“Metal” or not, I think we can all agree that Jane’s Addiction was a truly awesome and original band, and their seminal 1990 album Ritual de lo Habitual still sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard elsewhere.

If you don’t have this album, go mug an old lady for cash and buy it — yes buy — immediately.

JANE’S ADDICTION — “Three Days”, from Ritual de lo Habitual (1990)

-KW

Seriously, anyone who doesn’t love Trent Reznor has to be some kind of massive tool. As if all the crap he does didn’t already make him pretty much the coolest living rock star in the world today, he’s now giving away more free music – a sampler featuring some NIN songs, Street Sweeper tracks, and, perhaps most excitingly, new, Reznor-produced music from Jane’s Addiction.

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Vince has gone into some detail in the past about the travails of dating a girl who isn’t into metal; I’ve kept my own struggles to educate the future ex-Mrs. Axl Rosenberg more private, but I do feel Vince’s pain.

Lucky for us, then, that Thrash Hits has pointed us towards this article at self-titledmag.com, which outlines a plan to get your non-metal gf to give into the dark side. Here’s an excerpt:

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I just wanna be clear, right off the bat, that this is just me playing “What If?” I’m not breaking a story, I don’t have a source, it’s Monday, it’s a slow news day, and I just got to thinking. I don’t want this to be like the time that I said it might be cool if Whitfield Crane joined Anthrax and then some putz put it on Wikipedia and asked Crane about it in an interview, and asked as though it were a bona fide fact or even a real “rumor.” THIS IS JUST ME HAVING FUN.

Here’s the reasoning behind my total b.s. speculation:

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At least that’s what they claim. Or will they really pull a Led Zeppelin and decline to do a full tour after a wildly successful one-off reunion? We can only hope.

According to Brooklyn Vegan — and as we speculated earlier in the week — Jane’s Addiction are reuniting to play at the US NME Awards which will honor them with the prestigious “Godlike Genius Award.” What makes this reunion different from all previous Jane’s reunions? Original bassist Eric Avery will be in the fold after declining to participate in the late ’90s Jane’s reunion and the 2003 reunion which spawned the lackluster Bob Ezrin-produced album Strays and a headlining Lollapalooza appearance.

Does it really make that much of a difference whether Avery is involved? I’m sure to some die-hards it does, as I’m sure it also does to the band’s PR machine which will endlessly spin this as the first “all-original” reunion. But to me, not so much, big Jane’s Addiction fan as I am; if Perry are Dave are in the band, to me it’s Jane’s.

Anyway, will this one-off result in a following tour? Avery seems to indicate it won’t: “I’ve chosen to reject the prospects of reuniting in the past for personal and philosophical reasons. I have always considered reunions to be a way to make a quick buck, and it sells short my own experience of it the first time around. The reason I started to even consider this is because it’s honoring the past instead of trying to recreate it.”

Will the band stick to Avery’s word? We’ll see. For the sake of their legacy, I sure hope so; Strays already crapped upon that legacy, and the last thing we need is more diarrhea atop the pantheon of Jane’s Addiction.

-VN

In a recent interview with NME.com about Jane’s Addiction’s selection to receive the “Godlike Genius” award at the US NME Awards (to be held April 23 in Los Angeles), the broken-up group’s guitarist Dave Navarro seemed to leave the door open for another Jane’s Addiction reunion:

“The bottom line is that we have been getting along great and are moving forward with our personal and musical relationships… As it stands, we are planning on attending the awards as a unit and I really don’t have anything else that is concrete to report at the moment. We are all very happy with how things are evolving!”

Navarro also slammed the press for taking drama-free news and “find[ing] reason to fuck it up.”

Nothing to fuck up here. The band is certainly worthy of the award, having crossed multiple genres and inspired a generation of bands. It also sounds like a reunion may be in the works, though he didn’t specifically comment on the matter. This would be the third so-called Jane’s Addiction reunion — the first around 1999 (I had tickets to see them perform live on SNL and couldn’t go — I’m still sour about it) and the second for the 2003 edition of Lollapalooza. The Lollapalooza reunion was the first time I’d seen Jane’s Addiction live, and they really, really impressed; the show was phenomenal. The aforementioned reunion also resulted in the album Strays, which pretty much blew aside from the single “Just Because” which was as good as any prior Jane’s material.

So are we in line for a third Jane’s reunion? If so, count me in. Even if you’re not a believer in reunions, anything will be better than The Panic Channel and Satellite Party.

-VN

Jane’s Addiction in their prime were un-fucking-stoppable. Before Perry Farrell became a weirdo concert promoter and before Dave Navarro became a reality TV clown, Jane’s were one of the most original bands on the planet. You really ought to hear more about this band in the same breath as Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana, but alas, history has sort of passed them over. I like this video for “Stop” because a) it shows live performance footage, b) it’s from Ritual de lo Habitual, the best Jane’s album (disagree? discuss.).

Now just cross your legs and wait for the inevitable re-reunion.

-VN

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