Sophia Michaels
When Jane’s Addiction kick off their North American arena tour with Smashing Pumpkins on Oct. 2, they’ll be joined by original bassist Eric Avery for the first time in more than a decade. But this won’t be a complete reunion of the classic Jane’s lineup: Guitarist Dave Navarro, who is suffering from long Covid and unable to tour, will be recuperating at home. In his place will be Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen.
Jane’s hasn’t played a single gig without Navarro since he joined the group in 1985, and frontman Perry Farrell tells Rolling Stone that the decision to play without him wasn’t an easy one. “When we booked this tour and Dave was sick, we didn’t know he’d take this long, to be honest with you,” the singer says. “You have to be able to adapt. I really do have to consider everybody on the crew and their families. They have mouths to feed, and they haven’t had a paycheck in almost two years.”
He continues: “I wish I could have waited longer for Dave. Maybe he will call me in a week and say, ‘I’m good to go.’ And what could happen is, he could just slide right next to Troy.”
The group recently wrapped production rehearsals with Van Leeuwen. “The overall sound is very different,” says Avery. “Dave is an unusually smooth player, very, very, very smooth. Troy is much grittier in every way. There’s sort of like a working-man grit to his playing, and to his sound…I feel like I am the the keeper of the flame for the hardcore fan. I don’t know how it’s going to be for those folks, because it’s going to be different. But I do think they’ll be happy that I’m back.”
Just a few months ago, the return of Avery to Jane’s Addiction seemed just as improbable as the group launching a tour without Navarro. The bassist is a founding member of the band and a key architect of their sound, but he sat out their first reunion tour in 1997 and has been mostly estranged from the group over the past 25 years. The lone exception was a brief period between 2008 and 2010 when he returned to the group for an ill-fated attempt at reconciliation that ended in hurt feelings on both sides, and sharp barbs exchanged in the press.
According to Avery, the last reunion was a fiasco almost from the start. “I had a list of a few things that were important to me and had to be in place for me to do it then,” he says, noting that he wanted the band to record new music and get rid of the dancers and other “accoutrements” in their stage show that he found distasteful. “Almost from the start, those wishes were betrayed or the expectations were not met.”
For a while, he says, he was able to push his concerns to the side. “I kept being convinced by people, especially in management, that this was for the best,” he continues. “They said, ‘Yes, we’ll deliver that thing. But you know, in the interim, we just have to get this done. And then we can deliver those.’ I was like, ‘OK, well, I’ll do that.’ I tried to do it without these things in place that I wanted. It was just really frustrating from the moment I was involved. I felt like I was pushing a very big rock up a hill.”
The reunited band did get through a successful tour with Nine Inch Nails, but their attempts to record new songs with Trent Reznor didn’t get very far. “We really wanted him to Trent-ize us,” says Jane’s drummer Stephen Perkins. “He really wanted us to be Jane’s Addiction, and so neither of us got what we wanted at the sessions. It just didn’t seem to go anywhere.”
When the reunion fizzled out, Avery vented his frustrations in a 17-part video interview on YouTube that got deep into the weeds of everything that went down. To put it mildly, this didn’t sit well with Navarro. “The guy’s entitled to do whatever the fuck he wants to do, and it’s fine, but keep your fuckin’ mouth shut,” Navarro said in 2013 on his online radio show Dark Matter. “I don’t wish him any harm. I have a lot of fond memories with him. But if you’re going to fuckin’ open your mouth about the inner workings and dynamics of something that has been very, very good to you for a lot of years, and then not follow through on anything else, you’ve got it coming.”
Navarro and Avery got on the phone after that and quietly patched things up, and there’s been no public sparring between the two camps over the past nine years, but another reunion still seemed like a very far-off proposition. Things started to change about two years ago, when Avery answered his phone and heard Taylor Hawkins — a fanatical Jane’s Addiction fan going back to his teenage years in L.A. — on the other end.
“Taylor called me totally out of the blue,” says Avery. “He said, ‘I was talking to Perry and he had this idea of you coming back and doing all the Lollapaloozas to celebrate the 30th anniversary. He said he would love for you to be involved, but thought you’d never do it. And I said I’d call you.’”
Avery had spent the past few years touring with Garbage as a hired hand, and the idea of rejoining his original band appealed to him. “I said, ‘Well, actually, I’m in a different place in my life about all this stuff,’” Avery recalls. “‘That sounds actually all right, just celebrating the past. We’ll go play a bunch of Lollapaloozas, make some people happy to see the original members together again, and everybody makes some money. It sounds great, actually.’”
Hawkins called up Farrell to tell him that Avery was on board. But when the drummer called Avery back, he relayed more of Farrell’s vision for the reunion. It involved current Jane’s bassist Chris Chaney remaining in the band, playing keyboards for part of the night and bass for other parts. Avery would also be switching off between the two instruments. To him, it was a non-starter.
“I said, ‘Well, Taylor, this is a very different proposition,’” says Avery. “If you called me and said Perry had this idea, I would have said that I wasn’t going to be involved.’ Taylor said, ‘Sorry. Well, Perry is going to call you anyway.’”
