Jane’s Addiction Talk Reunion, New Songs, Walkthrough Without Dave Navarro

“What’s beautiful in life isn’t always winning,” says Perry Farrell. “It has been demolished and back again and then the win. Sometimes, that can be sweeter.”

It’s worth noting that Farrell isn’t short on winning moments in 2022. The 63-year-old recently watched Lollapalooza with a hugely successful multi-day platform in Chicago (not to mention Stockholm, Paris, Buenos Aires, and other far-flung spots); He conceived, performed and performed with his wife, Etty Lau Farrell, a recurring “immersive theater” experience in Los Angeles called Heaven After Dark which he hopes to gain internationally; And his reunion unexpectedly made his mid-’90s outfit, Porno for Pyros, their first full show in more than 25 years.

The missing piece of this winning puzzle is Jane’s Addiction, the LA band who, with Farrell shamanism at its head, played a major role in fostering alternative rock into the mainstream in the late ’80s and early ’90s, notoriously breaking up (for the first time, at least) after they topped The inaugural Lollapalooza Festival in 1991. Jane’s has re-recorded and toured multiple times over the years, and is still a hot live ticket and festival topper. But except for a few sporadic appearances at festivals in 2020 and 2021, they’ve been mostly dormant — until now.

The band kicked off their fall North American tour “Spirits on Fire” with another icon of the alternate era, Smashing Pumpkins. While the two acts share a lot of history — pumpkins topped the 1994 Lollapalooza Festival, for example — in those days they seemed to fall, musically and perhaps spiritually, into distinct corners of the alternative rock world, with Jane steering more toward punk, goth. The quirky arty, pumpkin brogue, classic rock and angry metal.

Nowadays, they probably have more in common—imposing legacies, bulletproof catalogs, and a dedication to big, flowery shows. “Jane, everything we have is festivals and bangs and drama and art,” Farrell says. “And Billy” [Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins front man] There are lights, costumes, video… It’s a performance that’s not just musical, but deep. He continues, “The tour is a comeback of real, lively human performance, unlike, you know, everything is on Jumbotron, or the band gives you nothing and they go out there in a silly T-shirt. “

Smashing Pumpkins, which currently features three of the band’s original four members — Corgan, guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin — has featured “Spirits on” Fire tour with the announcement of a new record, “ATUM,” 33-track rock opera at Three works” intended to hear great efforts such as the movie “Melon Cooley and Endless Sorrow” in 1995.

For Jane’s Addiction, these performances arrive as the band faces a personal inflection point: a re-embracing of what seemed out of reach, and a tentative first step toward an unknown future.

The piece “Past” is represented by the return of original guitarist Eric Avery. A major component of Jane’s Addiction sound, Avery was the first member of the band to play alongside Farrell in 1985, and it’s his strong, hypnotic lines that provide plenty of power and direction to classic tracks like “Mountain Song” and “Whooters.” Avery’s history with Jane’s addiction, and with Pharrell in particular, was marked by stress. He last played with the band for a short period earlier in the 2000s before leaving again in 2010. Over the years, his place has been taken by everyone from Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea to and, in most cases, prolific studio and bassist Chris Chaney.

Avery’s path back into Jane’s addiction began a few years ago, when he reconnected with Pharrell in a phone call that, according to the bassist, was brokered by a mutual friend, the late Foo Fighters, drummer Taylor Hawkins. When Farrell called again recently, he said, “I thought maybe it had an affair [Hawkins’] Death, because we both loved him so much. I thought maybe he wanted to sing a song or something to Taylor.”

Instead, the conversation focused on the future of Jane’s addiction and Avery’s place in it. “We’ve had what I consider to be the most meaningful, honest, and respectful conversation we’ve had since Jane’s early days,” Avery says. “I don’t mean to sound like that ‘new age’ about it, but it was kind of a rift healing.”

Farrell says that recovery was too late. “It’s time. We’re not getting any younger, and I wanted to start working with Eric again before it was too late.”

But just as the band, which also includes original members Stephen Perkins (also from Porno for Pyros) on drums and Dave Navarro on guitar, seemed to make themselves whole again, they were dealt a knockout hit. Navarro has been suffering from severe prolonged Covid symptoms since December 2021. His addiction forced Jane to withdraw from two festival bills earlier this year, both times with Porno for Pyros to replace them. As the band prepared to begin rehearsals for the “Spirits on Fire” tour, Navarro told them he was still not good enough to join Jane’s Addiction on the road.

