Top 19 -- Jane's Addiction: Jane's Addiction

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

By the time I started my second semester of my junior year at Merrimack College, I was done with two of my roommates. And they were done with me. We had lived together for two years and those peccadilloes that we thought were funny and quirky when we were sophomores were now annoying and grating. We spent a lot of time with each other going all the way back to freshman year, but these last four months were a slog or passive aggressive bitterness. 

I was a dick and would get really drunk every weekend at some party and go on and on about how "they missed out" and how the party at the apartments "was just so fucking good." My roommates were homebodies and didn't like going out, so I knew what I was doing and which buttons to hit. They were getting into jam bands like Phish, the Grateful Dead, Blues Traveller and Dave Matthews and I'd constantly tell them how bad these bands were while listening to my music (Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Public Enemy) over and over again at loud volumes. 

And then they'd do stupid shit to me too. Like rearrange the room that my roommate and I shared. One day my roommate let his girlfriend, who I couldn't  stand, wear one my hats--which when I spotted her across campus with it, I went fucking bananas when I got back to our suite. "Who the fuck do you think you are, thinking that your girlfriend can wear my 1961 pinstriped Cincinnati Reds hat? That's my hat, not yours," which is pretty much word-for-word something that I once said in all seriousness and anger.  

So the feeling was more than mutual when around March of 1995, I just wasn't interested in hanging out with them that much any more. One of the guys that I really started hanging out with a lot during this time, was a big Jane's Addiction fan. He especially loved this album and before we'd go out on Friday and Saturday nights, we'd end up playing drinking games and listening to this album over and over and over again. 

When I was doing some research on this album, I found out that this was recorded in late January 1987 and released that May, which seems like a pretty quick turnaround. And it sounds like it. Even though the Wikipedia page said that the crowd noises were goosed by a Los Lobos audience, there is an energy here that you don't get in a lot of debuts. I think that's because most debut albums aren't recorded live. 

Jane's Addiction is very much a Los Angeles band. During their ascent they were sharing the Sunset Strip with all of the hair metal bands that called LA their home: Motley Crue, Poison but mostly the second-wave of hair bands that were coming up in the late 80s like Warrant and Slaughter. For Jane's Addiction not to copy that style of both dress and music is a remarkable tribute to Jane's Addiction classic lineup of Perry Farrell, Dave Navarro, Stephen Perkins and Eric Avery. 

By the time that I had found Jane's Addiction and really enjoyed them, they had released two other albums, headlined Lollapalooza and broken up. So to me, Jane's Addiction was the "band that got away". Between drinks, my friend and I spoke a lot about how awesome it would be to have seen Jane's Addiction and how stupid it was for them to break up. "They had so much more left in the tank," I probably said. 

Over the years, I saw Jane's Addiction twice: once was a really good show, the other was a complete shitshow. They reunited in 1997 and played a college tour. My friend and I went with his girlfriend and a few other friends to see them at Brandeis University, which is outside Boston. Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist Flea was subbing for Avery, so I was incredibly excited about this show. I wasn't alone. The show was held at a smallish gym that was packed with people eager to see the reunited band. I don't think that Brandeis understood what kind of concert that this was going to be because even I could see that security was lax and the barrier between band and audience was barely existent. 

Navarro came out and played the first note to either "Mountain Song" or "Ocean Sized" (I can't remember, it was a long time ago) and the entire audience rushed the stage at once. Farrell begged for the crowd to back up, finished the song and the band left the stage citing safety concerns--who could blame them. About an hour and change later, the band came out and played a handful of acoustic songs and that was it. Curfew came and Jane's was gone. 

A few years later, I saw Farrell's second band, Porno for Pyros during the WBCN River Rave, which was an all-day festival. There was a rumor that Navarro and Flea were going to jet up from Washington DC to reunite with Farrell, but it never happened. I'm not sure where I heard that, but I was taking it as gospel and was completely disappointed when Farrell and his band left without Flea and Navarro playing a note. 

The last time I saw Jane's Addiction was at Lollapalooza 2003. The show was great and nothing went awry. They played all of the songs that I wanted to hear without any shenanigans and it was great. I guess third time is the charm. But after spending money and time waiting to see a good Jane's show, it put to rest any romantic notions of the mercurial band. It sucks when you are disappointed by a performance and there's nothing fun about saying, "Yeah, that show was a complete disaster. But at least I have a cool story!" 

I'd rather have heard a good show. 

To wrap this blog up, I want to say that my roommates and I made up during the following year. We didn't room together and that was for the best and we became better friends. I still text with these guys a few times a week and we joke about how we were assholes to each other when we were younger. It sucks, but it happens. Looking back on it, when you're in your late teens and early 20s, it's probably not a good idea to room with the same people for more than a year. You're way too self-absorbed for anyone to handle you for more than 12 months. Add in the crucible of the cinder block or a small dormitory suite, alcohol, other illicit substances, the pressures of school and the opposite sex and this was  tinder box. I'm surprised that we didn't murder each other. 

