It was about the only time I've ever been tempted to join in a midnight line-up to purchase the album. And even if I didn't, it seemed like everybody else I knew did. I got it later that day from the Penny Lane in Westwood near UCLA, and it still was packed with people asking for it. That's how big it was, and that's how big Jane's, in all their ridiculous, pretentious and epically wall-to-wall wonderful and glorious glory, were and still are in my memory. They were it when it came to LA, and the fact that they disappeared and Rage Against the Machine ended up taking their place as post-metal SoCal arena-stompers instead is sad, sad evidence of our nation's decline. I think.
So why here so high in my list? Partially because they used to be goth, and Perry Farrell especially was hardly hiding it. A strangulated Bowie-into-Peter Murphy-by-way-of-Robert Smith whine was the start of it, not to mention for echo on the vocals than even god would ever need should he decide to come back and see what was going on. The lyrics all seem to be about being special, weird and unique, which is fine by me, because it's not like he was the only one committing those particular sins. Pure OTT drama rock-as-shaman hoo-hah, and if it sounds foolish, well, that's because it is. It's also damn, damn entertaining, and one thing you could never say about Jane's was that they didn't know how to handle audiences.
But if the music wasn't any good, then we needn't've cared. And the thing for me nowadays is that while I can see the roots and connections all that much more clearly in what they were doing -- time, experience, all those things tie into it -- it all still works together in the bright sense of 'well, yeah, this is the way we're doing it -- what, you mean you wouldn't? odd.' So throwing in a Bo Diddley break in "Stop!" a couple of times is continuation from the past, say, but unlike U2's horribly ham-handed "Desire," sermons on the mount from 'authenticity' and the American Dream, here everything is explosion and frenzy, not to mention some zen metal stuck right in the middle, huge throbs and stoned delivery, a wonderfully contradictory a capella break about turning off the goddamned radio but humming along with the TV. Far more entertaining to me still.
And if anyone else tried "No One's Leaving" and "Ain't No Right" and that Ian Dury-quoting rant between the two, I probably would just call it bad metal-funk on the one hand and go-nowhere aggression on the other, but in Jane's hands, forget it, airplanes are taking off and strafing bombing, bacchanalias erupt all around and the end of the world might be nigh (and for a couple of months there in mid-1990, when the Gulf War kicked in and nobody knew quite what would be next, I felt more than a few tinges of apocalypse all around). And "Obvious" has Dave Navarro's solos getting more and more astounding as they go, not to mention some great aggressive piano sneaking in the side, "Classic Girl" has them doing their equivalent of a nerfmetal power-ballad and it's better than I remembered and "Of Course" is some sort of attempt at being a Middle Eastern gypsy band and works better than most anything David Byrne ever tried and "Then She Did…" plays the loud/soft contrast and string accompaniment gambits in ways that 90s commercial alt never thought of and "Been Caught Stealing" is them knocking out a pop hit in spite of themselves. Brilliant!
And "Three Days." Mm. First time I heard it, I thought that the nineties finally had a "Stairway to Heaven" of its very own, even with that one line that always sounds like "One night I met a pony," but hey, people also have bustles in hedgerows, apparently. Turns out "Smells Like Teen Spirit" got all the airplay a year later, but the way "Three Days" started, built, pulled back and then just went all over the place means I can treasure this all the much more without having to worry about it getting overplayed by bad classic rock stations. A fair exchange.
Eric A. is my new favorite member after he refused to join in the money-grubbing reunion. Smart man -- he knew that some things can't be repeated.