Avery braced for an uncomfortable phone call from Farrell, until his wife, Anabelle, intervened from the other room. She’d overheard the phone calls, and she knew that Farrell felt that Avery had dangled the possibility of a reunion in the past, only to change his mind at the last minute. It was a sore spot between the former bandmates.
“She goes, ‘Eric, you cannot take that phone call!” the bassist recalls her saying. “‘Perry already thinks that you fuck with them. And now he’s gonna think that you told Taylor that you’d do it. Perry is going to call and it’ll be like, ‘No. Got you again!’”
She convinced him to quickly call Hawkins back and try to sort the situation out before that happened. “If you really want there to be any hope of us working together again, you have to put this fire out,” Avery recalls telling Hawkins. “You have to let him know that you told me a different thing. You have to explain that.”
Hawkins did exactly that. “Perry and I then got on the phone, and I was able to say some things to him which were a lot of years in coming,” says Avery. “We wound up in a really, really great place at the end of a 40-minute phone call, and we sort of buried the hatchet. It was just two adult guys coming to a resolution about stuff.”
The pandemic ended any talk of a grand reunion to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Lollapalooza, but Avery got another call from Farrell earlier this year asking to meet him for lunch. He presumed the singer wanted to talk over the idea of preparing a tribute of some sort to Hawkins, who tragically died in March, but he wound up offering something else. “He presented this idea of me returning to Jane’s, and how we would do it,” says Avery. “He was like, ‘Here’s a few years’ plan of how to return some luster to Jane’s Addiction.’ It involved writing new music and playing shows.”
Avery tentatively agreed, hoping things would go better than they did last time around. “I told him that I’d take the next step, whatever that is,” he says. “That’s how each progression has been since then. I take the next step, I take the next step, and my initial mojo keeps getting reinforced. Interpersonally, it has been really good. Creatively, it’s been really good. This has been precisely the opposite dynamic of the [last reunion].”
The odd man out here is Chris Chaney. The bassist has logged 14 years in Jane’s and he plays on their two most recent studio records, 2003’s Strays and 2011’s The Great Escape Artist. (The Jane’s bass spot has also been filled over the years by Flea, Duff McKagan, and Martyn LeNoble.) Farrell initially wanted to keep Chaney in the band as a fifth member, but it didn’t wind up making sense.
“Chris knew that this day would come because we talked about it,” says Farrell. “When Taylor died, things really changed in our relationship. We can definitely call it ‘estranged.’ I do not have a good separation with Chris Chaney, that’s for sure. He was very close with Taylor. He was kind of our connection. And now that Taylor is no longer there… Time is ticking. It’s time to take care of fuckin’ unfinished business.”
That unfinished business meant writing new songs as a group, even if Navarro’s ongoing illness forced Farrell, Avery, and Perkins to work as a three-piece, sans guitar. As of now, they have three strong songs. “They’re raw,” says Perkins. “They sound like the beginnings of Jane’s Addiction. They sound like the seeds of 1986 with fuckin’ voodoo bass lines and tribal drumming. And because Eric is back and we all went through this nightmare of the pandemic, Jane’s Addiction has purpose again. Perry is writing about loss, losing friends, and losing time. Perry is 63. I’m 55. Fuckin’ time is important now.”
Even though they signed up Troy Van Leeuwen for the tour, there’s no thought of anyone besides Navarro playing guitar on those tracks, even if it takes many months before he’s ready to do that. “There’s no rush,” says Perkins. “To me, when Dave is on, that’s the complete picture. But I was in the band for about two months before Dave joined. A lot of the early hangouts was just me, Eric, and Perry since our first guitarist didn’t come around a lot. This [three-man formation] is the raw, primitive beginnings of Jane’s Addiction before Dave was in the band. It a weird way, it’s happening again.”
Plans beyond the end of the Pumpkins tour are unclear, and they depend at least partially on Navarro’s health. But they’re already thinking of releasing an EP of new material at some point next year. There’s also talk of a special commemoration of the 35th anniversary of their debut LP, Nothing’s Shocking, in the summer. And even though Avery is taking it day by day, he says he’s mentally in a very different place than he was in 2010.
“I made all those demands back then because I thought I was going to make Jane’s Addiction the best it could be,” he says. “But in retrospect, I can see why it was off-putting to people. It seemed like I was trying to take over everything. This time around, I’m just going to deal with what Jane’s Addiction is in 2022. I’m still going to voice my opinion, but I’m not going to try to force anybody to do anything. That means I’m less likely to step on toes, and less likely to reawaken old resentments.”
He adds, “That said, the guys are in a different place now than they were then. The new management team is doing a great job. Of course, the caveat being that Dave’s not here, and that that has been a bummer. That has been tough. But other than that, it really has gone quite well.”
Farrell, meanwhile, is just happy to have his friend back. “It shows that to be a man, you have to be capable of doing a little apologizing, a little looking at yourself, and seeing how you can improve, and find some love and understanding in your heart,” he says. “If you do all that, you can feel redemption.”
He also feels the presence of Taylor Hawkins. “Ever since he died, I’ve been seeing a hawk over my house,” he says. “I don’t know if he was immediately reincarnated, but I have a feeling he became a hawk. No matter what, I know that Taylor is somewhere watching everything go down, and I want him to see and to hear Jane’s Addiction original members play together again.”
