Jane's Addiction - November 25, 1990 - Concert Hall, Toronto, ON

Date: November 25, 1990
Location: Concert Hall, Toronto, ON
Recorded: Video
Audio (audience)
Status: Confirmed
Type: Concert
Lineup: Perry Farrell
Dave Navarro
Stephen Perkins
Eric Avery
Artwork:
 

Setlist:

Soundcheck:
Whores
Three Days


Concert:
Up The Beach
Whores
Idiots Rule
No One's Leaving
Ain't No Right
Ted, Just Admit It...
Pigs In Zen
Been Caught Stealing
Three Days
Mountain Song
Stop!
Summertime Rolls
Ocean Size

Show Information:

The Buck Pets opened.

Thanks go out to 'kc' for the multi-date ad, and 'sPiKi' for the article scan.

POP REVIEWS
The L.A.-based Jane's Addiction does more than deliver a body blow to today's smugly complacent rock scene - it nukes it with a vengeance and style reminscent of rock's legendary bad boys An emotional decongestant.
Globe & Mail
Nov 28, 1990
pC4
The Arts: Music
Alan Niester

Special to The Globe and Mail ROCK and roll loves its bad boys. From its inception in the mid- fifties, rock and roll was the bastard son of angry young rebels who thumbed their noses at what we've come to call the "prevailing social order." Elvis Presley was a greasy punk long before he became an American cultural Messiah. Ed Sullivan had him televised from the waist up so impressionable teens wouldn't see his hips grind. From Elvis to Mick Jagger to Jim Morrison to Johnny Rotten, rebellion has always been the electroshock machine for rock's occasionally lifeless corpse.

Perry Farrell, who led his L.A.-based band, Jane's Addiction, into Toronto's Concert Hall Sunday night, may well be the next inheritor of the bad-boy throne. We really haven't had a decent rebel lately. Some may point to Billy Idol, but he is a mere cartoon.

Farrell really has the credentials. A 31-year-old New Yorker who fled to the West Coast at the age of 15, he has spent the past decade and a half soaking up the stench from L.A.'s dirty, dark underside. He's a bona-fide rebel, but he is not without his causes. He and his band have found themselves at the forefront of the on-going censorship issue. His band's major label debut in 1988 (Nothing's Shocking) was blackballed by eight major distribution chains because of its cover art (a sculpture, designed by Farrell himself, of two nude Siamese twins with their hair ablaze). The band's current album (Ritual De Lo Ha bitual) had to be released with two different covers. The second shows a reprinted version of the U.S. First Amendment to the Constitution (which guarantees freedom of speech, the press and religion) and was issued because most distributors wouldn't touch the first. Fiery, opinionated and unpredictable, Farrell recently caused a riot in Philadelphia when he pulled his band from the stage mere minutes into its set.

That kind of notoriety sells well and the Concert Hall was packed to the brim for this, Jane's Addiction's third local appearance. The band didn't disappoint. The performance was as hot and emotional as the room (1,800 slam-dancing bodies in a confined space does tend to raise the temperature, even on a cold night).

Jane's Addiction proves difficult to pin down. It occasionally recalls the dark sentimentality of The Doors, but for the most part works the harder edges of thrash"metal outfits like Metallica. But the band has two shining advantages over its competition. One is guitarist Dave Navarro, whose edgy but electrifying style is the meat on the band's rhythmic bones. The other is Farrell himself, a charismatic frontman who mixes little-boy naughtiness with an off-setting candor.

In an age when so much rock music is safe, sane, corporate and predictable, Jane's Addiction blew through town like a breath of particularly vile air, the kind that rotors out your sinuses and shakes up your synapses.

While Jane's Addiction messes around with two different covers for its album release, Matthew Haly would be perfectly happy with just one. But, as April Wine has suggested, rock and roll is a vicious game, and Haly hasn't yet attracted any major label interest.

A 23-year-old New Zealander now living in Toronto, Haly is doing it by himself. With no outside funding, he recorded his own album at Phase One studio, hired a band (a remarkably competent collection of well-known locals including ex-Red Rider bassist Jeff Jones and Regatta"Danny Brooks guitarist Bill Bell) and arranged for a showcase performance Monday night at The Horseshoe for local media, music-industry types and other assorted schmoozers.

The results were surprisingly good. A veteran of a number of Australian bands, Haly showed he was no stranger to the stage, belting out self-penned numbers such as Living in the Sky and Steel Eyes with real finesse. He claims fellow New Zealanders Split Enz as a major influence, and it shows.

If Haly garners no interest in Canada, he is resolved to sell his craft in England. If determination is any key to success, he may turn out to be the next Bruce Springsteen.

Toronto Star - Toronto, Ont.
November 26, 1990
When intelligent rock rolls
Author: Mitch Potter Toronto Star

Surprise: There is such a thing as intelligent rock 'n' roll,even without the inconvenience of verblown,politically correct pontification.

It's name is Jane's Addiction,and it played Toronto for a third time Sunday night at the Concert Hall with the same snarky,snippy,impertinent smarts that made friends at the first two shows.

A deceptively messy,sinister quartet from Los Angeles,JA and its sardonic lead singer Perry Farrell poured for a capacity crowd of 1,800 a fresh round of antithetical tonic for anyone who's had it with vainglorious,self-absorbed rock stardom.

A flaky deviant who chides his audience with sing-songy abandon,Farrell found time last night to taunt those nearest the stage for violent slamdancing ("They're the warriors of our generation," he snarled), then everyone else for being "too old" to move up close.

All part of the careless,splayed abandon that makes the band's two releases (Nothing's Shocking,and the recent Ritual De La Habitual,whose censored cover now bears an excerpt about guaranteed freedom lifted from the U.S. Bill Of Rights)such a gust of chancy fresh air.

Farrell has cheekily likened his group to a trapped animal ("It makes a sound you don't really want to hear,but you can't help listening"), but behind the rhetoric is a provocative canon of skewed social commentary -"Jane Says","Idiots Rule"," Erotic Jesus With His Marys" -that bites deeply into the modern American mindset.

Sunday night,the band went back to the title track of Nothing's Shocking,a jumbled essay on media overkill that builds like a Twilight Zone coupling of Mahavishnu Orchestra and Black Sabbath,to say it best.

Opening foursome the Buck Pets marked its Canadian debut Sunday night,unless you count a lone set three years ago at a tiny Winnipeg thrash basement called Verna's. Because we happened to have witnessed that earlier encounter,it's worth noting the Dallas quartet has reached age of majority with its best feet forward,decisively pounding out one uncluttered,exhilarating electric melody after another for a full 40 minutes.

Unadorned,unaffected but not unaware that nobody in this room had even heard their name before,the group played to its slamming audience with an earnest ferocity that made them seem like D.O.A.'s long-lost southern kin. Word is the band's Island Records debut,Mercurotones,will see its Canadian release in January.