janesaddiction.org

JANE'S ADDICTION has done more than take the title of its debut album, "Nothing's Shocking," to heart. The members of the metal/folk band have adopted it as their personal motto.

Case in point I: Last summer, the band sparked a furor when it refused to replace the cover art on its first LP with something less controversial. Record retailers across the country retaliated by pulling "Nothing's Shocking" from store shelves, saying the cover - a depiction of naked, female Siamese twins with their hair ablaze - was pornographic.

Case in point II: Six months later, the band confronted MTV programming executives with its first promotional video, for the tune "Mountain Song." The performance clip was intercut with a bizarre story line involving lead singer Perry Ferrell, a bed and a nude woman.

In just a short time, Jane's Addiction has successfully fulfilled its collective vow to shock by establishing itself as rock's newest renegade band.

How, then, did Jane's Addiction manage to wrangle a Grammy nomination from the ultraconservative members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences? It was nominated in the new heavy metal/hard rock category, along with Metallica, AC/DC, Iggy Pop and the eventual winner, Jethro Tull.

But a Grammy nomination? For Jane's Addiction?

"You know when things like this happen to the band, it always comes out of the blue," said Perry Ferrell (yes, the pseudonym is a pun on peripheral). "I sure didn't sit around thinking, 'Oh, the Grammys are coming around. I wonder if we'll get nominated.' I never thought about the Grammys.

"As for the effect on us? I'm just not going to put that much thought into it either way. If they like it, great, but they aren't part of my world and I really don't consider them 'in' anyway. Grammys are weird. Music is not like a race, where you can look at a stopwatch and see who won. You can't possibly vote as to who is the best musician. I mean, is the best musician someone who is technically brilliant but dead, or someone who is creative and brilliant but a numbskull? The Grammys just are not my goal."

Making friends and influencing the mainstream don't rank among Ferrell's goals, either. Otherwise, he and his three fellow Janes would have produced a more docile debut video - a standard, three-minute, here's-the-band-and-what-we do clip that would have blended into the MTV woodwork.

Instead, they opted to make a video full of nudity. Although MTV agreed to air the clip with "censor bars" and refused to comment on the video, some critics claim the nudity was gratuitous - that it had nothing to do with the song. But Ferrell sees the issue differently.

"It was kind of important to the story," he insisted. "At least the story in my mind. It's like the album cover. They asked me to think about changing that. So I thought about it."

Some may contend that Jane's Addiction is neither deviant nor innovative, but is simply following a traditionally successful rock 'n' roll formula. After all, the Rolling Stones offended every adult on the face of the Earth at one time, distributing questionable albums, offensive films and laughing all the way to the bank. The pattern was repeated, far more calculatingly, by the Sex Pistols. Is Jane's Addiction following suit?

"We're not intentionally provoking anyone," Ferrell said. "But I am going out of my way to avoid attracting some of (the more mainstream music fans). There isn't a point behind our image. I think it's really pretentious to have a point to your music. I'm sure we're pretentious in our way, but if there is a point, and a defined direction about the whole band, and you make the band around that point, then what you've got is a marketing concept - not a band.

"I do care somewhat about sales, but not that much," he continued. "This is a great live band. (We're) incredible live, and I'm not really worried about anything else. I'm worried about the music and our credibility. . . . Really, we're perfect little angels. I don't know what people are talking about."

Nope. Nothing's shocking anymore.

Jane's Addiction will appear Tuesday night at Mississippi Nights.

helicine wrote:FWIW, we "have" this article, as it is from a the same news service that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch used for the Mississippi Nights show a few weeks earlier. Below is what we have, with the differences highlighted in purple:

intertwoven wrote:weird. obviously it looks close to this show, except a few days earlier:
Jane's Addiction - April 11, 1989 - The Stone, San Francisco, CA
http://janesaddiction.org/tour/tour_det ... tourID=311

Maybe it was a typo (like, maybe the article was originally intended to be printed later, but then the editor bumped it up?)
I doubt both shows (4/7 and 4/11) actually happened.. just doesn't make sense. I don't think they were that big in SF then, and if they were gonna play a couple shows, it'd most likely be back to back.. not 4 days apart.
It's weird/too bad that the show (neither) isn't listed in the concert listings of that paper.
While 4/11/89 The Stone is unconfirmed, it fits in better in the tour history.
Another thing that makes me doubt Janes played SF on 4/7 is that RHCP played there the same day (Fillmore).. they were contemporaries/friends and shared a lot of fans, so chances are they and their booking agent would try to not book shows in the same city outside of LA.

tvrec wrote:Maybe look into the venues in Modesto. The off-handedness of the reference strikes me as somewhat odd b/c the publication isn't really anywhere near San Francisco--okay, it's near but no nearer than San Diego is to LA, say. It seems like if it were the SF gig, it should say that they are playing The Stone in SF. I can't imagine that would be a given for the circulation of this paper.

spunkmuffin wrote:When was the date in the city with the sea hags....was that before this?