Jane's Addiction, "Ocean Size"
We know that on Planet Earth water is a finite, yet conserved, resource. Water doesn’t go away forever when we use it. The hydrological cycle (along with gravity) ensures that aside from the stores we might choose to load onto spacecraft, H2O in whatever form—ice, water, steam—is retained within the confines of the planet and its atmosphere. So that’s good news. Nevertheless, we, that is, humankind, have water availability problems for at least two reasons. First, with each passing day the number of humans calling for water increases, and as more and more of humankind is lifted out of poverty, the amount used per person increases as well. And second, water isn’t always in the right place, and it takes energy to move it around. Maybe that’s three reasons. I dunno.
Lately I’ve been wondering if the same isn’t true of peace on Earth and goodwill toward men. Might it be that we have only a limited amount of these precious resources, too, and after sharing them out across a world population of very nearly eight billion now—never evenly or equally—we find that the stuff that brings and holds us together, the good stuff, is spread too thin? This would explain why everyone is at one another’s throats so much lately, and why we’re all so ready to assume people we disagree with aren’t treating with us in good faith. Let’s take this analogy even further and consider that maybe goodwill is also like water in the respects that it is distributed unevenly and not so easy to move across long distances to where you need it. This would explain why we all seem to get along so much better in person, looking one another in the eye, and then we jump online and go to war.
I’m thinking about all this because over the past three weeks Oasis reunited, Jane’s Addiction imploded on-stage in Boston, and Morrissey and Marr (or at least their representatives) had a big public spat. Whatever might be said about the world more broadly, if you consider its Great and Historic Rock Bands to be a closed system like we have described, with a finite and conserved quantity of goodwill contained within it, then you’re able to watch these events and draw some interesting conclusions.
Consider these relevant facts.
Jane’s Addiction first broke up in the summer of 1991. The conventional wisdom suggests that this was due to Perry Farrell’s disproportionate allocation of the band’s revenue, with 62.5% payable to him personally. The other three were fed up with this legally binding arrangement, Perry declined to adjust it, so they walked. Perry had organized the Lollapalooza festival tour that summer, which Jane’s headlined, and the band played all its Lollapalooza dates through August 28, 1991, when the tour wrapped up in Washington State. Setlist.fm records that Jane’s played three songs in Los Angeles on September 4 at a benefit for LA rocker Craig Lee, who was dying of AIDS. But this flyer shows that Jane’s Addiction were not listed on the ticket that night. Instead, something called a “Perry Farrell Combo” was slated to (and did, so we understand) appear.
So it’s reasonable to conclude that the last Round 1 Jane’s Addiction show was that August 28 Lollapalooza show in Washington.
Exactly two weeks earlier, Oasis played their first-ever gig, at the Boardwalk club in Manchester. And for almost all of the next 18 years, as the Gallagher brothers began, enjoyed, and completed their meteoric rise and fall—recall what I wrote earlier about how meteors work, see “Helter Skelter”—we had no Jane’s Addiction in our lives. Then, after a tentative, let’s-see-how-this-goes performance at the NME Awards in April 2008, Jane’s played a handful of shows around town before embarking on a massive US tour the following year. And of course it was on August 28, 2009 that Noel Gallagher decided he’d had enough of his brother and left Oasis, forcing cancelation of the band’s gig at the Rock En Seine Festival in Paris. As announced to the crowd:
There followed 14 years, 364 days of cold-sometimes-hot war between the estranged Gallagher Brothers, with Liam firing salvos like these on Twitter:
Noel Katie Hopkins Gallagher is talking out of his slack arse again go and polish your SAXAPHONE [sic] Ha ha (8:00 AM, May 6, 2015).
Nothing worse than being told to go fuck your self by a potato as you were you LG x (3:41 PM, Aug. 2, 2016, embedding a photo of “Potato” Noel).
I must once again apologise on behalf of my family for Rkids piss poor and damn rite blasphemous version of joy division’s love will tear us apart tut fucking tut SORRY (2:56 PM, June 1, 2023).
Noel’s retorts weren’t as regular, but they could still be biting. After Liam took him to task for not turning up at the One Love Manchester benefit concert organized after the bombing of Ariana Grande’s scheduled date at Manchester Arena earlier in 2017, Noel told the Sunday Times that his brother “needs to see a psychiatrist. I don’t say that as a joke. Because young Mancunians, young music fans, were slaughtered and he, twice, takes it somewhere to be about him. He needs to see somebody.”
Through all this drama Jane’s Addiction enjoyed a long renaissance, playing more than 200 shows worldwide across 13 calendar years of touring and even releasing a fourth studio album. While it’s hard to imagine everything going swimmingly all the time with a scamp like Perry involved, nothing ugly spilled into public view until just recently, a matter of days after Liam and Noel mended fences. During this second honeymoon I even managed to see Jane’s twice, in 2009 on the NIN/JA tour with Nine Inch Nails, then again in 2016 to see them play all of Ritual1 on its 25th anniversary.
