This article originally appeared in the July 2003 issue of SPIN.

For years, Radiohead have been known as cold, cutting artistes who do everything—particularly interviews—the hard way. So why are they now acting like a bunch of chatty, regular guys who simply read lots of books and fear for our future? Well, Thom Yorke and the boys are finally trying to explain themselves—so you better listen up.

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MEETING THOM IS EASY.

Everyone will tell you it’s not, and they’re all wrong. There are people who will insist Thom Yorke is a misanthropic sociopath and that he ends interviews for no good reason. They will suggest that the likelihood of him speaking candidly is roughly the same as the chance of him unscrewing two bolts from his neck and removing his cybernetic faceplate, suddenly revealing a titanium endoskeleton that was built by futuristic space druids.

But this is not true.

Thom Yorke is weird, sort of. But you’ve met weirder. He’s mostly just an intense, five-foot-five-inch 34-year-old who wears hooded sweatshirts with sleeves too long for his limbs, and this makes him look like a nervous kindergartener. He doesn’t appear to have combed his hair since The Bends came out in 1995, and his beard looks undecided, if that’s possible.

But here’s the bottom line: He’s nice. Not exactly gregarious, but polite. He is neither mechanical nor messianic. And this is what everyone seems to miss about him—and about Radiohead as a whole: They may make transcendent, fragile, pre-apocalyptic math rock for a generation of forward-thinking fans, but they’re still just a bunch of guys.

I’m sitting with Yorke in the restaurant of an Oxford, England hotel called the Old Parsonage. He was 20 minutes late for our interview, explaining that he had to run home and do some yoga because he was “feeling a bit weird.” He’s studying the restaurant menu and complaining that he’s running out of things he can eat—not only is he a vegetarian, but he’s stopped eating anything made with wheat (for the past six months, he’s had a skin rash, and he thinks wheat is the culprit). Eventually he settles on roasted tomatoes and butter beans, a meal he calls “expensive” (it costs about $17). We’re talking about politics (kind of) and his two-year-old son Noah (sort of), and I ask him how those two subjects dovetail—in other words, how becoming a father has changed his political beliefs and how that has affected the songwriting on Hail to the Thief, the sixth studio album from earth’s most relevant rock band.

His answer starts predictably. But it ends quickly.

“Having a son has made me very concerned about the future and about how things in the world are being steered, supposedly in my name,” he says between sips of mineral water. “I wonder if our children will even have a future. But the trouble with your question—and we both know this—is that if I discuss the details of what I’m referring to in Spin magazine, I will get death threats. And I’m frankly not willing to get death threats, because I value my life and my family’s safety. And that sort of sucks, I realize, but I know what is going on out there.”

Yorke’s reluctance is not a surprise. Since April, Radiohead have stressed that Hail to the Thief is not a political record and that the album’s title is not a reference to George W. Bush’s controversial victory over Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election (in fact, Yorke claims he heard the phrase during a radio program analyzing the election of 1888). This is a bit paradoxical, because that argument seems both valid and impossible: There are no overtly political lyrics on the record, but it feels political. And Yorke is not exactly nonpartisan: At a recent anti-war rally in Gloucestershire, England, he publicly declared that “the U.S. is being run by religious maniac bigots that stole the election.”

So what are we to make of this?

“If the motivation for naming our album had been based solely on the U.S. election, I’d find that to be pretty shallow,” he says. “To me, it’s about forces that aren’t necessarily human, forces that are creating this climate of fear. While making this record, I became obsessed with how certain people are able to inflict incredible pain on others while believing they’re doing the right thing. They’re taking people’s souls from them before they’re even dead. My girlfriend—she’s a Dante expert—told me that was Dante’s theory about authority. I was just overcome with all this fear and darkness. And that fear is the ‘thief.'”

Well, okay, maybe labeling Yorke a “normal dude” might be something of an exaggeration. Perhaps he is a little paranoid. But he’s no paranoid android; he’s just a paranoid humanoid, and he certainly has a sense of humor about it. After he casually mentions his girlfriend, I ask him if he’ll ever get married.

“That’s a totally personal question—next,” he says gruffly, and for a moment it feels like I’m watching an outtake from Radiohead’s 1999 documentary, the mediaphobic Meeting People Is Easy. But then I laugh. And he laughs. And suddenly he’s just a bearded humanoid who’s eating tomatoes, completely aware of how ridiculous our conversation is. “What is this?” he asks. “Do you work for Us Weekly now?”

MOST OF WHAT YOU BELIEVE ABOUT RADIOHEAD IS WRONG.

“The first time I ever saw Thom, he was jumping over a car.” This is not something I expected Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien to say, but he appears to be quite serious. “Thom was an amazing gymnast in high school,” he continues. “Nobody knows that about him, but you can get a sense of it just by watching him move around. He’s really strong. He did this handspring right over a car. It’s like how Morrissey was a great long-distance runner in high school—nobody knows that, either.”

