Happy 35th Anniversary to Jane’s Addiction’s debut album Nothing’s Shocking, originally released August 23, 1988.
In 2001, David Segal, a reporter at the Washington Post, called up Jane Bainter out of the blue. It had taken only a little bit of asking around to determine that she was still alive, and still living in Los Angeles. Like anyone who had listened to alternative radio in the late ’80s and beyond, Segal had been moved by the two-chord ballad “Jane Says,” whose sunny-melancholy melody tells the story of an addict named Jane and her abusive boyfriend Sergio.
It’s a song that’s much more than the sum of its parts, a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the power of simplicity. Through a series of quotes, all beginning with “Jane says,” Perry Farrell paints a vivid portrait of Jane and her tragic but unwaveringly optimistic life as a junkie. No matter how hard life gets for Jane—whether she’s hiding the TV from Sergio, swinging fists, or lamenting that she’s never been in love—she always has hope for tomorrow. (“Jane says, ‘I’m going away to Spain, when I get my money saved.’”) I’ve listened to the song countless times, and it never fails to provide a cathartic sadness (I’ve had a lot of addicts in my life) and the comfort of hope.
The most beautiful thing about “Jane Says,” however, is Farrell’s palpable empathy for Jane. He sees her, in a way that most people never put the effort into seeing another human being, much less the kind of human being most people look away from. But that’s what also makes it so sad.
So, riveted like I’ve been by “Jane Says,” Segal called up Bainter, the titular inspiration for not only the song but also Farrell’s band Jane’s Addiction, to find out how she’d been. "I've heard about students getting writing assignments in class to write about ‘Jane Says,’" Bainter said. "Generally, I haven't told many people that I'm that Jane. It's a little awkward. It's a hard life being an addict, and it feels now like the song is about another person. It's not something I've really spoken about much."
Wearing her signature black wig and fishnets over lithe legs, Bainter’s photo appeared in the insert of Jane’s Addiction’s debut Nothing’s Shocking, the album that would establish the band as alt-rock pioneers, earn them a GRAMMY nod, and place them on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It’s easy to see why they were so taken by Jane—she’s fine-featured, sphinxlike, exquisitely beautiful. A natural muse, though Bainter’s parents didn’t see it so romantically.
"It was very hard for my family," Bainter recalled. At the time, she’d been living a double life. In the morning, she’d suit up in conservative clothes for her job at a management consulting firm. By night, she’d don her wig and haunt LA’s music scene high out of her mind.
But she wasn’t a sex worker, as the song might seem to imply. (When I was first getting into Jane’s Addiction, I remember an older girl, Jackie, telling me, “Jane was a hooker the band knew.”) "A lot of people hear the song and assume it's about a prostitute,” Bainter told Segal. “It's not. If you could clear that, I'd appreciate it."
When Perry Farrell first met Jane Bainter he was living in a crumbling Craftsman aptly nicknamed the Wilton House on Wilton Street in Los Angeles. Farrell had employed some shady tactics to secure its rental, hoping to eventually turn the place into an arts collective. “I told the landlords—these twin motorcycle cops—that I would love to put curtains here, do the walls a certain color,” he recalls. “I got them to believe I was this quiet, shy, gay interior decorator who’d be no trouble. They ended up getting twelve musicians, photographers, artists, their girlfriends, dogs, snakes, loud music, and round-the-clock junkie shenanigans.”
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Growing up Perry Bernstein, Farrell was a Jewish kid from Queens whose family moved to Miami when he was 15. “In the ’70s and ’80s, everybody thought Miami was the spot and Scarface was reigning,” Farrell recalls. He had older siblings who turned him onto music, and when they moved to Florida, Perry got into David Bowie, Lou Reed, and surfing.
Farrell’s dad Al was a character, an old-school 47th Street jeweler, and the kind of guy with coiffed hair who drove a Corvette. He was likely a role model for Farrell’s own flamboyant style and desire to draw people together into things like art collectives. “Celebrities and regular people gravitated toward him,” Farrell told SPIN. “The wise guys knew my dad, too. Everybody knew Al Bernstein. He was one of those guys walking around Miami Beach in the ’70s with a Fila headband and a bikini bathing suit with gold around his neck.”
Farrell was so obsessed with surfing that he barely graduated high school. As soon as he did, he took off for California in 1976, and began living out of his car in Newport Beach. He stayed there for seven years, surfing and using the public showers to stay clean. He worked as a busboy, a dishwasher, and a waiter until Al, worried about his son’s future, contacted an old friend and got Perry a job with a liquor distributor. While doing a delivery at a fancy private club, Farrell met a talent scout and landed a job doing impersonations (Bowie, Jagger, Sinatra). Bit by the showbiz bug, Farrell decided to move out to LA.
