit Navarro tells Guitar World from Los Angeles. “We wrote songs, toured them, played them, got them together and recorded them. The process was much truer and less product-oriented than it is now.” Navarro makes no mystery of his spotty memory, wrecked by serious drug use, the spoils of fame and musical exhilaration: “It was a very convoluted time,” he explains.
Farrell, soft-spoken and thoughtful, remembers something more ambitious. “What I was personally shooting for was greatness,” he says, aware of the immodesty but owning it. “I wanted to be in league with, you know, the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and Hendrix and the Doors. That was what my dream was.” Farrell, like Navarro, is a survivor. You can’t tell the story of Jane’s Addiction without a fair