Jane's Addiction - August 28, 1991 - King County Fairgrounds, Enumclaw, WA

Date: August 28, 1991
Location: King County Fairgrounds, Enumclaw, WA
Recorded: Audio (soundboard)
Video (proshot)
Video (audience)
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
Trip Away
Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey
L.A. Medley
Been Caught Stealing
Thank You Boys
Three Days
Ted, Just Admit It...
Classic Girl
Mountain Song
Stop!
Ain't No Right
Summertime Rolls
Ocean Size

Show Information:

This Seattle-area show was the final date of the Lollapalooza tour and was originally scheduled to take place on August 29th.

Recording Information:

There is an excellent quality soundboard recording of this show. There also exists an amateur video recording, but it's filmed from quite far away. Parts of this show were also professionally filmed for a documentary made by Casey Niccoli. The project was never released, but has been available in trading circles and now with clips on YouTube. It features three songs from Jane's set: "DCMNW", "Classic Girl", and "Chip Away".

Thanks go out to Gavin for the recording info, and to Brian for the following article:

Jane's Addiction Can't Make Soggy Crowd Ignore Its Misery
Tom Phalen

Jane's Addiction, The Lollapalooza Festival, King County Fairgrounds, Enumclaw, all day and into the night. Two songs into the closing set of the Lollapalooza Festival, Jane's Addiction's lead singer and main brain Perry Farrell addressed a tired, soggy, long-standing audience.

"Have you been waiting all day for us?" he questioned.

"Yesssssss!" came the loud but weary response.

"Then it's time to chip away!" he cried, breaking into the little smacked-up ditty "Chip Away" from the band's debut album.

Guitarist Dave Navarro rampaged through a brutal spray of hot and cold running shrapnel while bassist Eric Avery and drummer Steve Perkins played stop-motion thunder. It rolled off the darkened hills and crashed back across the fairgrounds like some dirty red tide. Farrell spit his lyrics and slimed the stage, a hopping, jerking, strutting marionette in charge of his own strings. It was powerful stuff, but it was numbing. Unfortunately the audience was already pretty numb.

Those of us who arrived late didn't have to endure the hours of rain and rock. Henry Rollins, the Violent Femmes and Ice-T had come and gone. Siouxie and the Banshees were wailing like Druids as late-comers were still negotiating for a decent parking place.

There were no more $30 tickets, so the stragglers set up camp on the shoulder of the road outside the fairground fence. It was a good view, the sound was crystal clear and only a couple of bystanders toppled into the ditch. Ironically, ticket-holders leaving the show early were heard to mutter that this side-of-the-road spot was better than what they had paid for.

There was, in fact, a lot of mumbling: The facilities were bad, the security was ripping off people's backpacks, the police weren't doing anything about it, there were too many police, there was too much security, parking was too expensive, they couldn't bring in their umbrellas, it was raining. The crowd was beginning to disintegrate during Souxsie's set. Halfway through Jane's, it was really coming apart.

But Farrell and company seemed quite willing to self-destruct early on. All the big guns were fired midway. That done, the set became little more than a meandering monologue.

After "Chip Away," Farrell told a hideously racist joke. The crowd groaned. Some booed. But he didn't mean it folks! It was just a set up so that Ice-T could return to the stage and the singers could exchange the lines: "Don't call me nigger, whitey!/Don't call me whitey, nigger!" It would have been a powerful moment without the joke. As it stood, it smacked of Las Vegas shtick.

Farrell followed the duet with a methedrine-driven version of the Doors' "L.A. Woman." It cut like a chainsaw on high octane. Tearing, angry and bitter. More forceful than the original version could ever aspire to. It was one of the best moments of the set.

"Been Caught Stealing," the band's chart-crossing, MTV hit then came midset rather than at the end where you'd expect it. It was the peak and the audience began to spill out in earnest. The security people broke up the crowd on the side of the road and a great many took their final listening places in their cars, with the engines running and the heaters on.

Thanks go out to Colin MenDes for the 5th ticket photo.