Whores takes its name from an early song inspired by a sex worker named Bianca, who bankrolled those name-making gigs.
The band’s origin myth is a history of grifts and sharp dealing: Jane’s Addiction boosted their local reputation by trashing and subsequently getting banned from influential venues, who would then make a pile of cash promoting the show where they were allowed back. You know, L.A.-glitter and gutter, hippie hedonism fueled by heroin and Hollywood handshakes. Rather, it was a quintessential Los Angeles album. Note the message of the chorus: “Cash in now, honey.”īut in 1988, Nothing’s Shocking wasn’t intended as the constitution of Alternative Nation. “Coming down the mountain/One of many children/Everybody has their own opinion,” Farrell yelped on “Mountain Song,” delivering alt-rock’s first mission statement like Moses on Mount Nebo, a vision of a promised land where the iconoclasts and idealists would reshape culture after years of toiling in obscurity. Alternative rock was going to strange and exciting places with or without Jane’s Addiction, and Nothing’s Shocking made it go Hollywood.īoth prophetic and flying blind through the overlapping outgrowths of art-metal, proto-grunge and college rock that were formulating a legitimate alternative to MOR radio and MTV, Nothing’s Shocking is the sound of the ’90s arriving two years ahead of schedule. But none of them saw the big picture like Farrell, a product of New York privilege who reinvented himself as a motor-mouthed L.A. As the leader of pre-Jane’s goth outfit Psi Com and an ambassador of the mongrel Los Angeles post-punk scene that birthed Fishbone and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he respected the ideological purity of America’s underground rock royalty. Throughout Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction, a large cast of disgruntled ex-bandmates and business partners credit the band’s 1988 debut Nothing’s Shocking as the first truly mainstream alternative rock album, though Farrell does acknowledge that he did not invent the concept. Within two years, it turned into a 300-page book. Still, Brendan Mullen got the green light to cover the band’s 2003 reunion for Spin and went 10,000 words over the original assignment. Anyone who’d ever put a microphone in front of Perry Farrell should’ve known that the oral history of Jane’s Addiction couldn’t possibly be contained by a print magazine.
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