O’Brien is the fifth member of the band I have spoken with over the past eight hours, each in a different room of the Old Parsonage. I’ve been rushing from room to room for answers, not unlike the final ten minutes in a game of Clue. O’Brien is the last person I’m speaking with today, and he’s different from the other four guys in the band: He’s significantly taller (6’5″), he’s the only one who doesn’t reside in Radiohead’s native city of Oxford (he lives an hour away in London), and he talks like an intelligent hippie (if such a creature exists). He’s also rumored to be the most “rock-oriented” member of Radiohead, preferring the conventional structures of older songs, like “Just” and “Ripcord.”

Here, again, my assumption is wrong.

“Do people really think I like straight-ahead rock?” he asks when I bring this up. “There is an irony in that, because I’ve always been more interested in making sounds, which is why I tend to gravitate toward Kid A material. If I ever made a solo record—and I have no plans to do that, but if I did—it would be all ethereal music. I like to smoke. I like a toke or two. So I like music in that vein.”

Part of the reason O’Brien is perceived as Radiohead’s designated rocker is that he’s the most interested in classic rock; he especially enjoys discussing U2, who appear to be Radiohead’s third-biggest musical influence (the first two being the Smiths, whom all five members love unequivocally, and the Pixies, from whose records Jonny Greenwood learned how to play guitar). For the most part, the other four members don’t talk about mainstream rock.

“I’m interested in bands as beasts,” O’Brien says. “I’m interested in U2 and the Rolling Stones and Neil Young & Crazy Horse. I love the dynamic of musicians working together and all the voodoo shit that comes with it. It’s a complicated thing to do over the expanse of time, which is why I respect U2 so much. Don’t get me wrong—I adore the Stones, but they haven’t made a good record since 1972. Exile on Main Street was the last great Stones album. But U2 have been at it for 20 years, and that song ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ was amazing. And that’s after 20 years. That’s when the Stones were making Still Life.”

It’s intriguing to hear O’Brien discuss band dynamics, because Radiohead rarely discuss the internal mechanics of their organization; their dynamic is relatively unknown. The band members tend to describe the creative process as their “methodology,” and here’s how it works: Yorke writes the material alone (usually on piano) and gives demo CDs to the other four. They all listen for a few weeks and deduce what they can contribute; then they meet, rehearse, and arrange the songs as a unit (according to Jonny, arrangement is their favorite step). They perform the songs live (in order to see what works and what doesn’t), and then they go into the studio to record them.

With Hail to the Thief, the recording process was intentionally short. Most of the record was cut in two and a half weeks in Los Angeles with longtime producer Nigel Godrich, often one song per day (supposedly, the very first sound you hear on the album is Jonny plugging in his guitar on the first morning they arrived at the studio). What’s surprising is how conciliatory the other four band members are to Yorke. They’re all accomplished musicians, but he directs the vision of the band. Yet this seems to cause no problem whatsoever.

“In a band like the Smashing Pumpkins, that kind of songwriting situation caused problems, because one gets the impression certain members of that band felt replaceable,” O’Brien says. “But if you feel good about yourself, you will be honest and generous toward other people. I hope Thom makes a solo album in the future; there’s no doubt he will. And it will be fucking amazing. But as a band, we are all individually essential. In Radiohead, no one is replaceable.”

Obviously, this is the kind of hyper-democratic statement all bands make, but it seems slightly more genuine with Radiohead: Due to the layered complexity of their soundscapes—almost nothing is verse-chorus-verse, guitar riff/bass line/drum beat—collaboration and cross-pollination are unavoidable. It appears that Jonny’s musical contribution continues to expand; for example, he wrote all of the song “A Wolf at the Door” (Yorke just added the words). At 31, he’s the youngest member of Radiohead, and he also may be the most cognitively musical. He likes to talk about details.

“For every song like ‘I Will,’ which arrived fully formed and was immediately perfect, there are songs like ‘Sail to the Moon,’ which weren’t great,” Jonny says. “I’m not being rude, but ‘Sail to the Moon’ wasn’t very well-written, and it had different chords and only half an idea. It only came together after the whole band worked on it and figured out how the structures should be, and [drummer] Phil [Selway] had some insight on how the song could be arranged. And then it became just about the best song on the record.”

In a way, it all sounds remarkably simple, but things weren’t always this easy. O’Brien says Hail to the Thief represents “the end of an era” and that they’ve taken “this kind of music” (however you want to define it) as far as it can go. But that statement seems more reflective of their new outlook on life, which is that being in this band is an exceptional—and relatively painless—experience.

They like being Radiohead. Six years ago, they did not.

