Jane’s Addiction would help bring alternative rock to the forefront in the late 80’s and
early 90’s, but their time together would be short lived, only releasing two albums,
before the band imploded. Frontman Perry Farrell would soldier on with his new projects including
lollapalooza, a dark drug influenced semi-autobiographical film named Gift and Porno of Pyros, a band
who a lot of people have request so let’s get to it.
Growing up in a broken home in Queens, New York frontman Perry Farrell would leave home
at age 17 and hop on a bus and head for hemet california where a friend of his lived. He
would look back at his upbringing saying “Now after years of my father telling me I’m
never going to do anything, now I’m signed to Warner Bros. and he says we’re the best
friends. “Put it this way: I hated my parents when
I was a kid, like everybody else, and I left. If I wanted to I could have stayed at home
and been a fat little Jewish kid and had my dad start a business for me."
In 1986 Farrell would join up with drummer Stephen Perkins, guitarist Dave Navarro and
bassist Eric Avery forming Jane’s Addiction. The quartet would soon become one of the hottest
bands on L.A.'s underground club scene. They would release two studio albums including
“Nothing’s Shocking,” in 1988 and their follow up Ritual De La Habitual. But drug
abuse, and ego’s cannibilized the group and by 1991 they were done. Following the
group's demise Perry Farrell had other avenues to explore and he would bring along drummer
Stephen Perkins with him. He would tell the LA Times in 1993 where Jane’s
addiction went wrong revealing “I just knew that I couldn’t conceive
of playing indefinitely with people I don’t get along with. We weren’t getting along
to the point that nobody was listening to musical ideas,” “If I said, ‘Hey, man,
let’s try being adventurous here and putting, say, a flange on this instrument,’ if you’re
not friends, you don’t listen to me. You tend to block out any suggestions. Suggestions
grounded in love are always accepted. When they’re not grounded in love, everybody
becomes cunning and wary of each other” he’d say.
By early 1992 Farrell would rejoin with drummer Stephen Perkins who just finished up playing
with Mike Muir. Farrell would meet guitarist Peter DiStefano, during a surfing trip to
Mexico & the three piece of Perry, Perkins and DiStefano decided to form a band and they
just needed to audition bass players. DiStefano would recommend a friend of his he knew from
the LA scene of the 80's who was now living in holland a bassist named Martin Le Noble
who most famously played in the group the Thelonious Monster. Le Noble for his part
almost never made the audition as he had a string of bad luck as the morning of meeting
the band for the first time. Le Noble had just been evicted from the apartment he was
living in. When he drove to rehearsal his car broke down resultingin him walking to
rehearsal. He almost turned around and headed back recalling in the book Perry Farrell:
The Saga of a Hypester. “But when we started playing, I knew.””
The band would produce a three song demo day in one day that got the attention of warner
brothers who signed the group. By march of 1992 the band would end up coming up with
a name Porno for Pyros. The name of the group has been the subject of much debate. Spin
Magazine who did a profile of the band in 1993 as well as the book i just mentioned
perry farrell: the saga of a hypester would claim that the band got their name from a
magazine and not the LA riots with the book claiming the band came up with the name in
march of 1992 almost a month before the riots broke out. But the book an oral biography
of perry farrell & jane's addiction claims the name was inspired by the LA riots so take
of it what you guys will.
The group's live debut would happen on april 4, 1992 at the hollywood palladium as part
of the magic johnson ads benefit show alongside the beastie boys, the red hot chili peppers
and henry rollins. Fans who turned up to the band’s shows may have been disappointed
to see that no material from jane’s addiction catalog was played by porno for pyros with
farrell recalling at the time “I don’t want to be like Chuck Berry,”, “doing
the duckwalk across the stage singing ‘Maybelline,’ just because some eighteen-year-old jerk never
got to see him do it. To me it’s like, ‘Well, you never got to see me do it? Too bad, look
at a film. Let me get on to something else. I’m bored" he'd say.
The band was in LA at Crystal Studios when the LA Riots broke out in 1992. Farrell would
look back at the riots saying “It got kinda scary. We were like, ‘Man, I kinda like
wanna go back out on the street without thinking someone’s gonna shoot me. I wanna go to
a club, y’know?’ We were a little tired of this.”