Farrell says, “Dave told us he hopes to be back on a date [on the tour], but … look, this is very important. Today, you should be looking for your friends and family. It’s a tough time to survive. You have to think smart. When someone isn’t feeling well, you have to be okay with them slowing down for a minute. There’s nothing else you can do.”

“My heart is broken not to have Dave here with us,” adds Perkins. “But I just want my boyfriend to be healthy. The best thing we can do for him right now is not to interrupt the healing process.”

In the meantime, the show must go on. For that to happen, Jane’s addiction, for the first time in their history, had to find a guitarist to wear Navarro’s shoes. For the tour, at least, that guitarist will be Troy Van Leeuwen, a record producer and multi-instrumentalist who has played with the likes of A Perfect Circle, Iggy Pop, and most notably Queens of the Stone Edge. Additionally, Farrell reported that many of the shows will feature guest guitarists joining the band on stage. These names, however, remain top secret. “I wish I could tell you, but I can’t,” he says. “But they are guitar peers, shall we say, to Jeans. Friends first and foremost, but certainly musical allies.”

Regarding Van Leeuwen, he continues, “I would never have wanted to go out without Dave. But these days are the time to collaborate. So with Troy, we sat down and talked about theater style and most importantly, musical style. And we found common ground.”

“I came to it from the angle of respect for the material and respect for history, because Dave has such a big presence in the band,” Van Leeuwen says. “Then when we started playing more and more, they all said, ‘Okay, do your own thing too. “So I have some space to add my taste here and there.”

“We really got to grips with it, this is a chance for Jeans to get a little different sound,” Avery says. “A slightly different experience.”

From now on, Jane’s addiction experience, on another break from her last operating procedures, won’t be limited to just the stage. The band’s latest studio album, “The Great Escape Artist,” was released in 2011. But last August, they reunited to work on new material, which would also form their first recording with Avery since 1990’s “Ritual de lo Habitual.” The sessions “really exceeded expectations,” Farrell says. We wrote three songs – one of them is very raw, but there are two in particular that I like. One is called “true love” and the other is called “imminent redemption.” ”

The last song came in an unusual way, albeit in the twenty-first century. The night before the band’s first session together, Avery was searching all over the internet and came across a YouTube video of Perkins giving a drum clinic. He stuck to a solo piece that the drummer was reviewing 6/8 times, and created a bass melody out of one of the rhythms. The next day, it became the first new music they worked on.

“I started playing with Stephen, and Berry started singing, and I got a feeling I haven’t had in many years,” Avery says. “Remind me of surfing. When you’re paddling for a wave, there’s an inflection point where the wave is at you, and you put the effort into that and you can stop paddling. You just have to stand up and start riding. I thought, cool, we can still get into this.. .”

“When she hears what we’ve come up with, she immediately has that vibe that you hear in things like ‘Mountain Song’ or ‘Whores,'” adds Perkins. It’s cinematic. It is sorcery. It looks like us.”

However, Farrell stresses that there is still work to be done, as Navarro has yet to add his guitar to the new material. “These songs are outstanding,” he says. “Dave hasn’t scored it yet, and it won’t be complete until he does.”

As for whether there’s an entire album in the future of Jane’s Addiction, Perkins, for example, is hopeful. “Damn, yeah, that’s all I want,” he says. “Go into a room together, just do it. The past three years have been a nightmare for everyone—let’s ignite this pain, that fear, the uncertainty, all that shit we’ve been through together. Let’s turn that into a Jane record. That’s my dream.”

At the very least, the music will continue in one form or another. “We’re all on the world clock, so I’m going to ride it for as long as I live,” Farrell says. “I don’t know what music will look like when I’m in my 70s, but I want to give it a try, and I will.”

He went on to say that calling it a termination of service was out of the question. “You never have to retire,” Farrell says. “I could ask anyone—I could ask Tom Brady, and he would tell you he envied him I. Because I can go until I can’t breathe anymore. That’s the nice thing about being a musician. You keep moving, and along the way you gain knowledge of music, you gain poetic knowledge. You acquire political knowledge, spiritual knowledge, and universal knowledge. And then you put it all into your art.”