Perry Farrell: The Gang is a Weapon That He's Traded His Mind in For

I love Perry Farrell---I really do, even got him to blurb my first book and remain grateful to him he did, and for all his greatness as a performer and impresario--and he wrote one of my very favorite interestingly sophisticated (for a rock song taking on politics) libertarian rock tunes, "1 %."

But alas, now the failures of industry and government lead him to regretfully call for a government-music industry partnership, as reported on LAist.com:

Farrell also wants to go federal, seeking government help to regulate online music distribution. In doing so, he believes a cut of the increased revenue could go to the government with a chunk allotted toward music education.

Says the Jane's Addiction frontman, 

"Let's try to organize something. It should be a case where the touring music industry, the recording music industry, distribution, all should sit down with government to figure out how we can get music to be really healthy again and recycle that money back into music, back into education, back into the city's parks and recreations where we have these great parties. I think it's a system that could absolutely work."

From the last time I saw, or doubtless will ever see, the real Jane's Addiction, a great performance of "1 %":

Bonus Jane's gossip: Eric Avery complains about his old partner Perry. Not about being soft on government, but still…

Comments

[John]

Their first live record XXX that had "Jane Says" and a killer cover of Sympathy for the Devil was a good record. Everything else they ever did, especially the much vaunted Ritual de lo Habitual is just pretensious junk. One of the most overrated bands of the last 30 years. They were like if Motley Cru had spent their youth listening to Lou Reed. Yeah, I guess Lou Reed is good taste in music. But they still suck

[Pip]

Anyone know anything about the band My Chemical Romance? They were at Firts Avenue last night and as early as 4:30 pm, there was a line several blacks long.

[Pip]

several "blocks" long.

[ClubMedSux]

If my kids were teenagers they could do a lot worse than listening to My Chemical Romance. Sort of an overproduced 21st century faux-glam knock-off of Queen, but that qualifies as above average by pop music standards.

[marlok]

I think they're big with the teenagers.

[Firts Avenue]

People think I'm a typo, but I was actually born to parents who didn't want me. Thank God for borderline illiteracy.

[marlok]

Transformer was Lou Reed's last good album. The rest of the 70's was very splotchy. And let's not even talk about 1980 and on.

[dunphy]

i disagree. i thought New York was an excellent album

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA4-4ifhixg

also, from an arrangement perspective, it's really well done. the entire album

[Mongo]

Yeah, man, I really liked that one too.

[marlok]

I guess I did kind of like New York, but other than Halloween Parade, nothing really stays in my rotation. I guess I don't like how he mostly disowned melody after transformer. His speak-sing delivery annoys me, and the lyrics aren't so great that they overcome it.

[dunphy]

i do agree he kind of abandoned melody. i like strawman, busload of faith and romeo and juliet off that album. i will give him credit for actually making a "concept album" and it not sounding totally pretentious

[P]

What's that called again, when government and commercial interests collude to control an industry? Oh yeah, fascism.

Perry Farrell, American fascist.

[Sal Paradise]

Jane says
Have you seen my rent-seeking around?
I feel naked
without it

[GILMORE]

I think it's a system that could absolutely work."

....

This reminds me somewhat of how people who used to be criminal dope fiends find Jesus, and then become THE MOST SEVERE JESUSHEADS ON THE PLANET

Seriously, there's nothing like some ex-crack addict mugger loudly lecturing people on the subway about how glad he is Jesus saved his worthless ass.

Likewise, perhaps decades of being a rockstar impresario so distances one from reality that they suddenly believe in the fantasy concept that Government DOES ANYTHING that, "absolutely works".

I mean, look how well they do *everything else*...?

Seriously Perry; you should never have kicked.

[Abdul]

Government-run music industry? what could go wrong?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....re=related

Chi-coms do "Beat it"

[dunphy]

i got to produce JA in college, and to this day, pigs in zen is one of my all time favorite songs...

with that said...

ugh...,

[John]

Were they as fucked up as their image or are they fakes?

[EDG reppin' LBC]

They were actually pretty f-ed up. That being said, remember when punk in the USA was fueled by a DIY attitude? Entrepreneurs starting record labels, cross country touring in crummy U-Hauls? Despite no help from the government, and sometimes outright harassment from the police, PMRC, etc., some of these smart people somehow managed to thrive and make decent money and careers in music. Perhaps Farrell should look inward to find the creative spark and build a new business model that does not involve a government partnership. Pretty lame, dude.