Arriving in the city in ’83, he immediately immersed himself in the underground music scene, becoming enamored by bands like X, the Minutemen, Black Flag, Saccharine Trust, Redd Kross, and the Go-Go’s. There was also an emerging goth scene and Farrell became a part of that, too. Soon, he found two art-goths, Mariska Leyssius and Rich Robinson, through an ad in the Recycler, and began singing in their band Psy Com. Through Psy Com, Farrell honed a wild fashion sense and a magnetic stage presence. “Perry became a great showman,” remembers friend Angelo Moore.
Farrell then found Wilton House and moved in with a motley crew of friends. After a guy named Stuart Suezey moved out, Jane Bainter moved in, taking over Suezey’s room on the top floor, the lone woman among seven men. Bainter had graduated from Smith, the alma mater of Sylvia Plath and Gloria Steinem, but she was also already an addict, having first done heroin in London with a roadie for The Clash.
Because Bainter was the only bona fide addict (though most of Wilton House’s inhabitants more than dabbled in drugs), her housemates began to have a problem with her, and soon every problem was blamed on “Jane’s addiction.” Farrell was the only one who defended her. “Jane is a very beautiful woman. [… ] I look at her like a tragic figure,” he said. “She’s a Smith graduate, she’s extremely intelligent, which is very unappealing to most men. She still hasn’t found love, pretty much like [all of] us.”
“Sergio was just a drug boyfriend. He wasn’t any real damn boyfriend,” remembers Bainter’s friend Bob Moss. “The TV was stolen and they blamed Jane and Sergio for taking it to hock for drugs. That was the assumption of the anti-Jane contingent. They didn’t like Sergio at all. He wasn’t welcome at the front door so he’d sneak around the back and holler up to her bedroom window.”
When Bainter was still in college, her parents divorced and her mother and her new husband bought a house in the south of Spain. Bainter was too strung out to ever manage a visit, and so going to Spain became a symbol of sobriety and a better life—a beacon of hope.
Farrell had started becoming disillusioned with Psy Com and the goth scene. A harder rock scene was forming in LA, and although he wasn’t into the glam-metal of Ratt, Mötley Crüe, and Guns N’ Roses, Farrell loved Red Hot Chili Peppers and wanted to emulate their energy. So, he contemplated quitting Psy Com, and was soon introduced to a bass player named Eric Avery by Bainter’s friend Carla Bozulich. Avery was a Joy Division fan, and so his basslines were dark and, yes, a bit goth, but the chemistry with Farrell was instantaneous.
“Without Eric Avery, there never could have been any success for Jane’s Addiction,” Bozulich asserted to SPIN. “Eric had written the music, on his bass, years before he met Perry. I remember hearing those bass lines as far back as 1982. Eric started playing those bass lines, and Perry really seemed to hear himself in there.”
Their first jam morphed into “Mountain Song,” and many of the songs that followed would replicate its formula of a soul-shaking, killer bass intro. So, it wasn’t a tough decision—Farrell decided to leave Psy Com and start a new band with Avery. As part of that change, he adopted the moniker Perry Farrell, which he noticed sounded like “peripheral.” Farrell and Avery also began thinking of a name for the band, coming up with “Jane’s Heroin Experience” and eventually settling on Jane’s Addiction.
Avery was in a strange, sort-of relationship with a sex worker named Bianca, and Bianca bankrolled Jane’s Addiction’s early shows, renting venues and serving as a promoter. At the time, Jane’s Addiction wasn’t particularly solid in its membership, and Farrell and Avery were playing with Avery’s childhood friend Chris Brinkman on guitar, then later with another guitarist named Ed, as well as Matt Chaikin, a stand-in drummer borrowed from another band. It was at one of these early shows that Farrell and Avery first met Dave Navarro and Stephen Perkins.
Fresh out of high school, Navarro and Perkins had been playing in a heavy-metal band called Dizastre. They went to see Jane’s play at the urging of Avery’s younger sister Rebecca. Jane’s Addiction’s borrowed drummer was a bit flaky, and they were looking for someone permanent to replace him. Rebecca was hoping they’d choose Perkins, who was also her boyfriend.
Farrell and Avery loved Perkins’ drumming, and so he suggested they also hear Navarro play guitar. Navarro was a heartbreaker—all the girls loved him—and an accomplished guitarist who could play Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, The Who, and Pink Floyd all by the tender age of 18. Ultimately, Navarro’s sexy guitar playing sold them. “What I brought is a musical direction the band didn’t have, which was based more in progressive rock, heavy metal—a lead-guitar-player style of playing, rather than atmospheric playing,” Navarro told Billboard.
As far as presenting a unified visual aesthetic, they were all over the place—Farrell was a goth-surfer who wore corsets and big hats over dreadlocks, Avery had a punk-rock look, and Navarro and Perkins were heavy-metal hippies. Musically, they were also all over the place. They had a dirty Zeppelin thing going on, but with an ‘80s metal edge and that spooky goth bass and sometimes even a bit of a groove. The only word that could really describe them was “alternative.” (“Nothing’s Shocking is the sound of the ’90s arriving two years ahead of schedule,” notes Pitchfork of Jane’s debut.)