While the band originally planned on hunkering down into the studio to let the riot pass,
the carnage on the news was too much to bear and Perry wanted to go out into the streets
and that he did. He would even brag about even partaking in the looting himself. claiming
that he himself got a set of huge bronze peacocks statues. While the band may or may not have
been inspried by the LA riots in naming themselves, they definitely drew on inspiration from the
events for their debut album in addition to several uleftover Jane’s Addiction tracks.
The self titled track, as well as packing .25 and black girlfriend would definitely
be influenced by the LA riots. Perry would even give his thoughts on the lessons learned
from the riots telling spin magazine in 1992 “the underbelly of our country is rotting.it’s
like having a garbage can you keep stuffing garbage in but then the bottom of the garbage
can ir otten. We need to have people of this country cared for again. Otherwise what happened
with the riots here in lA are going to happen everywhere he'd say.
Farrell would tell the LA Times where his new project fit into the rock landscape revealing
“Rock ‘n’ roll has a problem these days where the players overplay because they have
something to prove,” he says. “They’re trying to outdo each other like it’s a physical
thing, like it’s an Olympic event. Farrell would reveal the songwriting process
telling spin magazine “we’ll work on a song, but it’s not done until everybody
goes home and hears the crazy thing sin their heads. If i say look this song is about driving
on the freeway at 90 mph. Peters takes off his acoustic guitar. A lot of guitar players
don’t give a shit what you sing. No one used to ask me what the hell i was saying.”
Farrell would add “the band sounds like a little like jane’s but i think we stepped
up. Even if we didn’t. I’m happier. We don’t back-stab each other.”
The group’s self titled debut album would be delayed due to a dust up between Perry
Farrell and his label Warner Brothers. But the album’s original artwork concerned warner
brothers who thought it could be misconstrued as being anti-semetic. In March of 1993 the
LA times reported that Farrell submitted artwork for the cover which included a six pointed
star with a world war 2 symbol synonymous with germany in the middle. Warner brothers
at the time was still reeling from the whole Ice-T cop killer controversy the previous
year & Farrell’s publicist would tell LA Times that the whole thing was a misunderstanding
with the paper writing and i quote “ted mico, farrell’s publicist says that the
whole thing was innocent. The original art, he says was based on an indian yantra an ancient
form incorporating geometci patters and designs. The symbol appeared in various cultures art
for centuries before the germans adopted it as a symbol. It was reported at the time that
the symbol would be replaced with a little devil, which you see on the front cover of
the album. This wasn’t the first time Perry Farrell ran into trouble with his artwork
as Jane’s Addiction's records up until this point had some pretty controversial covers
that resulted in some record stores refusing to carry the albums -
The relationship between the members of Porno for Pyros seemed to be pretty positive as
they would vacation together in Bali, indonesia and were already writing songs for their second
album while promoting their first. It only reinforced the widely reported news that Jane’s
Addictions tensions came from the friction between Perry Farrell and bassist Eric Avery
and guitarist Dave Navarro. Despite Jane’s addiction ending in turmoil
the some in the press questioned whether breaking up the band was a good move given that their
sophomore record sold half a million copies in just a few months after its release. Was
it a commercial risk to make such a decision? Well a promoter who worked with porno for
pyros would dispell such questions saying “He’s certainly not starting from the
ground up,” “We did 4,000 people at their Castaic Lake show. Nobody had ever played
there and nobody had heard them. Released on April 27, 1993 the group's first
album debuted at number 2 on the billboard charts and within several months sold over
half a million copies going gold The press was mixed towards the record. Many comparisons
to jane’s addiction were made with the alternative press writing There isn’t a single reason
this album deserves any press,” while Rolling Stone gave it a ⅗ stars.
The biggest hit off the album and an mtv staple, would be the single Pets. Released as the
second single off the album it reached number 1 on the mainstream rock charts. While the
song’s subject matter deals with how the human race would make great pets for an invading
aliens, the origins of the song are much darker. The guitar part that Distefano came up with
was much slower than what ended up on porno for pyros first album. He would admit the
song was inspired by a girl he dated when he was in the 7th grade named Breanna Dean
revealing "It was a song written for a girl that I was in love with. I was in the seventh
grade at Lincoln Jr. High in Santa Monica and she was in my cooking class. Still when
I think about her the love that I feel, you can call it puppy love or whatever, but my
heart feels and my stomach drops," "One day she didn't show up in cooking class.
The teacher was nervous and everything," "Then the next day we heard in the news, and nothing
ever happened in Santa Monica ... but she had been murdered. There had been a Charles
Manson type couple that were robbing the house and her and her brother and they came in,
were victims of the couple. "The song, it comes from a very dark place.
