Brendan Mullen, Whores; An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction

Brendan Mullen, Whores; An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiciton. Da Capo, 2005

PF: I was living in my car in Newport Beach, an old, red Buick Regal big enough for two people to live in. If you park down by the beach, you can always shower or go surfing in the morning to stay clean. And you get yourself a banana or an orange for breakfast. You keep your clothes in the trunk folded neatly so you’ve always got nice clean threads to go looking for work in. I was dishwasher and a busboy for about a year, moved up to waiter. I was living at the beach for six or seven years before I got in my first band, Psi Com. (3-4)

Peter Distefano: I went to Santa Monica high school with Eric from 10^th to 12^th grade…we would ditch fourth and get two bottles of Old English 800 … I don’t remember him getting expelled. (40-41)

EA: Peter and I were close friends. (42)

Rebecca Avery: The first time Eric went to rehab he was a high school senior. He did not want to go. It was a really big deal. Around that time, too, he found out that he had a different biological father. (42)

EA: I was sleeping with this prostitute named Bianca. She was awful, but she was going to bankroll us. (54)

RA: Eric kept from me that he was sleeping with Bianca. That’s hilarious. I just thought, hmm that’s an interesting woman. I found out later Whores was about her. (55)

DN: I’d pick up Perkins every day before school. We’d do coke, smoke pot, and split a 6 pack, all before 8 am. (72)

RA: Stephen and I would talk about Dave and how terrible it was and what could we do [mother murdered] and then it sort of grew into a solid friendship. Stephen was very persistent in pursuing me. He just grew on me. He was such a ball of energy and love. We started dating and I fell in love with him. We were together almost five years from when I was like sixteen to 21 [Steve 17-22, 84-89] (74)

DN: One night Stephen and I went to see Jane’s Addiciton… they had the energy and power that we loved about metal, with a total abandon that we didn’t have any experience with. (74)

PF: Stephen showed up with like an 18 piece kit for the audition. He was ready to rock us with a double kick! We were from totally different worlds, but I felt that this kid could just rock the shit out of us. He was from the Valley. That’s what the kids from the Valley looked like and that’s what they sounded like. (77)

DN: Then again our bass player really does hate Led Zeppelin. (112)

EA: I was totally perplexed when people referred to us as like Led Zeppelin. In retrospect I can see some aspects of it. (112)

DN: And personally--…I hate the Rolling Stones. Always have, always will… We ended up singing “Sympathy  for the Devil” as a joke. … I can’t believe one of my least favorite bands is on my first record [1994] (121)

Johnny Navarro: “Dave and I listened to [Appetite] and NWA a lot. Those were the cassettes all the time when we went to score. They became our official cop records. I still can’t listen to them without remembering that time. (130)

PF: Once I started hanging out with the kids in LA, it was a whole new world. I was landlocked but still carried my surfboard with me everywhere. I became a fully addicted drug fiend. Surfing just went out of my field of vision. When you’re a junkie, you’re cold constantly. Now the idea of going in the water repelled me” 136

CN: Perry was more of a crack addict, or a coke addict, than he was a heroin addict. I became a heroin addict when he started touring because I didn’t like being alone. …Perry would come back from touring while I was strung out. Then he would get high with me for a couple of weeks. (139)

CN: He could go on a little dope binge and then go out and run ten miles. Perry was able to walk away. Just bounce right back and start touring again. He didn’t stay strung out when he toured, whereas Dave was always strung out on the road. Perry did a lot of coke on the road, because promoters supply a lot of coke, but as far as being a junkie, he really wasn’t a junkie like most junkies are. He was like a part-timer. But with coke, he had a harder time [quitting].

John Frusciante: Even though Perry talked about drugs and gave the impression he was some kind of drug addict, and he obviously smoked a lot of weed, I don’t think he was ever a heroin addict. He would just go on drug binges and then not do them for a while. (141)

Eric ODs at the Chelsea [hotel, 1987]

Charley Brown: [Love and Rockets tour, 1987-1988] That was pretty much the whole tour. Jane’s was just a local LA phenomenon up to now. Suddenly we’re playing 5,000 – 10,000 seaters. The biggest crowd they’d played in front of was at the Scream. We lived like dogs with one beat up motor home, one crew guy, and myself. Everybody’s been fighting the whole way across the country. We get there, expectations are high, and the audience hates us. Gaaah. (161)

RA: Had a Dad had to do with Eric finding out that he had this different father. (167)

EA: I came up with the guitar for Jane Says and Summertime Rolls. (167)

PF: It’s a rocking chair, but if you look closely, it rocks side to side rather than back and foth. We had that made. (182)

Dave Jerden: When [Nothing’s Shocking] came out, the mainstream rock press just trashed it. Rolling Stone said, “this record is unlistenable” (189)

PF: When [Xiola] died [June 1987], it was just kind of a jolt. An electric jolt. (198)

DJerden: We were supposed to start recording the Ritual recod in June or July, but because of his rift with Eric, Perry just didn’t show up for weeks. We started recording without him. … Eventually Eric and Perry talked and decided they would just come in at different times to do their stuff.