“THE WORST POINT (IN OUR CAREER) WAS PLAYING SHOWS IN THE U.K. right after OK Computer came out,” says bassist Colin Greenwood, Jonny’s older brother. “There is nothing worse than having to play in front of 20,000 people when someone—when Thom—absolutely does not want to be there, and you can see that hundred-yard stare in his eyes. You hate having to put your friend through that experience. You find yourself wondering how you got there.”

Colin is saying this as he eats in the hotel’s parlor room. It’s the second of four meals he will consume today (he claims nervousness over Hail to the Thief has raised his metabolism). Colin is both the band’s friendliest and goofiest member and about the most enthusiastic person I have ever met. Sometimes he closes his eyes for 20 seconds at a time, almost as if the world were too brilliant to look at; there appears to be no subject he is not obsessed with. He tells me I must visit the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to see the stuffed dodo birds (which I do) and insists I check out a cartography exhibit at the Bodleian Library (which I do not). He gleefully mentions having seen a baby deer while driving to the Spin photo shoot, as if it had been some rare sighting of the Loch Ness monster. He mentions about 15 different books during our interview and even gives me one as a present (Brian Thompson’s Imperial Vanities). Everyone in this band probably reads more than you do; hanging out with Radiohead is kind of like getting high with a bunch of librarians. At one point, I ask Colin, who is married to American writer and literary critic Molly McGrann, a theoretical question: If the music of Radiohead were a work of literature, would it be fiction or nonfiction?

“I think it would be nonfiction,” he says. “Thom’s lyrics are sort of like a running commentary on what’s happening in the world, almost like you’re looking out of the window of a Japanese bullet train and things are sort of flying by. It’s like a shutter snapping in succession.”

That’s an apt description of the lyrics on Hail to the Thief, particularly on less abstract tracks like “A Punch-Up at a Wedding” (a narrative about the clichéd reactions to a social faux pas), “We Suck Young Blood” (about the vapidity of celebrity), and “Myxomatosis,” perhaps the most interesting entry on Hail to the Thief. Myxomatosis is a virus that inadvertently devastated the British rabbit population after it was introduced in the 1950s, covering the countryside with bunny carcasses. The disease is not what the song is literally about, but hearing Yorke’s explanation illustrates why trying to dissect the metaphors in Radiohead’s music is virtually impossible. The dots do not connect.

“I remember my parents pointing out all these dead rabbits on the road when I was a kid,” Yorke says. “I didn’t know that much about the virus, or even how to spell it. But I loved the word. I loved the way it sounded. The song is actually about mind control. I’m sure you’ve experienced situations where you’ve had your ideas edited or rewritten when they didn’t conveniently fit into somebody else’s agenda. And then—when someone asks you about those ideas later—you can’t even argue with them, because now your idea exists in that edited form.

“It’s hard to remember how things actually happen anymore, because there’s so much mind control and so many media agendas,” he continues. “There’s a line in that song that goes, ‘My thoughts are misguided and a little naive.’ That’s the snarly look you get from an expert when they accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist. In America, they still use the ‘conspiracy theorist’ accusation as the ultimate condemnation. I’ve been reading this Gore Vidal book [Dreaming War], and I know Vidal is always accused of being a conspiracy theorist. But the evidence he uses is very similar to the evidence used by a lot of well-respected British historians. Yet they still call him crazy. To me, that’s part of what ‘Myxomatosis’ is about—it’s about wishing that all the people who tell you that you’re crazy were actually right. That would make life so much easier.”

This self-analysis is noteworthy, because it speaks to where Yorke is coming from intellectually. However, it avoids one trenchant question: What does mind control have to do with a virus that kills rabbits?

The answer is “nothing.”

Yorke named the track “Myxomatosis” for the same reason he repeats the phrase “the rain drops” 46 times during the song “Sit Down. Stand Up.” He simply liked the way it sounded on tape. The syllables fall like dominoes, and consonance collapses like a house of cards. Sometimes you can’t find the meaning behind the metaphor because there is no metaphor.

YORKE’S PREOCCUPATION WITH PICKING WORDS FOR HOW THEY SOUND (AS opposed to what they mean) is part of why Radiohead’s cultic following cuts such a wide swath (every album except 2001’s Amnesiac has gone platinum): If phrases have no clarity and no hard reality, people can turn them into whatever they need. If you need the words on Hail to the Thief to be political, they certainly have that potential; if you need Hail to the Thief to explain why your girlfriend doesn’t love you, it can do that, too. It’s a songwriting style Yorke borrowed from Michael Stipe: not coincidentally, Stipe’s R.E.M. were the last rock-band intellectuals taken as seriously as Radiohead are taken today.

“What I love about them,” says Stipe, calling from a recording studio in Vancouver, “is that Radiohead’s music allows me to craft my own film inside my head. That’s what I like about all music.”