Upon hearing last month that Oasis had reformed, my old gang got involved. Folks signed up for the UK show presales, and dozens—hundreds?—of texts were exchanged on the question of who could commit to traveling Across the Pond for one or more of these shows. I trailed a little behind on this work, given that (1) the last time I saw Oasis they pretty much sucked; (2) I did move heaven and Earth to see the Stone Roses at Wembley when they reunited, and while that was amazing, I have it fairly fresh in my mind that stadium shows are stadium shows; and (3) have you heard Liam Gallagher’s voice lately? I therefore arrived too late to pull any presale credentials, but on the strength of writeups like this one in The Guardian, I came around to concluding that there’s at least a 50/50 chance this reunion captures some of the band’s mid-1990s magic—particularly if the setlists hew closely to the first two studio albums and related B-sides.
And there I was, up in the wee hours of the morning on August 31, coordinating with my oldest (as in longest-in-time) friend Mark and his wife re how to secure our tickets from Ticketmaster UK, once the bell rang at 10 AM Greenwich Mean. I’d been through this wringer before and was carrying in my mind all the lessons learned. Like, for example, your bank might wonder if it’s really you buying tickets for an event 3,000 miles away in the middle of the night. Suddenly your credit card is canceled, and while you’re on the phone with the bank trying to get it reinstated, all the good seats are sold out. Accounting for every foreseeable eventuality is second nature to me as a lawyer, with the result that we were largely successful getting tickets to the Wembley and Edinburgh gigs next August. This notwithstanding that the ticket offering seems to have brought the British Isles to a standstill and generated umpteen million complaints about Ticketmaster’s ability to weather the crushing demand.
By contrast, there were seats still available at reasonable prices for Jane’s Addiction’s show with Love and Rockets last Friday. I was hoping to go and was in fact still smarting from having missed their last visit with Smashing Pumpkins in 2022, but alas, I was already committed to taking a trip to New York City for a friend’s wedding party. As I noted last week (see “Drama!”), I was in something of a snit during the I-90 and I-84 legs of that trip, which Kate can confirm. I didn’t have any specific, articulable grievance, other than what was happening in the baseball game, which wasn’t enough in itself to make me as sour as I was in that moment. I certainly haven’t been this irritable and toxic after any of the Guardos’ other 66 losses this year.
Let’s go to the video tape.
At 9:48 PM, on Friday, September 13, I text the following to Carla:
I should be at Jane’s Addiction but we JUST STARTED driving to NYC and the baseball game sucked and I’m in a mood
At 9:49, Carla responds:
Does it make you feel better that someone reported the other day that Perry was terrible and Dave Navarro was pissed
This did make me feel ever so slightly better, and I posted a heart-emoji react to Carla’s message.
It turns out that while this exchange was happening, and for some time thereafter while I stewed over nothing obvious in the shotgun seat of Kate’s car, Jane’s Addiction were heading toward a full-on meltdown in front of a crowd of 5000 in the Seaport. Now I’m wondering if we were just driving downwind of Leader Bank Pavilion2, and my shit-ass mood was the result of our passing through some Jane’s-induced miasma, a vapor trail of misery to which I, as their lone fan in the car, was especially susceptible.
If you follow these things, you would have seen what happened. Perry finishes his song, walks up to guitarist Dave Navarro and shoves him, rebounds backward because of Newton’s Third Law, then catches himself and rounds on Dave again for more. Dave puts his right forearm out, across Perry’s chest and then his neck, to ward him off, and then Perry attacks. A roadie intercedes—you can hear him yelling “Stop!” over and over, which was coincidentally the title of the next song in the setlist (Apple Music, Spotify)—and with the help of bassist Eric Avery, they together subdue Perry and wrestle him off-stage.
The throwdown happened at the end of probably my favorite Jane’s Addiction song, which is “Ocean Size” (Apple Music, Spotify). This is a song that I suspect means a good deal to Perry Farrell, given that its lyrics, sung in the first person, convey a sense of woundedness, of feeling small and always at the mercy of others.
Wish I was ocean size. No one moves you, man—no one tries. No one pulls you out from your hole, like a tooth aching a jawbone.
I was made with a heart of stone, to be broken with one hard blow. I’ve seen the ocean break on the shore, come together with no harm done.
It ain’t easy, living.
Acting the editor here, I put the comma between easy and living, because to me that presentation best reflects what Perry is getting at—i.e., not that the ocean having to pound sand is hard living or that any particular kind of living ain’t easy, but instead that living generally, for him, ain’t easy. I just consulted the liner notes in my CD case. No comma there, but it bears mentioning, too, that other than in the title of “Ted, Just Admit It” (Apple Music, Spotify), no other commas appear in any of the lyrics in the Nothing’s Shocking jacket. So it’s reasonable to conclude that no commas was a stylistic choice, and It ain’t easy, living is as valid a transcription of Perry’s sung words as without the comma.
