Everybody Has Their Own Opinion

No single musician or band has captivated me so completely as once did Los Angeles-based Jane's Addiction, a four-member, semi-dysfunctional freakshow whose music will resonate with me forever.

Between 1987 and 1993, I spent untold sums of money on Jane's Addiction posters, stickers, bootleg recordings, concert tickets, and t-shirts.

In poor imitation of the lead singer, I wore (supremely wretched) dreadlocks in my hair; had my nose pierced in a dicey St. Louis thrift store; and for a short time refused to suffer any criticism of the band from cronies ... or my mother.

And I perpetrated all of this foolishness for a group with just a single self-titled live album and two studio albums--Nothing's Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual--when Bill Clinton began his first term as President.

To date, they've produced a third (Strays) and a fourth, tentatively called The Great Escape Artist, is reportedly in the works. But I'm not holding my breath ... or even that interested, really.

The band's original line-up consisted of founder and front-man Perry Farrell, bass player Eric Avery, guitarist Dave Navarro, and drummer Stephen Perkins. Tensions with Farrell prompted Avery to leave in 1991, and (with a couple exceptions) he has not expressed interest in returning.

Wikipedia, fan sites, and the official JA site can provide more background, should you be interested.

Alternately, you can read Brendan Mullen's Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction, which prompted my present nostalgia.

I was fairly well-versed in the band's history and had a good handle on three of the four musicians' heavy drug use.

Interviews with family members and friends from the L.A. music scene filled some important gaps in my knowledge--for instance, Navarro's mother and aunt were murdered by his would-be step-father and it was many years before he was apprehended.

Avery is described by peers as the brainy, brooding dude I intuited him to be. Perkins is a kind of steadfast glue, willing to stick with the rest in good times and bad.

And if Mullen's assembled history is close to the truth, and his contributors forthright, Farrell is an exceptionally charismatic, cocky, and self-obsessed libertine. Perhaps my biggest takeaway is what I'll call the Perry Farrell Paradox.

He has always enjoyed the wild abandon of parties, gathering people together, and is credited for dreaming up Lollapalooza and other music events. In fact, he was willing to lose a considerable amount of his own money investing in concerts (later in his career).

And yet, and yet ... the irony: he is consistently an incorrigible prick averse to equitable contracts and financial arrangements with bandmates.

All of which suggests nothing less than the usual hedonism and heroics of most rock 'n roll stories ... which is why Jane's Addiction so fascinated a particular bucktoothed, introverted high-schooler in south-central Illinois.

We're Trying Our Best

More than ten years ago, my younger brother expanded my musical horizons significantly through the blues artist R.L. Burnside. The guitarist, who left this mortal coil in 2005, was one of many performers recorded and distributed by the enigmatic Fat Possum Records.

Founded in 1992 by Matthew Johnson and Peter Redvers-Lee, the label's early mission was to discover (and in some cases rediscover) blues players in Mississippi and help them be heard more broadly ... before they up and died. Their business motto: "We're trying our best."

Among the albums they helped create in their early years, including three fantastic compilations (Not the Same Old Blues Crap), Fat Possum won a good deal of attention for the hypnotic, sometimes droning, All Night Long by Junior Kimbrough.

Iggy Pop was reported to be a big Kimbrough fan and counts as one of many artists covering songs on the tribute Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough. (Unfortunately, Pop's two versions of "You Better Run" are among the most forgettable. See The Fiery Furnaces' tripped-out "I'm Leaving" instead.)

In 2002, Jay McInerney published a compelling profile of Fat Possum and its curious oldsters in The New Yorker, titled "White Man at the Door."

Fat Possum artists seem to share a background of sharecropping, illiteracy, poverty, alcohol abuse, and prison time. Burnside is a convicted killer, as is T-Model Ford, the crudest and most exuberant of the Fat Possum lot. T-Model Ford's drummer, Spam, lost several fingertips to a girlfriend with a box cutter. Seventy-four-year-old Cedell Davis, crippled with polio as a child, was crushed and nearly killed in a barroom stampede set off by a police raid.

Paul (Wine) Jones, a part-time welder, is the only Fat Possum artist who's young and fit enough to play an entire set standing up, although he is sometimes not sober enough to do so. Johnson is suspicious of all blues cliches, including the one that says you've got to suffer before you can sing the blues, but he concedes, "My artists have all had hard lives, and that's reflected in the music."