Stipe and Yorke’s relationship is hard to quantify, as it’s difficult for uber-famous rock musicians on different continents to have any kind of normal friendship (since traveling together on R.E.M.’s 1995 Monster tour, they’ve maintained a sporadic phone and email dialogue). However, this much is clear: The guidance Stipe provided Yorke at the height of Radiohead’s fame almost certainly kept the band from breaking up. To hear Stipe explain it, their interaction was almost academic—he talks about the complexity of “dealing with words” and how all performers “‘are missing something in their DNA” and that it’s almost impossible for artists to balance their inherent insecurity with the ego required to display oneself in public.

Meanwhile, Yorke’s description is considerably simpler.

“The nicest thing Michael did for me was pull me out of a hole I would have never escaped from otherwise,” Yorke says. “This was right after OK Computer came out. All he really did was listen to me talk about the experience I was going through, but there’s not a whole lot of people who can relate to that kind of situation, you know? That was very nice of him. I would like to pull a few other people out of holes at some point.”

I tell Yorke he should consider contacting White Stripes frontman Jack White about this, but he says, “I don’t think he needs my help.” This is another of Yorke’s quirks: He tends to assume that everybody on earth has their life more together than he does. Sometimes he puts his hands on the sides of his skull and inadvertently replicates the figure in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream. Conversationally, he seems completely rational and calm, but he’s convinced he’s losing his mind. And it’s probably Bill O’Reilly’s fault.

“I absolutely feel crazy at times,” he says. “Anybody who turns on the TV and actually thinks about what they’re watching has to believe they’re going insane or that they’re missing something everyone else is seeing. When I watch the Fox News channel, I can’t believe how much nerve those people have and how they assume that people are just going to swallow that shit. And I find myself thinking that I must be missing something.”

This is who Hail to the Thief is ultimately for, I think—people who look for order in the world and simply don’t see it. Colin thinks much of the album is about the destruction of human space by corporate forces (he draws thematic comparisons between Hail to the Thief and Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection How to Be Alone); Jonny thinks it might be about accepting the condition of the world and concentrating on one’s own family; Selway talks of “dark forces” that drove the record’s creation; O’Brien casually wonders if “it might be too late for this planet.” (Part of Radiohead’s enduring mystery might be that even the other guys in the band don’t fully understand what Yorke’s lyrics are trying to convey.) Yet the songs are all about the same thing, really: learning how to understand a new kind of world. And while this isn’t always simple, it’s not necessarily depressing. In fact, it might be why Yorke still claims that Hail to the Thief is a record “for shagging,” which is what he told the press months before the record was released. Apparently, we’re all supposed to listen to “Myxomatosis” and get laid.

“I think this is a sexy record,” Yorke says, and there is at least a 50 percent chance that he’s serious. “The rhythms are very sexy. It’s where the beats fall. It has its own sexy pulse.”

Hoping for clarification, I ask him to name the sexiest record he owns.

“That’s a good question,” he says. “Public Enemy was pretty sexy. ‘911 Is a Joke’ was a sexy song.”

And I find myself thinking: “I must be missing something.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the May 2002 issue of SPIN. 

To most of America, Pink is that loud girl with the blinding hair from the Moulin Rouge video. And that “Party” song. But she’s been a punk, a headbanger, a grunge brat, a club kid, an R&B girl-for-hire, and a law-breaking lover of 4 Non Blondes. Never mind Britney, here’s Pink!

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Pink is on her cell phone arguing with her boyfriend. She’s sucking a menthol cigarette. “You’re totally taking this the wrong way,” she says, clearly annoyed, coughing deeply. Pink’s lungs have made her rich, but they’re vengeful bastards. She’s got asthma and bronchitis, and she’s canceled several recent TV appearances. Then there are the ulcers.

Standing in Santa Monica, with the Pacific Ocean at her back, Pink, 22, is looking sort of yellow this late-February afternoon—like a sickly skate rat in black hoodie, bedhead, and no makeup. She’s got blue polish on stubby nails, a red thong peeking out of her baggy jeans, and, under her arm, a motorcycle helmet.

“I can’t talk now, I’ll call you later,” she says to her man. Then, raising her shades, she asks earnestly, “How are you?” as if weary of her own real-life drama. Today’s episode of Pink: The Madness and the Music features:

A new cream-colored scooter. Driven from her Venice pad without license plate, registration, or insurance.

The recent discovery that she’s a bitch. “I was watching [MTV’s] Making the Video [for “Don’t Let Me Get Me”] and I was like, ‘Oh my god. I’m a bitch. I’m 22, and I’m a bitch—and I’m the only one who didn’t know it.'”

