Jane's Addiction - February 15, 1991 - Municipal Auditorium, New Orleans, LA

Date: February 15, 1991
Location: Municipal Auditorium, New Orleans, LA
Recorded: Audio
Video
Status: Confirmed
Type: Concert
Lineup: Perry Farrell
Dave Navarro
Stephen Perkins
Eric Avery
Morgan Fichter
Artwork:
 

Setlist:

Up The Beach
Whores
Standing In The Shower... Thinking
No One's Leaving
Ain't No Right
Three Days
Been Caught Stealing
Had A Dad (aborted)
Stop!
Then She Did...
Trip Away
Mountain Song
Summertime Rolls

Show Information:

Soul Asylum opened.

The Advocate (Baton Rouge, La.)
February 20, 1991
Edition: THE BATON ROUGE STATE TIMES
Section: TREND
Page: 1-C
Column: AFTER HOURS

Jane's Addiction ventures into unsafe territory
Author: Glen Michael Prejean

NEW ORLEANS -- I stepped out of the club scene last weekend, well for about an hour anyway, to get a glimpse of Juana's Addicionne, better known as Jane's Addiction. The L.A. quartet that has built up quite an eclectic following since last year's release of "Ritual De Lo Habitual."

"We were on the floor for the beginning of it, but with all the thrashing, we headed up for relatively safer territory," said Kevin Mulcahy, an associate professor of political science at LSU. "It was great because you could look down and see waves of people dancing and thrashing to the music."

According to Beaver Productions, 6,475 people filled Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans, for a short but sweet set heavily weighted with the band's most popular songs. It was only a few months ago that this band was still playing smaller venues like the New Orleans Music Hall, but it looks as if Jane's Addiction has its eyes on bigger and better things.

The band's art-rock image, artwork and videos laced with obscenity, and its "in-your-face" music may have been hard for some to digest at first, but Jane's Addiction is finally getting the respect it has deserved for years. The band is a classic "love-'em-or-hate-'em" band.

The lights dimmed at 9:40 p.m. as Jane's Addiction took to the stage. A rather large, perhaps the original, copy of the artwork which appears on the original cover of "Ritual De Lo Habitual" hung behind Stephen Perkins' head. What appeared to be nothing more than leftover Christmas lights were draped across the stage, as the blue, green and purple spotlights pierced through the smoke blanketed stage. As the intensity of the show progressed, white rotating lights pointed into the sea of warm bodies, as the faux smoke thickened.

The band performed "No One's Leaving," "Ain't No Right," "Been Caught Stealing," and "Three Days," off last year's "Ritual De Lo Habitual," as well as "Had A Dad," "Standing In The Shower ... Thinking," "Mountain Song," and "Idiot's Rule," off of 1988's "Nothing's Shocking."

The band came out for a one-song encore and did the mesmerizing "Summertime Rolls," also off of "Nothing's Shocking," before leaving the stage once and for all. The only other downfall, besides the length of the show, was that they didn't play any new material.

"The show was a little too short," said Michael Young, a senior at LSU majoring in general studies. "If they would have played like two more songs, or maybe one more encore. They quit kind of on a slow note instead of with something upbeat, which was kind of odd, but the show started well and they played hard."

"I thought the concert was very intense," Mulcahy said. "It was intense because they projected a lot of excitement. The crowd was going crazy."

"Their music makes a lot more sense after seeing it live," said Alex Dugas, 33-year-old international art director for Brocato International, who viewed the show about 30 yards from the stage.

"I thought it was great," Dugas said. "There were a lot of people complaining about it being so short, but two of the best concerts I've seen in my life were short ... They kind of leave you wanting more, which I think is a planned thing anyway," Dugas said.

Where did they get the name?

"When I lived in L.A. originally, I was living in a house with between eight and 13 kids ... . One day, this girl Jane appeared. Anyway, she ended up living in the room next to mine and we became close. When you invite someone like her out, and you come to get her and she's dancing in front of the mirror with a wig on, and there's nobody there, you gotta name a band after her," said Perry Farrell, the mastermind behind Jane's Addiction, in an interview with Jill Selsman for last month's edition of Interview magazine.

Jane's Addiction released a self-titled album in '87 on an independent label, Triple X Records, which includes an acoustic version of the ever popular "Jane Says," as well as its renditions of Lou Reed's "Rock 'N' Roll," and Jagger and Richards' "Sympathy." The quartet was named top L.A. band in Music Connection magazine's 1986 poll.

Before signing with Warner Bros. in the summer of '87, Jane's Addiction found itself in the midst of an intense bidding war among major record companies. Their major debut, "Nothing's Shocking," on Warner in '88 sold more than a quarter-million units, despite receiving no airplay and hardly any airtime on MTV.

Farrell, who has been in charge of the cover art since "Jane's Addiction," found that something indeed may be shocking, when seven major retailers refused to carry "Nothing's Shocking" because they found the cover photograph of a Farrell-created sculpture obscene. The cover showed Farrell's rendition of his girlfriend's breasts. One retailer called the cover "the second most repulsive cover I've ever seen."

"My main goal is to get the art out. I wouldn't want everybody to be into what I'm into. In fact, that's what makes me change all the time. My art does not enclose or encapsulate people. Those who are not artistic do. They look at what artists are doing and try to stifle and stop, where we just go about our business," said Farrell in response to his artwork being banned.

The first promotional video for "Nothing's Shocking" was a video for "Mountain Song," which contained nudity as well. MTV agreed to air the video only after some proposed editing, but Farrell refused to let any editing take place. MTV eventually aired the video using black censor bars over the "offensive areas."

Regardless of how much negative publicity the album received, any publicity is good publicity, and "Nothing's Shocking" ended up on more than 25 years best lists in '88, and was nominated for, but lost, a Grammy in '89 for "Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance."

Farrell ran into problems once again with the cover art of last year's "Ritual De Lo Habitual." The cover features "a Santaria religion-borrowed folk-art fetish conceived and created by Perry." Perry opted to make an alternative album cover, one less offensive, but threw in a clause that required Warner to print the original artwork as well. The alternative cover was white with the First Amendment printed on it.

According to the "Reader's Picks," in an upcoming issue of Rolling Stone, Jane's Addiction ironically was cited as having the best album cover, as well as the worst for '90 with "Ritual De Lo Habitual." The album has gone gold (500,000 units), and was at No. 35 on Billboard's Top 50 Albums for the weed ending Feb. 4.

"I didn't know they were as popular as they are. I didn't know that there would be that many people there, I was somewhat surprised," Mulcahy said. "I had only heard of them a few months ago, maybe about six months ago I started hearing them on WBRH.

"They are kind of like music of the future, that's what I was thinking. In a few years that's the kind of music that you'll hear on mainstream radio stations."

In an Oct. 20, '88 Rolling Stone review on "Nothing's Shocking," Steve Pond wrote "Jane's Addiction is the true heir to Led Zeppelin,creating music that's simultaneously forbidding and weighty, delicate and ethereal."

Michael Goldberg went one step further in his Feb. 9, '89 article "Hardly a Plain Jane" for Rolling Stone magazine. "Jane's Addiction is merely the latest to combine arty aesthetics with sex, drugs, violence and rock 'n' roll, emerging from the laboratory with a strange but addictive brew of image and sound as intense as a horrific nightmare, beautiful as a heavenly dream, calculated to both endear and offend."

My sentiments exactly.

Thanks go out to David Landrum for the second ticket.