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The naive, deviant allure of Jane's Addiction was everywhere at their Halloween party. Fans came to the show - which was also a taping for MTV's Live From the 10 Spot - dressed as everything from Pez dispensers to hypodermic needles. The oversold venue, packed to its 3,699 - person capacity, was adorned with huge crepe paper flowers, metallic streamers and fiesta like strands of bare light bulbs. And at the center of the dream / nightmare aesthetics was Jane's leader, Perry Farrell, who hit the stage in a shimmery cowboy suit and a halo of gravity-defying braids.

The band - Farrell, guitarist Dave Navarro, drummer Stephen Perkins and new bassist Flea - kicked off with "Ocean Size," and it was immediately apparent that this show was not just founded on nostalgia for familiar songs. The young audience (some of them toddlers when Jane's were formed in 1986) greeted the band with a spontaneous zeal rather than with historical reverence. The quartet responded with a ferocious vibrancy, launching into "Stop" with the acid-rock know-how and ratty, skate-punk attitude required to pull off such a schizophrenic song.

Farrell's tinny voice appeared unchanged by hard living and the passage of time. He hit the nasal highs of "Jane Says" and the gauzy, float-away tones of "Then She Did." And though his showmanship was less animated than it was in the past, the charismatic singer still trembled and quaked with uninhibited enthusiasm.

The extra personnel onstage often distracted from the music: Female exotic dancers slithered and writhed around Farrell's feet, occasionally shimmying up a pole to execute amazing showgirl feats 15 feet in the air. Behind them, a jungle gym of debauchery housed up to seven nymph like creatures performing simulated sex acts. Audience members were afforded the drool-inducing sight of Navarro ripping off his devil's cape to expose a bare torso. But the tired multiple-stripper-lesbo fantasy thing inadvertently lived up to Farrell's famous line "Nothing's shocking."

In true Jane's Addiction form, the mood shifted dramatically for "Summertime Rolls," which produced the most amazing moment of the hour plus show. Farrell stood alone on a platform in the middle of the crowd, his demeanor vulnerable and his voice cracking to expose the sweetness that counters his banshee side. It's these contradictions - hippie idealism vs. modern-day cynicism, heavy rocking vs. a total disregard for rock convention - that still render Jane's Addiction one of rock's most powerfully unique forces.
- LORRAINE ALI