Pink’s mom. She’s Pink’s date for next week’s Grammys (see also: pissed-off boyfriend, who was originally going to go). “I just can’t get along with my mom,” she says. “But I wanted to do something nice for her, buy her a dress, get her hair done.”

At the Grammys, Pink and the gals (MISSY “Misdemeanor” Elliott, Lil’ Kim, Christina Aguilera, and Mya) will perform, and win an award for, their cover of Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade.” But now the song feels so last year—especially since the release of Pink’s genre-fucking sophomore album. Missundaztood, a rebellion against the producer-driven machinery that created her 2000 debut, Can’t Take Me Home. Initially snubbed by her label, the new record is a hybrid of everything that makes Pink tick—disco, rock, R&B, blues, hip-hop—held together by hyper-personal lyrics (part hip-hop swagger, part Lilith confessional) and cameos by Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Bon Jovi’s Richie Sambora.

The record resulted from an unlikely meeting between Pink and her improbable teenage idol, Linda Perry, former leader of early-’90s one-hit wonders 4 Non Blondes (1993’s “What’s Up?”). Pink stole Perry’s number from her makeup artist and cold-called her; Perry called back. Pink drove her truck over to meet Perry, and that was that. Much of the album, including the dance anthem “Get the Party Started,” was produced and/or written by Perry, who’s now been tapped to write songs for Christina Aguilera’s new record.

Growing up in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Pink (born Alecia Moore) was a misfit punk who fought with bad cops, racist bus drivers, and sleazy night crawlers. It was excellent training for life in the music biz. Now, at a time when record companies don’t have a clue about what young people want, she’s finally emerging from the prefab pop puppet show, hoping fans, if not suits, will understand. She’s a star who’s got more to say than Britney, Beyoncé, and Christina combined—whether dissing her label or religious nuts. (“Organized religion’s a joke,” she spits. “I’m convinced God is a woman.”) She’s a girl who calls you “mama” and “hon,” picks her teeth, and bites her thumb. In short, she’s ideal company for smoking menthols, eating mussels, and talking fantastic smack.

Spin: So, who’s the boyfriend?

Pink: He does motocross—I met him at the X Games just before he broke 14 bones. I’ve been friends with skaters all my life, and I’ve always been attracted to that mentality—fuck it, let’s go break shit. [Laughs] Self-destructive.

Did you skate?

Yeah. My brother told me girls can’t skate, so I broke my ass to get good at it. I love proving people wrong.

Especially guys?

Yeah! So many guys think like that. Maybe it makes them feel better, because we can do everything they can do, plus some—like have children and be sentimental.

Your brother is in the military, right?

Yeah, the air force. We’re good now, but we used to beat the crap out of each other.

When did you guys get close?

Probably when we didn’t live together anymore. My mom kicked me out when I was 15. I think we learned from our parents to be violent and fight all the time. But my brother wrote me a letter this year and apologized for all the times he hit me and said how much he loves me. We’ve been best friends ever since. I’m closer to my family now than I ever was.

It’s impossible to live with people.

It is! [Laughs] Family dinners are the best. You all sit around and just smile—”Yes, Mom, whatever, right, right.” Like this past Christmas, I went to my mom’s house and every five minutes—”I need you to sign this for this person, look at my daughter, she was a punk delinquent that I had no faith in, but now that she’s a star, let’s invite friends over.” I was like, “I have three days with you. I’m Pink all year ’round. I wanna be able to come home and be Alecia.”

How does she react to your lyrics? I mean, you call her a lunatic [on “My Vietnam”].

After she heard this album she called me up crying…. I’m like, “I don’t lie, it’s up to the people to decide.” I don’t keep secrets.

Why did she kick you out?

My dad left when I was seven, and she went to school full-time, worked full-time, and went out to bars with her boyfriend. So I had no supervision—I cooked for my brother, I was the mom of the house. Plus I was into a lot of crazy shit. When I was 13, I was the ultimate club kid—in the street all night long, fucked-up—and she was sitting home waiting for me. I used to run away all the time. When she wanted to go out of town, I’d run away so she couldn’t leave. I was an asshole!

At that age, you were pretty into rock, right?

Yeah, [Guns N’ Roses’] Appetite for Destruction was my first love, and Skid Row. I was in two punk bands in junior high. We sucked! Bad Religion got me through seventh grade. We loved Nirvana. And I remember seeing this band Tilt, they had a female lead singer who reminded me of Wendy O. Williams—she would hock loogies and catch them on her upper lip. It was disgusting, and I fell in love. I also loved Mary J. Blige. I sang in a gospel choir too—they’d say, You ain’t white, you got too much soul!”

Did you actually get arrested for singing Linda Perry songs?

Yeah. I sat at my friend’s house tripping [on acid], singing all her [4 Non Blondes] songs out the window at the top of my lungs. The neighbors called the cops on us.