Good Songs VIII

Kiss of Death – Dokken

Burning Like a Flame – Dokken

Epic – Faith No More

Falling to Pieces – Faith No More

Up All Night – Slaughter

Fly to the Angels – Slaughter

Never Enough – LA Guns

Ballad of Jayne – LA Guns

Cult of Personality – Living Colour

Glamour Boys – Living Colour

Type – Living Colour

Love Rears Its Ugly Head – Living Colour

Don’t Close Your Eyes – Kix

Cold Blood – Kix

Kickstart My Heart – Motley Crue

Doctor Feelgood – Motley Crue

Don’t Go Away Mad – Motley Crue

Same Old Situation – Motley Crue

Down Boys – Warrant

Currently, I am a marketer. Technically, I’m a product marketer and that can mean a lot of different things at a lot of different companies. However, the bulk of my job is understanding my product, crafting a message for that product and making sure that message gets to the buying public. Unless you have amazing brand recognition (Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonalds) getting that message out there can be difficult.

But that’s what I love about my job. I love determining what the product’s message and value props are going to be and figuring out a way to present it in a way that will make people reach into their wallets and pay my company their hard-earned money. That’s probably a crass way to put it, but that’s basically what my job boils down to.

One of the things that I would love to discover (and this is a discovery, more than an invention, thought I assume it could be argued either way) is an algorithm that will correctly predict the whims of the public. On a macro-level, I’m not sure if you need something like this. Normally, people will gravitate to something that has a ton of hype around it. Hype costs money, ergo if you have a ton of money you can get your hype and your customers. The trick is creating something worthwhile enough so that the hype can die down a bit and people will still actively seek out your product. The bottom line is, money helps.  

The algorithm that I would like to discover would operate  on the micro-level. Why do some towns and cities prefer Pepsi over Coke, Budweiser over Coors Light, Burger King over McDonalds. These hamlets have their regional favorites and there has to be a reason why. If you get enough of these micro-levels together, you get a chunk of the macro-level and start competing with the big guys.

The first two songs on this tape* sorta relate to this micro-level way of thinking.

* The next three Good Songs tapes were all created at the same time. They were broken up into Rock, Rap and Mix. As you might be able to tell from this tape, the first 14 songs are paired – a duo of songs from one tape. Except for some reason I really liked me some Motley Crue at this point, so I doubled the duo of Dr. Feelgood. Anyway, I’m not sure if I like this gimmick, it reminds me of those old “Two for Tuesdays” programs they’d run on the local radio station where you’d get two songs from the same artist. I have a feeling that I was influenced by MTV who was playing video blocks of the same type of music during the summer of 1990 and 91. At this point in my life, MTV was the Pied Piper, I’d pretty much buy anything that was in heavy rotation on MTV.

This micro-level of marketing refers to the band Dokken and my specifically high school. From any objectionable point-of-view there is no difference between Dokken and Ratt and LA Guns and Poison or any other mid-80s, LA heavy metal band. Like those bands, they were an amalgam of Led Zeppelin/Van Halen/Black Sabbath-influenced rock that placed a premium on looking a certain way (PRETTY!) and acting a certain way (obtuse and obnoxious). Also like those bands, Dokken didn’t do anything extraordinary. The lyrics weren’t anything special, the musicianship was mediocre and even the way that the singles were released (rockin’ one first, ballad second, whatever third) was all the same.

They were unoriginal soliders in a time where corporations were pumping out bands who were rockin’ by numbers. They were a disposable band that was an example of a successful musical formula.

For some reason, Dokken took ahold of my high school. Or at least the band took ahold of the cooler guys in my grade, which meant that the band Dokken had a heightened sense of awareness at Amesbury High School. It wasn’t “Dokken or Die” but I seem to remember that there were a lot of cafeteria conversations about whether Dokken guitarist was “Awesome”, “Fucking Awesome” or “Wicked Fucking Awesome”. On days when “Mr. Scary” was extra loud, there were some debates about whether Lynch was legitimately better than Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page.

I’m sure that every moderately popular band had an unexplained loyal following at every high school in America, so I don’t mean to single my high school out. I’m sure you could replace Lynch with Rikki Rocket or Richie Sambora or Mick Mars and the same conversations where taking place all throughout America at that time.

As a young person you have no real idea of what came before you but you have an endless amount of time to figure out where you heroes will rank. I thought that Jose Canseco would sail into the Hall of Fame on his first ballot, things happen. But what I’m most interested in is how did one high school in the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts have a slavish devotion to a completely forgettable and totally middle-of-the-road rock band? I’ve thought about this question for nigh 20 years and I don’t think that I ever figured out a good answer. Maybe an algorithm for predicting the trends of teenagers is dumb because there is too much randomness, but I don’t believe that. There should be an answer somewhere.

