When I was a teenager, I saw Janes Addiction at the first Lollapalooza and it was almost tribal. This impression was added to by the fact that some fans at the early '90s Irvine Meadows gig had lit fires.
There was a lot of good music and some I would come to appreciate more later. Siouxsie and the Banshees were great, Björk activated my chakras and Nine Inch Nails was. . loud. Later, around the time Trent Reznor curated the Natural Born Killers' Soundtrack, I would be impressed by the beauty of songs like "Burn" and "A Warm Place."
But the evening set by concert organizer Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction outdid everything. The crowd was hypnotized by the sheer, star-dusted repetition of the song "Jane Says." It's a jam that has no proper place to be cut off because, once started, in a perfect world it wouldn't stop.
Parry Farrell's voice is from another planet. It has its own scale, somewhere between pentatonic scale and Indonesian gamelan orchestra. You may say, "Oh, it's all done with smoke and mirrors, echo and sustain."
He sounded just as strange though when, several years ago, I had the great honor of interviewing Perry Farrell via telephone.
If the song as performed live was tribal, Perry Farrell served as chief. He was charismatic, but touched with an languor that says, "We've got all night. You're not leaving until you get it."
What a guy for a Gen X teen to gawk at. Handsome in a praying mantis kind of way, if that makes sense. That band was on fire, the audience was singing along, and then, a single percussive chord.
Janes Addiction is brilliant for bringing steel drums to the melange that lifts "Jane Says" from being a song about a sad, pretty junkie to something more elemental. The ambiance is part surf, part sand, part tiki torch part voodoo. It's those nights you get in the car and drive fast because the ocean is touched with bioluminescence or teeming with grunions.
—Sarah Torribio