So when I played it, Perry goes 'Pick it up' so I did and he wrote lyrics to it. I never
told the band or anybody where it came from, so I feel like the reason it went to No. 1
and was my biggest hit, is because it was Briana's ghost giving me success," he would
say..
Days before porno for pyros tour kicked off in late may of 1993 to promote their first
album, an unexpected tragedy happened when Stephen Perkins’s brother had died. Some
expected the tour to be scraped, but Perkins played on with only the second night of the
tour cancelled being rescheduled so he could attend his brothers funeral.
The band’s live shows seemed like a circus fusing together music with performance art
and a sexual sideshow. Exotic dancers, , fireaters and clowns all made an appearance during porno
for pyros concerts leaving some critics scratching their head. In addition to that, farrell would
hand out thousands of fake $100 bills with his face on the money to members of the audience
during the band’s performance of the song meija ( The band probably had no idea that
they could land themselves in hot water with the federal government. Counterfeiting money
is a serious federal crime and can land someone in jail for 15 years along with a several
thousand dollar fine. That’s just the crime for printing fake money, but actually circulating
it carries a separate but similar penalty. The United States government was no stranger
to counterfeit money. Colour photocopiers only helped proliferate the rise in counterfeit
cash floating around America. And up until 1993 the biggest seizure of countefit cash
happened in 1989 when the government uncovered a counterfeit operation that was done through
a single laser copier in Arizona. After one porno for pyros show in Tampa Bay,
a ballsy fan who took home some of the fake money tried to use one of the $100 bills to
a local denny’s to pay for his meal. According to the Tampa Tribune the fake money was accepted
at the restaurant, but the store manager quickly realized they had been duped according to
Spin magazine. The bill that was used to pay for the meal bore little to no resemblance
to a real $100 bill. In fact, it didn’t feel like real money, didn’t feature any
of the security counterfeit protections and most strikingly benjamin franklin’s photo
wasn’t on the bill, instead it was replaced with perry farrell’s face.
The federal and local authorities ended up visiting the Denny’s and spoke to the manager.
Porno for pyros was set to play a show in Miami after Tampa but prior ot the show Federal
and local authorities raided the amphitheater where the show was set to take place and counted
and seized the fake cash. The band would be held in custody for several hours and were
released with no charges being filed.
The band’s manager at the time would put out a statement that read “perry is crushed.
He had his own secret supploy of p money and was hoping to dine out at denny’s for the
nexxt ten years on it. Spin would report that for the subsequent tour dates would see them
scale back handing out money The following year spin magazine caught up
with Farrell who was juggling lollapalooza and porno for pyros. The interview would show
a jaded musician who resented the industry he made a living off of telling the magazine
why he was disgusted with the record business saying “Music has all to do with finding
yourself. As long as we’ve got people in the middle that make money from it, you’re
going to be kept form what music really can do, from it’ spower.”
The group’s follow up album arrived three years later. Titled Good God’s Urge. And
while some fans may ahve epxected to see more of the same iwth the group’s second record,
it went into a more post-punk direction. The same forces that helped capsize Jane’s
addiction were now at work during the making of porno for pyros second record. Drug abuse
was running rampant between members so much so that bassist Martin LeNoble left midway
during the recording of the their second album to kick his habit. Minutemn bassist Mike Watt
would step in. The album was full of guest appearances with red hot chili peppers bassist
flea contributing to the track freeway. The album was full of guest appearances, but fans
were shocked to see Janes Addiction guitarist dave navarro appearing on the same track Only
missing of the classic lineup of Jane’s Addiction was bassist Eric Avery but Freeway
would foreshadow what happened the following year when Jane’s Addiction reunited without
Avery and Flea filling in on bass. Porno for pyros would disband by the late
90’s due to the jane’s addiction reunion, other side projects and guitarist peter distefano’
cancer diagnosis. The band would up reuniting in 2009 for perry farrell’s 50th birthday
and finally in 2020 the band played a few live shows as part of youtube’s lollapalooza
live stream. On July 20, 2021, Peter DiStefano announced on his Facebook page that he, Farrell
and Perkins were working on new porno for pyros the first in almost two decades. That
does it for today's video guys thanks for watching. Be sure to hit the like button and
subscribe and we'll see you again on rock n' roll true stories. Take care.