While bands like Guns N’ Roses played seedy nightclubs on the Strip (Farrell hated Guns N’ Roses), Jane’s Addiction represented the anti-Strip at a club called Scream in downtown LA, as well as other little clubs outside the hair-metal scene. The band began churning out demos, and the local alternative station KXLU began playing their music. “Mountain Song” was a favorite, as was “Jane Says.”
One day in 1986, a Warner Bros. executive named Steven Baker was listening to KXLU in his car when “Jane Says” came on. He called around to see if he could get a demo, and a messenger arrived at his office with a four-song cassette. He knew right away he wanted to sign the band.
For Jane’s Addiction, there was no question that they wanted to sign with Warner Bros. After all, the label had worked with artists like Hüsker Dü, Prince, and The Replacements. However, they didn’t want to compromise their indie cred, and so they decided they would first put out a live album on label Triple X, and then release their proper debut with Warners.
As Jane’s gained notoriety, a label bidding war ensued, but the band was steadfast in their desire to sign with Warner Bros. For their debut, they chose producer David Jerden, who had worked on the David Byrne/Brian Eno album My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (1981), and who Farrell believed would be able to achieve a certain lushness even on a hard-rock album.
The cover of Nothing’s Shocking came to Farrell in a dream, where he envisioned naked conjoined twins on a swing with their hair on fire, and he ended up creating the elaborate sculpture himself by putting his girlfriend Casey Niccoli in a full-body cast. It was surprisingly easy—not long after getting their advance money, the band and most of their entourage were on heroin themselves (so much for scapegoating Jane Bainter), and so Niccoli spent the time mostly nodding off.
Nothing’s Shocking begins where Farrell’s California adventure began, with “Up the Beach,” a song that’s atmospheric, psychedelic, and mostly instrumental save for Farrell’s gentle moaning. “Ocean Size,” a song described on Janesaddiction.org as “about being homeless,” brings the hard rock following Navarro’s delicate finger-picking—a classic Jane’s song in its juxtaposition of the beautiful with the darkly harsh. The heavy-metal element struts in with a raucous guitar solo, and then dissolves with the melody of Farrell’s ethereal wails.
“Had a Dad” is a heavy, hard-driving lament for an absent father and the ensuing chaos—“If you see my dad / Tell him my brothers / All gone mad / They’re beating on each other.” Meanwhile, “Ted, Just Admit It…” starts with a slow, gray groove that froths into a rolling-drumbeat storm. It features a recorded quote by serial killer Ted Bundy, and Trent Reznor ended up mixing the song with Diamanda Galás’ “I Put A Spell On You” to create the medley “Sex Is Violent” for the Natural Born Killers soundtrack.
“Standing In The Shower…Thinking” is opposite of the introspection one might expect, a discordant, staccato groove and bop. “Summertime Rolls” is a slow, druggy meditation on summertime and Ecstasy—“Me and my girlfriend don’t wear no shoes / Her nose is painted pepper sunlight”—capturing another day at the commune (or the arts collective).
“Mountain Song,” one of my all-time favorite Jane’s tracks, begins with that unforgettable rumbly bass line, and then that primal scream, and Perkins’ tight, muscular drumming becomes the star of the show. (The band produced a video for “Mountain Song” that ended up being rejected by MTV based on its brief nudity, and so they made Soul Kiss, a short VHS documentary, to showcase the video.) “Idiots Rule” is another wild ride, this time with raucous horns with Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea on trumpet.
Next comes the sublime “Jane Says,” which has made anyone who’s ever heard it a diehard Jane’s Addiction fan itching to know more about the enigmatic Jane. The following “Thank You Boys” is a jazzy interlude that allows one to imagine Farrell doing his impersonations at a swanky private club. And “Pigs in Zen” concludes Nothing’s Shocking with a sinewy, metallic groove punctuated by Farrell’s moans. It’s one of the band’s chaotic, “anything goes” tracks, a song used for crowd interaction and riffing during live shows.
Despite their ongoing struggles with heroin addiction, Jane’s Addiction would put out one more album, Ritual de lo Habitual (1990), with Eric Avery (who saw the band’s 1991 breakup as an opportunity to stay clean) and two more without him. Farrell would use his status as an alt-rock pioneer to found Lollapalooza, one of the most successful traveling festivals to showcase alternative music throughout the ’90s and beyond.
As for Jane Bainter, their beautiful and tragic muse, she told Washington Post reporter David Segal that she, too, had eventually gotten clean. By that point, she’d been off heroin for eight years. "Oh, and I did get to Spain, by the way," she proudly informed him.
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