SP: We started a few songs for Ritual with Dave Jerden producing again, and then decided we needed to get away from each other, and then took like a two or three month break.

DN: I recently found out that we were in such poor condition that we had to stop and take a break for several months.

PF: Was it from drugs? Did anybody mention that it might be from drugs? Was it me that time out had to be taken for? Or was it somebody else? Casey was really sick and had to be taken to rehab and she wouldn’t go unless I went with her. I didn’t want to go to rehab, but Casey would going to drop dead within a week. She just didn’t want to be alone. I hate rehabs. I never want to be in another one. Maybe that’s where this break comes from.

Tom Atencio: Dave was in and out of rehab during the recording of Ritual. Nobody was visiting him. Nobody talked to him when he was in rehab. I was the only person who went to see him. They were total dismissive.

DN: My memory of recording Ritual lasts about five minutes. In my head, we spent five minutes in the studio.

EA: At the time I was clean and so I was kind of like what the fuck is this? What am I doing here? At the time we were doing Ritual I was taking astronomy courses at Santa Monica College. (201-203)

Tom  Atencio: Eric was absolutely appalled that [BCS] was going to be a single.

Chris Cuffaro: When we were in Hawaii for the last show, Tonya [Goddard, Dave’s then girlfriend] came down to the bar where I was hanging out with some people. We were like, “where’s Dave”. She said, “ah, you know, he’s in his room, he doesn’t want to come out. It’s too bright. There’s Eric out on the beach swimming and snorkeling with his girlfriend. … I think she left Dave and got clean soon after that (240)

PF: That last night I went off the deepest end a fella could go. We’re talking about a ravishing young hottie showing up with a doctor’s bag in her hand and a wink in her eye… so I spent I don’t know how many ecstatic days on the paradise island of Hawaii getting high and feasting on her beauty. [Afterwards] I remember getting off the plane and feeling really light and free. I felt like, man, all that swirl of energy and work and attention, there’s nothing to it anymore. And there I was on the curb just waiting for a cab… thinking, man, that was some chapter, you know. Hell of a chapter. (244)

PD: I met Perry through Eric’s friend Greg Lampkin. We went on a surf trip to Mexico and I shared a cabana with Perry and he heard me play some classical guitar, finger pickings and he was like, wow, that’s great,  you should jam with me and Perk when we get back. (262)

Pete Weiss: The day Martyn got into Porno they were having open auditions for a bass player. Casey was at the sign-in table, and if you looked cool enough—then they’s see if you could play. (263)

PF: In Jane’s I would wait until after the show [to get high]. In Porno, I couldn’t even sing if I wasn’t on the pipe. I couldn’t get out of bed, I couldn’t move without it. (263) … In Jane’s I’d see that we were off on tour in two weeks and I’d kick… it was important for me to be good onstage ‘cause heroin cuts your notes out. Your throat can’t open up.

Martyn: Perry would say, OK, on Monday the tour starts—this is on a Wednesday—so let’s party until Friday, then we kick and on Monday we go on the road clean, which kind of worked for him but it didn’t work for me (264)

PD: the first record it worked perfect, smoking rock and shooting heroin…Matt Hyde and Perry co-produced the record. It took a couple of weeks of writing and two weeks of recording. That was it. The songs were all written coming off drugs. During drugs we never wrote. (265)

Martyn used to live in a house with some Crips.

PD: I used to always carry a .25 anyway, and Perry also go a hold of a gat, I can’t remember what.

PF: With Porno, it all just caught up with me. I needed a lot before I could even go on. I never left my house without crack and some dope. (270)

PD: Fiji was another detox, buff and shine, another was to go and get off of dope without facing what we really had to do. It was always another excuse to get another surf trip. We spent a log of money on these trips. They worked but only temporariliy. They’d help us clean up, we’d get strong, come back and then start partying and getting stuff done, but then we’d crumble in three or four weeks. … Porto Escotino, G-Land in Indonesia, Java, Sumatra, we lived on a boat for about a week in the Indonesian islands. We went to Bali two times… Taberil…Samoa… Costa Rica … San Blas, Santa Cruz, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico a lot. We went on probably ten to fifteen trips. (273)

Martyn – we had armed bodyguards with submachine guns and shoulder holsters in this treehouse and Perry was running around naked with a gun one night. These two hired goons were just laughing their asses off, milking it for all they could get. They’d be like snickering, “hey Perry, I think we saw something last night—” that would be another like five grand or whatever, and Perry was just oblivious. (277)

Paul V: [Woodstock] Saturday comes around and Perry doesn’t show up. … Turns out he is in San Francisco… doesn’t know how he got up there or why he was there. … we thought, we are going to get sued, we’re off the bill.. we had to charter a special flight from San Francisco to New York… another 10, 20 grand. He finally arrived in New York at like three in the morning. Then we had to shell out for a helicopter to take up to upstate New York. … We had to rent stage suits so we went to Western Costumers… (279)