Where’d you go after your mom kicked you out?

Friends’ houses. Then this guy put me up in an apartment in west Philadelphia and basically paid my rent, got me rental cars, gave me weed, all this shit. I never kissed him. He just was a weird guy who wanted to take care of me. Then he started stalking me, slashed my tires. So I moved in with my dad, and we became best friends. Six months later I had a record deal, and I moved to Atlanta.

You had a record deal at 16?

Yeah, I spent two years in Atlanta in a house with two other girls, making a record. And then the group [Choice] broke up. I was homeless for three months before I signed a solo deal [with LaFace Records]. I had bad jobs, too. I made deli sandwiches and pumped gas. One day [LaFace honcho] “L.A.” Reid’s son walks in, and the next day L.A. yells at me—”Pink, how does it look if one of our artists is pumping gas?” I’m like, “Pay me what I make and I’ll quit. If not, you can kiss my ass and come in for a sandwich like everyone else.” That four years was so frustrating. I’m watching Britney and Christina, and I dropped out of high school four years ago! But it was good. I had that time to learn how the record company operates.

Obviously it’s helping you now?

With the first album I was tiptoeing around. With this album I just decided, “No, I ain’t doing that.” I had a dream when I was a little girl that I was going to grow up and change the world, and it was going to be through music. I was always so sickened by racism and sexism and ageism and all the fucking -isms. I was like, “I have to forget about all the radio formats and imagery and all the bullshit.”

And your label [Arista] wasn’t too happy, right?

I just went for it without their knowledge and sent it to them. Then two weeks later they called and said that I couldn’t do this, that I was abandoning my fans, that Linda Perry hadn’t been around for ten years. I basically called them all pussies. Then “Get the Party Started” came out, and we were like, “We told you so, motherfuckers!”

What’s your earliest memory?

Probably my dad rocking me, singing me to sleep. I remember a lot of the fighting. I remember the night my dad punched a hole in the refrigerator.

You used to go to Vietnam-vet meetings with him?

Yeah, my whole life. I loved watching these guys get together, the brotherhood. I don’t agree with war at all, especially the politics of the Vietnam War. But what it meant to them was something different. Every Thanksgiving we’d feed the homeless and senior citizens and veterans. Like 50 of us, we’d rent out this banquet hall, and bring people in by the busload. I’d wait on them and watch them cry; they’d be so happy. They’d give me a dollar, their only dollar, as a tip. That was the best feeling I’ve ever had.

How do you strike up conversation with guys? I can imagine they would be intimidated by you.

I’m very aggressive. I know I can be very intimidating because I am so aggressive. I’m loud and outward, and I don’t hide anything, so when it comes to guys, yeah, guys are terrified to talk to me. But it’s a good thing, because I don’t hear the bullshit, the dumb lines or disrespect; they know better.

You read how men want women to ask them out, but I find that guys ultimately prefer to be the aggressor.

Oh yeah, they want a challenge. But I’m just like that. I want a challenge too.

You’ve been refusing to lip-synch.

Yeah. In Barcelona this [TV producer] said I had to [lip-synch]. He. was like, “I’m not going to let this little bitch change me; I’ve been in this business longer than she’s been alive.” It was a total dick war—who had the biggest dick. And in the end, I did. But that’s what keeps me going. Like fighting with L.A. [Reid]. Then having him come back two weeks later, like, “You know I always believed in you.” That makes it worth it. Because if all this was easy, I’d be bored to death. If everything went my way, I’d probably shave my head and paint green frogs all over it—just to fuck shit up.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the February 2004 issue of SPIN.

Usually, when we music geeks talk about Next Big Things, we’re referring to bands and artists that fall into three categories: (1) People who major-label execs suspect can earn bags of cash, so bags of cash are spent to get their videos on MTV and their songs on the radio, on the soundtracks of Jerry Bruckheimer movies, and in iPod and car commercials (see everyone from 50 Cent to Jet); (2) people we know are cool and talented and have a chance to be popular, if anybody could hear their music above the Hoobastankin’ din (see everyone from Ms. Dynamite to Bright Eyes); (3) people we think are cool and talented but have absolutely no chance of being popular, at least not until they’ve been around for a while and start to seem less weird (see everyone from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Dizzee Rascal). So how do we categorize our Next Big Things of 2004? Well, to be blunt, our cover stars are solidly settled in (2), skirting the edges of (1), and in dread fear of (3). The best of the inside crew are tentatively perched in (2), occasionally flirting with (1), and a stiff single away from (3). The rest are trapped in (3), clawing for their lives. It’s dog-eat-dog out there, kids. But it always has been, and that’s why we recommend that you (a) trust yourself, (b) ignore the haters, and (c) keep listening. And remember what the ladies on The Bachelor say: It’s all about the journey.