All this to say that the swell of the guitars and thundering rhythm section in “Ocean Size” are super-powerful and fully in alignment with the urgency of the sentiment Perry is expressing in his vocals, which by the end of the song leave off language entirely in favor of howling and shrieking. The song fucking rocks, and the composition, Perry’s lyrics, and his performance are obviously coming from somewhere heavy and deep down.
Back to last Friday night. Perry’s camp is saying, per an Instagram post on his wife’s account, that he’d been fighting an illness and was upset that his voice was playing too low in the mix:
Perry’s frustration had been mounting, night after night, he felt that the stage volume had been extremely loud and his voice was being drowned out by the band. Perry had been suffering from tinnitus and a sore throat every night. But when the audience in the first row[] started complaining up to Perry cussing at him that the band was pla[y]ing too loud and they couldn’t hear him, Perry lost it.
I’m speculating here, but I wonder, too, if the fact they were playing this particular song didn’t in the moment play a role in pushing him over the top. The music is truly ocean-sized during this number—all-diminishing and profound. If Perry couldn’t physically make himself heard over it, then he was sinking under the water, becoming small again. Notably, the last intelligible lines he sang before accosting his guitarist were these: I want to be more like the ocean. No talking, all action. Fuck you, motherfucker. Fuck you. And the action followed, such as it was.
But of course none of this would have happened if Liam and Noel Gallagher had not publicly reaffirmed their brotherly love. Right? The timeline I laid out above firmly establishes the truth of this: Jane’s Addiction and Oasis cannot cohabitate in the rockosphere for any meaningful length of time. The longest they lasted together was for that little more than a year between ’08 and ’09, during which time the Gallaghers tore both their family and their band to ribbons and began fifteen years of estrangement. Outside of that period, you’re looking at three weeks max before one or the other band combusts.
Given the state of play with Oasis entering the summer, it’s reasonable to conclude that a reunion would make such a call on worldwide reserves of goodwill that by necessity Perry Farrell would lose his shit, assault his guitarist, get battered by his bass player, and put an end—at least in the moment—to a band that had steered successfully through its own fifteen-year renaissance. And sucking all the togetherness out of Jane’s Addiction’s room was apparently not enough to seal the deal between Liam and Noel, because last week also saw tensions flare with the Smiths, who have only been broken up, seemingly long past repair, for going on 37 years.
Reports were circulating online that Smiths guitarist and co-songwriter Johnny Marr had trademarked the band’s name, prompting speculation that he planned to tour as the Smiths with a vocalist other than Morrissey, from whom he has been estranged since Marr departed the band in 1987. Guitarists and singers, singers and guitarists. With the lawsuits among band members long decided, you might have thought this conflict was entirely in the rear-view. You’d be wrong: it was Morrissey himself, or rather his representatives, who broke this “story,” on Moz’s website. This was the third in a series of escalating accusations made against Marr, starting with an allegation on August 29 that Morrissey had agreed to reunite the Smiths, while Johnny had “ignored” the proposal.
You’ll note that August 29 was two days after the Oasis reunion was announced.
In answer to these and other charges, on Wednesday Johnny’s reps posted an Instagram statement disclosing that upon learning in 2018 that the Smiths trademark was unregistered, his team had “reached out to Morrissey, via his representatives, to work together in protecting The Smiths’ name.” The IG post goes on:
A failure to respond led Marr to register the trademark himself. It was subsequently agreed with Morrissey’s lawyers that this trademark was held for the mutual benefit of Morrissey & Marr.
As a gesture of goodwill [that word again], in January 2024, Marr signed an assignment of joint ownership to Morrissey. Execution of this document still requires Morrissey to sign.
[T]o answer recent reports that Marr ignored a promoter’s offer to tour as The Smiths, Marr says: … “I didn’t ignore the offer—I said no.”
In response, Morrissey fired his management team. I’d be inclined to say that Team Johnny came out definitively on top in this exchange, except that he did reveal to the public that he is the only thing standing between a Guy Like Me Who Never Saw the Smiths and seeing the Smiths. Alas, announcements of Oasis and Smiths reunions, all in the same month, were too much to ask for. There’s just not enough goodwill in the world to accomplish both these feats of reconciliation at the same time.
In fact, if we’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that the system needs to maintain equilibrium—one band’s restoration must be bought and paid with an equivalent amount of infighting and self-destruction from others. And now we know what it cost to get the Gallaghers to drop their feud: a Jane’s Addiction brawl and breakup + a fourth-decade Morrissey/ Marr border skirmish. This was a heavy tax, and Oasis owes it to us to deliver on the promise of this reunion. Please let it not be said that Jane’s died for nothing.
And for all of us whose wildest dreams involve going to a Smiths concert in our middle age, let’s get cracking on a plan to break up Coldplay.
From time to time I’m given signs either directing or affirming my choice of a particular song or band for a Substack post. That happened again this week, as the New York Times Spelling Bee’s pangram for this Monday morning was HABITUAL.
As it’s called this week. See “Government Center.”
There you are, Sean!