[John]

Yeah or make some music people want to listen to and hit the road rather then trying to squeeze a few more pennies out of stuff he recorded twenty years ago. What a concept?

And yeah, I do remember all that. Somewhere along the line, Henry Rollins got a talk show and Perry Ferrell started asking the FBI for help enforcing movie rights. Things have kind of gotten off track you know?

[John]

I mean music rights.

[ClubMedSux]

The government is the enemy until you've got a mortgage to pay.

[dunphy]

i recall perry screaming at the audience "you're all probably a bunch of republicans!"

i kind of lol'd because it was UCSB. he was right.

[Matt Welch]

I was at that show.

[dunphy]

NICE! mary's danish, and iirc one of my buddies bands The Burning Couches was also on the bill. sadly, my band was not 🙁

it was kind of windy and at one point, it looked like the stage backdrop was going to fall over.

[ac in ca]

I was there too. Saw many a Burning Couches show (sometime later known as zof-tix??) in my IV days.

[dunphy]

nice. i used to jam with them on rare occasion, but had my own band. funny story was a bunch of SB high school kids had a practice studio right next to the one we used. we used to give them "advice". next thing you knew they had a record contract and an MTV video. bastids!

[dunphy]

if you are referring to drug use, not that i saw. otoh, red hot chili peppers were shooting up heroin when i produced them...

[cynical]

"when i produced them"

Wait, what?

[Rock Action]

I'd also like to hear about that. Sounds interesting.

[dunphy]

i produced a show they did. i didn't mean i produced them, as in i was their producer. anyway, i went backstage to give them some updates and the needle was IN!

[John]

During the recording sessions, Farrell stated he wanted fifty percent of the band's publishing royalties for writing the lyrics, as well as a portion of the remaining half for writing music. Bassist Eric Avery said he and the other band members, guitarist Dave Navarro and drummer Stephen Perkins, were stunned by Farrell's demands.[2] Farrell refused to compromise. One day Jerden drove up to the studio to find Farrell, Navarro, and Perkins leaving; Farrell told him that the band had broken up and that there would be no record. Warner Bros. called an emergency meeting to resolve the situation. Farrell got the royalty percentage he sought, and the other band members received 12.5 percent each. Avery said the incident had a profound effect on the band, creating an internal fracture.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigs_in_Zen

Yeah Perry is an asshole.

[Rock Action]

And by Ritual, they couldn't stand each enough to be in the studio together for any song but Three Days, and it showed. Mediocre album. Nothing's Shocking, however, was a fantastic album in my opinion, and one of my favorites in high school. Mountain Song and its attendant video were so far out there for pop culture in 1988/9, it's beyond belief. But, like you, I also like the XXX recording better.

[John]

Yeah, Nothing Shocking was a good record. IN fairness when I first heard Nirvana and all the bands from Seattle my first thought was "hasn't Jane's Addiction been doing this stuff for two years?"

[Rock Action]

You mean heroin?

[John]

that to.

[ClubMedSux]

Isn't Navarro directing porn now? Anybody know if it's actually interesting or just the same old stuff (not that there's anything wrong with the same old stuff)?

[Lowdog]

Perry helped out some friends of mine when their car broke down in LA. He happened to be getting money out of an ATM where they were broke down.

I also got to party hard with Stephen Perkins (Jane's drummer) at a Halloween party here in Tempe, AZ back in, oh, '91.

Good times.

Way to turn into a complete tool, Perry.

[Michael]

Perry Farrell turns out to be a rent seeking piece of shit? No way, getdafuckouttahere!

Aren't Lollapalooza acts contractually obligated to not perform within a hundred miles of Chicago like three months in advance of and in following the festival? Not that there's anything wrong with that...

[John]

XXX also has a great cover of Lou Reed's Rock and Roll. And Nothing Shocking is a good record. After that it was all down hill.

[Michael]

Oh, how I long for the heady days when alt-butt-rock frontmen were whining like little bitches about the government censoring their shitty album covers. How times have changed.

[Alt Music Douche]

They can censor it just as long as they keep it off of pirate bay man.

[Michael]

Does that apply to masturbatory wedding videos too?

[Al Wayswright]

Blessed with brains wired in a particular way -- for music -- musicians, like other artistic performers, are morons.

If not for the mass of low IQ idiocy who worship idols of the celebrity, everyone else would mock such amusement jesters.