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THE FANTASTIC

Get ’em before they’re too hot! The lead singers of rock’s most exciting up-and-coming bands discuss insanely huge tour buses, taking over the world, and needing a cheese sandwich

If you owned a Geiger counter that measures rock-star energy instead of radioactive ions (we have one: it’s Japanese, and it’s rad), it would pulse intensely in the presence of the four individuals we’ve chosen to represent 2004’s Next Big Things: the Distillers’ resilient punk heroine Brody Dalle; Geoff Rickly of New Jersey emo saviors Thursday; Justin Hawkins of witty British metallurgists the Darkness; and Paul Banks, the haunted voice of New York City post-post-punkers Interpol.

Even hanging out at a Manhattan photo studio, their eyes crossed with fatigue thanks to jet lag, and, in Hawkins’ case, a half hour of grilling by federal officers (apparently, there’s another catsuited dude with the same name who’s done something very bad), these four radiate the all-important “it” that separates your White Stripes from your White Light Motorcades. Still, you’d need one of those high-tech instruments (ours is pink and covered with kitten stickers) to notice. Although all four bands are enjoying success after years of bubbling beneath the surface, their lead singers, with the possible exception of Hawkins, can still walk down a busy city street without incident. This probably will not last. As their window of anonymity rapidly closes, we asked them about life on the verge of a major breakthrough.

I. THOSE THREE WORDS

JUSTIN HAWKINS: The “Next Big Thing” always makes me think of the “Last Big Thing.” What was it again?

GEOFF RICKLY: When I’ve heard the term “Next Big Thing” applied to Thursday, it makes me feel like there’s some kind of strange pressure on us to do something different from what we’re doing now. Like we’re not a big thing now—we’re gonna be a big thing.

BRODY DALLE: It’s always, like, next week. It’s always a week away.

HAWKINS: It’s always the next drop of water that [the media] are going to lead the horses to. Then you find out whether or not they’re gonna drink. It just means we’re gonna be in everyone’s faces, and then we might stick around, or we might not. The Strokes were the Next Big Thing, weren’t they—for a while? And they’re still a big thing.

PAUL BANKS: I think the Strokes and the White Stripes are great. There’s a shitload of great bands that keep coming up. I don’t know if the new bands are dominating the radio like all the shitty music has been, but there might actually be hope that things are going to get better.

RICKLY: Every so often, I’ll hear a record [after reading about the band] and it’ll be totally revolutionary to me and I’ll be so psyched. Whether or not it has the impact on culture that it’s been tipped to have is irrelevant to me. It was just my way of finding out about the music. So even though I feel cynical toward the hype, any time you’re introducing something new to people, it’s a positive thing.

II. HYPE + MAJOR LABEL $$$$$ = CRUSHING EXPECTATION?

HAWKINS: In the U.K., it’s especially bad. The Next Big Thing syndrome is really acute there. Every fortnight there’s a new Next Big Thing, your new favorite band. The British market is said to be the tastemaking market, but it’s losing a lot of kudos, because a lot of the stuff that’s hyped doesn’t sell—people don’t like it. The bands get all the exposure they could ever require to sell a record, and it still doesn’t sell.

SPIN: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, for example. [At press time, their Fever to Tell had sold 102,000 copies.]

BANKS: Maybe the record labels shouldn’t be putting so much money behind it. But in the end, that record got made. From our point of view of making music, it isn’t a business venture.

SPIN: But Interpol are on an indie, Matador.

BANKS: We are, yeah. We don’t have the pressure of having to sell this or that many records. But from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ standpoint, their record got made. And they’re not going to lose any money as individuals. I’d like to believe that [their label] Interscope will be aware that [the musical climate is] changing, but maybe it will be slower than they hoped, and they should stay behind a band like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, because they are great.

DALLE: Also, these major labels understand what they are getting themselves into. They understand the type of band that they are signing. When we got signed, the president of our label [Sire’s Seymour Stein] was like, “I understand that you’ve basically built your own culture.” It was ours—that’s what it’s about, and it’s about building your band slowly.

SPIN: Justin, the Darkness have sold a million copies of Permission to Land in the U.K., but you haven’t sold too many here, even though the album has been out for quite a few months.

HAWKINS: We clearly don’t expect to take over the entire world just like that. I expect a band with longevity to do what it does over the course of several albums, rather than suddenly be in everyone’s face, everyone’s pocket, and everyone’s record collection. That’s not going to last. That’s when you’re a novelty act.

RICKLY: I was very into the D.C. bands of ten years ago. I saw what happened to Jawbox and Shudder to Think [when they signed to majors]. There’s definitely something like, “Well, I know how this goes. We’ll see how this goes.” Maybe we’ll get some money, and when we’re done, I’ll be able to put it into our own indie label and put out our own records again. That’s what our producer said: “Don’t think about whether the song will be a hit, think about whether you’re going to be proud of the record when you get dropped!”