In time, Fat Possum began to sign younger talent with their own approach to the blues (the now wildly popular Black Keys) and indie rock rooted in a blues mindset (Heartless Bastards).

More recently, fantastic low-fi bands like Wavves and Crocodiles have joined the roster--artists with musical aesthetics quite apart from the black fellas listed in the back catalog.

Just this past week, the label announced that Spiritualized had signed. Fronted by J. Spaceman (Jason Pierce), formerly of the Spaceman 3, the band will be working on its seventh album.

Not by accident did they land with Fat Possum: Spiritualized also contributed to Kimbrough's 2005 tribute album and Pierce's music, like Kimbrough's, often bears the descriptor "drone."

All of which is a long way of saying that a) deep-down Matthew Johnson is a My Bloody Valentine fanboy and b) you need to listen to these folks and new acts like Yuck ... Fat Possum continues to deliver the goods.

Music is forever, but are bands? ANVIL

Back in the early 80s, before the rise of Metallica, Scorpions, Whitesnake, Guns 'n Roses and the rest, there was Anvil--a heavy metal band that other musicians admired and imitated. The core of the group, childhood friends, were crazy-charismatic Lips, the lead singer, and Robb, the talented drummer. Anvil never lived up to its promise. Why? Perhaps they just weren't in the right place at the right time. Perhaps their management didn't promote them or their albums well. Anvil faded in public memory.

Anvil forged on. Back in their Canadian homeland the band continued, picking up gigs here and there, creating albums, members taking day jobs to support themselves. No longer rock gods. But 25 years after their first album, a former roadie and long-time fan started filming a documentary about the group. This film, highly regarded and reviewed, has kick-started Anvil's career.

If you enjoy rock documentaries, and even if you haven't viewed one before, watch Anvil: The Story of Anvil. You'll hear from other metal stars, such as Slash (G'n R) and Lars Ulrich (Metallica). You'll empathize with and be enraged by Lips. You'll admire the loyal Robb. Most of all, you'll get a snapshot of what the music biz can be like. And how the desire to create music and perform drives musicians to continue, even without success.

Currently we can't post the trailer in this blog post, but here's the link to the official Anvil The Story of Anvil website, where you can view it.

Edifying the Musically Inquisitive?

I've been reading two music books in tandem, one newish and one not-so newish, each guaranteed a decent shelf life.

Rock Star Babylon, by Jon Holmes, runs the gamut "from the rude to the ridiculous" with "reports of rock-and-rollers at their worst ... straight from the mouths of those who were there--or those who were there but left early and heard about it afterward."

One story insists Marvin Gaye made an intentionally bad album to ensure that his ex-wife, entitled to royalties from that record, would profit next-to nothing.

Another tale suggests that Pete Doherty is, in his totality, a hoax perpetrated by former members of the KLF.

Jerry Lee Lewis also makes an appearance (at Elvis Presley's home):

Out of his mind on a cocktail of drugs ... Lewis rocked up to the gates of Graceland and, rather than politely knock and announce his arrival, instead began to ram said gates with his massive car while a loaded derringer rattled about on the dashboard ... bellowing at the sky started: "Tell Elvis the Killer is here!" he yelled over and over and over and over again ...

Security simply called the police, who arrested him and took him away in handcuffs. It was politely explained to Mr. Lewis that Mr. Presley saw no one at 3 a.m. unless that someone was delivering prescription drugs and/or three or four skipfuls of Nutella ... The day after the Graceland incident, Jerry Lee went to the hospital and was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer. At the time of writing he is still alive. Elvis, depending on who you talk to, isn't.

On the more erudite (but no less snarky) side, David Kamp and Steven Daly created The Rock Snob*s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge.

The book was conceived "to enable non-Snobs to hold their own" when confronted by Snobs. It helps explain "ultra-knowing references in the music press to 'Stax-y horns,' 'chiming, plangent Rickenbackers,' and 'Eno.'"

A sample:

Electroclash. Assaultive, hokey club-music trendlet with wishfully grandiose name. Posited as the music of the twenty-second century by warehouse-club folk and newspaper style sections, Electroclash, as practiced by New York City standard-bearers Fischerspooner and A.R.E. Weapons, amounts to little more than eighties-style synth-and-beat-box music played in art galleries while its practitioners stage street-theater "happenings" that owe more to mime and Xena, Warrior Princess than Velvets subversiveness or Warholian spark.

Ouch! But may I have another, Sir?