The Wilsonian inspired and FDR implemented fascist America allowed the oligopoly scam of the recording industry to go on far longer than it should have.

Ask U2 if they need government sponsorship?

The band's U2 360 world stadium tour is now the biggest-grossing concert trek of all time...

With Sunday night's performance in S?o Paulo, U2 surpassed the $554 million earned by the Rolling Stones' A Bigger Bang tour in 2005-07. By the time the two-year tour wraps up July 30 in Canada, it will have made more than $717 million, sold 7 million tickets and played 110 stadium shows in 30 countries.

see: http://www.usatoday.com/life/m.....d_ST_N.htm

[John]

Wow form a band and actually play your insturments and be able to give a performance people want to hear and make millions. What a concept. That could never work. The only way for art to survive is by destroying privacy and freedom to keep the 20th century recording business model from dying.

[Fiscal Meth]

"Blessed with brains wired in a particular way -- for music -- musicians, like other artistic performers, are morons."

As someone who used to write pretty good songs and also used to be really stupid, I agree that aspiring musicians should avoid learning anything important. Learning one important thing might serve as a gateway leading to all sorts of other important concepts and once you integrate them into a single non-artistic worldview, your music career is over. Then again, it might be true that my old songs were shitty and so is all the music I'm comparing it to.

[Fiscal Meth]

Also, prepositions are what I like to end sentences with.

[Anne]

"Blessed with brains wired in a particular way -- for music -- musicians, like other artistic performers, are morons."

citation needed

[ClubMedSux]

While I agree that most musicians are morons, the same can be said of humans in general.

[Anne]

Why yes. Yes they did:

The U2 record incidentNegativland's next project was the U2 EP, with samples from American Top 40 host Casey Kasem. In 1991, Negativland released a single with the title "U2" displayed in very large type on the front of the packaging, and "Negativland" in a smaller typeface. An image of the Lockheed U-2 spy plane was also on the single cover.

The songs within were parodies of the group U2's well-known 1987 song, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", including kazoos and extensive sampling of the original song. The song "The Letter U And The Numeral 2" features a musical backing to an extended profane rant from well-known disc jockey Casey Kasem, lapsing out of his more polished and professional tone during a frustrating rehearsal which had gone out to many stations as raw feed and was taped by several engineers, who had been passing it around for a number of years. One of Kasem's milder comments was "These guys are from England and who gives a shit?" (U2's members are in fact from the Republic of Ireland).

U2's label Island Records quickly sued Negativland, claiming that placing the word "U2" on the cover violated trademark law, as did the song itself. Island Records also contended that the single was an attempt to deliberately confuse U2 fans, awaiting the impending release of Achtung Baby, into purchasing what they believed was a new U2 album called Negativland.

And the fucking irony of this is that while U2 was suing Negativeland, they were in the middle of the Zoo tour where they were projecting live images onto huge screens of anything they could pull off of media satellites...without paying copywrites.

[John]

I think there is a difference between using someone else's music to make money, which is what negativeland was doing, and copying music. Negativeland had a good point in arguing that we shouldn't have to ask permission to parody someone. But at the same time, they packaged their single to make people think it was a U2 record and mistakenly buy it. And that is fraud. Negativeland were a bunch of douchebags.

[Anne]

That still doesn't justify the hypocrisy outlined in my final paragraph.

[John]

How was U2 ripping anyone off or committing fraud by pulling shit off the satilite? If negativeland were putting up U2 videos behind them at live shows and U2 sued them, that would have been hypocritical. Or if U2 had done a record called "Lou Reed" that was remakes of Lou Reed songs without paying royalties, sueing Negativeland would have been hypocrtical. But that wasn't what happened. Negativeland deserved to be sued. U2 should have sued them for no other reason than to keep their fans from getting ripped off.

[Mongo]

Nobody would confuse Negativland with U2 -- it was a clear example of sampling.

Should U2 have received any royalty cuts? -- Yes, but I doubt there were any profits. Where I lived, Negativland was only played on community radio.

[John]

The music sounded nothing like U2. But the packaging was made to make the record look like a U2 record. It had a big U2 on with "Negativeland" in small caps below it. When you saw it you thought it was a U2 record called "negativeland". To me that was the objectionable part, not the parody songs.

[Mallet Diction]

To me that was the objectionable part, not the parody songs.

That was a central part of the parody. That's like saying you are okay with Hunter S. Thompson, except for all the talk about drugs.

