See Jane Rock Out

Jane's Addiction
Album: Nothing's Shocking
Song: Mountain Song
Song: Mountain Song (live)

My favorite comment ever about Perry Farrell, lead singer of Jane's Addiction: "Perry Farrell looks like an insect. Perry Farrell sings like an insect.  Is Perry Farrell an insect?  Just wondering."  So wrote Johnette Napolitano, member of the crappy 80s band Concrete Blonde, in a letter to the editor of SPIN magazine.  There is indeed something insect-like about the weirder-than-life singer, but he's a heck of a front man and has a genre-appropriate screechy voice.

If the band seems particularly musically adept, it's cos their lead guitarist is the great Dave Navarro (Red Hot Chili Peppers) and their bassist, at times, is Flea.  These guys can flat out play.

Jane's Addiction was a very popular act in the mid 90s, releasing two great records: Ritual de la Habituel and Nothing's Shocking but they have been largely ignored over the last decade or so.  I remember listening to "Mountain Song" incessantly on a trip to Calgary with a young soccer team that I helped coach at the time.  The head coach and I traveled together, and we brought with us one of the players, a kid maybe 14-15 years old.  He sat there, at times cringing, at times open-mouthed, as we worked our way through Nothing's Shocking over and over again.  Poor guy.  This was at the height of the "boy band" phenomenon.  Backstreet Boys were the preferred music of practically every young dumbass.  "Mountain Song" is pretty much the antithesis of this sort of craptastic effluence, which is at least partly why I enjoyed it so much.

Pretty sure we scarred that kid.