It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to Dokken* (actually, I do unironically enjoy the second song on this tape, “Burning Like a Flame”) but it’s interesting how hearing the opening riffs to “Kiss of Death” brings back those old high school memories. I never made a big deal of liking or disliking Dokken (in fact, I know I got “Back For the Attack” from the Columbia House tape club for a penny) but I’m not made of stone. I heard a bunch of people talking about a band, I listened to them a few dozen times, I thought that maybe I could get cool by osmosis, it didn’t work that way and I moved on. High school is a strange time.

* In the late 90s, MTV ran a retrospective Where-Are-They-Now special (this was pre-everyone having the internet and knowing where everyone is) on the heavy metal heroes of the late 80s. An interview with Dokken lead singer Don Dokken was surprising in just how unaware he was about his band’s place in the world was. He said that his band’s managers worked with Metallica at the time and would beg him and his mates not to fall in the trap of the LA scene of too much makeup, too much Aquanet, too much handkerchiefs, basically too much opulence. Be like Metallica they said and don’t follow the trends. The band ignored them and Dokken wistfully said—and I quote, “If we listened to them, we could have been Metallica.” No you wouldn’t, Don. No you wouldn’t.

I will not apologize for the Faith No More double-dip, though. Both of these songs were in heavy rotation on MTV and rock radio in the early 90s though not too many people remember the band itself. They had a modest hit later in the decade with the ironic cover of the Commodore’s “Easy (Like Sunday Morning)” but other than that, you didn’t hear too much about them. It’s easy to understand why because the group was ahead of its time. From the rock/rap melding to the band members’ detached, almost ironic sense of being, FNM had no business showing up in the self-absorbed stratosphere of the early 90s.

If you asked a person to tell you something about FNM, a majority would talk about the video for “Epic”, specifically the slow-motion video of a fish who had fallen out of its bowl and was gasping for breath. It wasn’t a particular shocking image, but for some reason it resonated with a lot of viewers. So much so that MTV News felt it was their duty to ask the band about the video. Lead guitarist Jim Martin glibly said, “Well, the fish deserved to be filmed too.” This answer was interesting on many levels in that a. it was a foolish “controversy” to be overly concerned about b. the visuals don’t matter, it’s supposed to be about the music. And c. the answer itself almost a non sequitor in that the interviewer obviously wasn’t concerned about the fish’s popularity but rather the fish’s well-being. Martin brought a sense of absurdity to the interview by turning an incredibly dumb question’s perception completely askew.

I watched a lot of MTV News and saw a lot of celebrities interviewed and that’s the only one that I remember because frankly, I don’t think that anyone else at that time could have given the same response.

Aside from Motley Crue and Living Colour (who I wrote about a few entries back) the rest of the bands are completely anonymous. A few quick hitters on what I remember from them:

Slaughter: the band that girls really loved, mainly because of Mark Slaughter. I thought that they might be kinda cool because I heard Gene Simmons “discovered” them and Gene let Mark wear his leather jacket in the “Fly to the Angels” video. Here’s a potentially embarrassing fact, if I get drunk and I have access to YouTube, I will probably play “Fly to the Angels” at least a half-dozen times. BTW, the line from "Up All Night", "Oh I wish we could stay up, 24 hours a day!" is perhaps the whiniest line ever song by a band that wanted to look cool or tough. Man, that was terrible. 

Kix: the name sounds like Kiss, but the band sounds like Great White. In fact, I get those two bands confused all the time. I owned the tape these two songs came from and I don’t think that I could name any other song these guys did.

LA Guns: I wonder if the Jayne from the “Ballad of Jayne” is the same Jane from Jane’s Addiction’s “Jane Says” (despite the spelling differences)? Probably not but  that last sentence holds the records for most times I’ve ever written the name Jane in any permutation of the name. I remember hearing that lead guitarist Tracii Guns was in a band with Axl Rose and that’s how the name Guns N Roses came to be. The story goes on to say that Axl kicked Tracii out and replaced him with Slash, but kept the name. Wikipedia says this story checks out, so good work AHS rumor mongers! Anyway, I always felt sorta bad for Guns and thought that he had to be kicking himself that he wasn’t actually in the multi-platinum band that was partly named after him.

Warrant: This band is usually short-hand for being part of the terrible rock scene that is being covered with this cassette. And for good reason, I suppose. I have no idea what a Down Boy is and I don’t remember caring too much. The one thing that I found refreshing about lead singer Jani Lane is that in that same MTV retrospective that I referred to earlier, he talks about going to the band’s record company in 1992 and seeing a huge poster of “Cherry Pie” hanging over the secretary’s desk. A year later, the poster was replaced by Alice In Chains. He then thought, “Crap. We’re probably in big trouble.”

He certainly was.