[John]

So defrauding people is okay as long as it is done in the name of parody?

[Mallet Diction]

I reject the premise that any fraud was occurring. Maybe you think Tina Fey was defrauding SNL's audience when she put on glasses to look like Sarah Palin.

The U2 single by negativeland was released on SST records, filed in the Negativeland bin in record stores and only available at the kinds of record stores that carried SST records.

[Mallet Diction]

Mongo,

Should U2 have received any royalty cuts? -- Yes, but I doubt there were any profits. Where I lived, Negativland was only played on community radio.

In the end the publicity probably helped Negativeland. They lost something on the order of 100k on U2 much more than they had ever LOST on previous records (all were net losses, I am sure...I mean, have you seen the handmade covers on their early records?)

Then they were able to ride the publicity to make a movie which was an underground hit, and sell some records (still not many). Their story is one of the prime examples of the abuse of copyright.

[Mallet Diction]

I think there is a difference between using someone else's music to make money, which is what negativeland was doing, and copying music. Negativeland had a good point in arguing that we shouldn't have to ask permission to parody someone. But at the same time, they packaged their single to make people think it was a U2 record and mistakenly buy it. And that is fraud. Negativeland were a bunch of douchebags.

Wow.
You have that story completely wrong.

But they have more than "a good point" when it comes to the right to parody without permission. Their use was clearly fair use.

[Al Wayswright]

While no doubt you meant well, Anne; your example fails to show that U2 needs government sponsorship or ever needed such.

Yet, by your expression "Why yes. Yes they did", you believe so, however wrong in your belief.

Your example reveals the members of U2's respective interest in their property, their right of ownership of what they create.

[ConfederalRepublicBy2030]

Yeah, because what Perry Farrell says is totally worth considering at all. Right.

I think I prefer taking advice on how to establish and maintain sectors of the music industry from Justin Bieber.

[TrickyVic]

""In doing so, he believes a cut of the increased revenue could go to the government with a chunk allotted toward music education.""

The government already gets a chunk of the revenue as taxes. What a tool.

[Mongo]

Didn't he falsely claim that he was HIV-positive too?

I never understood why people would make a claim that they have AIDS (or straights claiming that they're gay).

[John]

Unless it is done in complete desparation to run off a drunken fat chick who will not get the message, why would any straight guy claim to be gay?

[The Gobbler]

Because some women believe they can "change" you so there is value in letting them make the attempt.

[Bloodhound Gang]

I wish I were queer so I could get chicks.

[Mongo]

Anthony Keidis (Sp?)--the front man for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kurt Cobain both did.

[Mongo]

A couple of hipsters in my town, alt-journalists, did too. All around the same time period.

My gay friend developed a real affinity towards that dork for the Chili Peppers. He was heartbroken when he found out it was just a front.

[dunphy]

Everyone has AIDS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6szE_qmzavQ

[Fartnoise]

One of the greatest sideshow attractions to the whole Napster dust-up in the '90s was watching lefty musical icons like Don Henley come out defending Big Evil Corporations (i.e., the record companies that provided their rice bowl). Delicious.

And fuck Perry Farrell, that overrated Lou Reed wannabe.

[John]

Yes it was. Don't forget Metallica's whinning on the subject.

[dunphy]

except i don't recall metallica being a bunch of lefty "corporations are evil" whiners.

[GSL]

The guy created Porno for Pyros, so I think we're all more than justified in questioning his judgment.

[ClubMedSux]

Of the thousands of cd's I've bought in my life, I've only re-sold three of them. Porno for Pyros was one.

[SIV]

You ladies like MTV pop-metal?

[ClubMedSux]

The Simpsons nailed Farrell in their Hullabalooza episode:

"Homer, nothings more important to me than the health and well-being of my freaks... I'm sending you to a vet."

[I was a rebel]

But now I'm not.

[dunphy]

in the immortal words of tom petty as visualized by johnny depp "a rebel without a clue"

[Mallet Diction]

figure out how we can get music to be really healthy again

Music is doing just fine.
The record industry is not music.
That said, my buds who own record stores are doing just fine, so I am not sure what problem he is trying to solve.

Oh wait...when he says "music" he means the "Rock Star" industry.

[erikjay]

Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening.

[Cure ear infection]

Your post is really good providing good information. Garlic health benefits I liked it and enjoyed reading it.Keep sharing such important posts.Sinus headache