III. EVERYONE IS HIP

SPIN: Thanks to the velocity of pop culture, new bands are getting hyped more and more in the mainstream media. It’s increasingly common for the average person to be able to name-check a Next Big Thing without hearing the music.

HAWKINS: Kind of like some of our reviewers. [Laughs]

RICKLY: After being around Brody, I realized that I had seen her face and heard about her for probably two years before I listened to the Distillers. I was already familiar with the sort of style she was representing. I feel like Thursday is one of the less stylized or image-based bands. I almost feel like it’s productive for the media to have our images out there before our music, because we don’t have a very striking image.

BANKS: [To Spin] The theoretical listener that you are talking about is an empty individual. I don’t even want them. The people who count are the people who actually listen and care.

IV. THE BLONDIE SYNDROME

SPIN: As the singer, you’re frequently identified as the face of the band. Does that create any intragroup strife or ego problems?

RICKLY: No. Most of the guys in the band are psyched that they don’t have to do it. If you’re going to do an interview that’s based on lyrics, you’re probably gonna want to talk to me. So, by default, I’m always going to be more of a spokesman. And [traditionally] when bands are loading their equipment and taking care of their stuff, the singer is kind of standing there doing nothing except meeting the press, so…

HAWKINS: The band don’t mind it, because it means less work for them. The nature of this group is that everyone has their own look, attitude, music style, and preferences—and mine is: I wanna be the star. And if you asked them seriously, they would say that they didn’t. It’s a double-edged sword. It’s gonna be a ride, but in some ways it’s gonna he more intense for me.

DALLE: We’ve tried to keep our identity as a band, but magazines have cut me out and put me on the cover alone, which is frustrating because it’s out of our control.

BANKS: It’s a great thing to be on this cover because of the publicity for the band, and I like all the other bands in this piece. But we [in Interpol] had a discussion about it. The band had to approve it, because it’s not like us—we never even take photos where I’m in front. We never would have done something like this seven, eight months ago, but we feel we’ve established the fact that we’re all equally relevant, so this isn’t going to fuck up everyone’s perception of who we are.

V. THE BONO STANDARD

SPIN: When you talk about a band that have maintained their hugeness over time without ever really sucking, U2 seem to be the perennial standard-bearer. They might have been our Next Big Thing if Spin had been around in 1980. Whose career do you admire?

RICKLY: You’ve nailed No. 1 right on the head. That’s also partly because they’re my favorite band. They also had a hugely profound effect on my family life. When I was younger, my mom was seriously depressed all the time. I made her take me to see U2, and she totally fell in love with it and got really passionate about music. It just gave her some kind of hope or happiness back in her life. Anything U2 do is a model of what a good band can possibly be—with Bono being involved in politics and being able to translate lofty ambitions to actual real-world political change.

HAWKINS: In terms of [experiencing] lineup changes and still maintaining credibility when you hit back, it’s Aerosmith. They all had their differences. One of the best things about the Stephen Davis biography [Walk This Way] is that there is no happy ending. They’re all still bitter, and they’ve still got issues with each other, but they’re still working it. And it’s still a valiant, enviable position to be in—to be a member of Aerosmith.

BANKS: The ideal model for me would be R.E.M., as far as longevity and success [are concerned]. They stick to who they are and do whatever they want to do. Another band would be Radiohead, because they managed to go experimental and still be on the radio and debut at No. 1 with Kid A. That’s an example of a band doing whatever the fuck they want and yet somehow managing to keep everyone’s curiosity.

DALLE: No one’s career will suffice. Actually, we’re all going to grow long, white beards and see if Gillette will pay us a million dollars to shave them.

VI. THAT MAGIC MOMENT

SPIN: When did you first notice your band had made it into the big leagues?

HAWKINS: When we realized we shouldn’t be expected to carry our own gear. When you first have someone to carry stuff for you, you think, “Oh, that’s a relief. I’ll have perhaps a bit more energy for the show.” And then there comes a point when you may have to carry it again and you’re like, “Fuck that, I’d rather just leave it in the street.”

RICKLY: We always had this joke. The band would say, “You’re the singer—you don’t carry anything!” But I say, “Hey, you guys carry equipment—I carry the band!”

BANKS: For us, I guess it was moving up from a Dodge Ram to a tour bus. But that’s a practical thing. When you’re on a grueling tour, those practical things really pay off. We haven’t been swimming in Cristal or burning money. There’s no Learjet yet. There’s no Learjet only because they’re working on the airbrushing—the Interpol logo.

RICKLY: Seeing our first huge tour bus was insane. When we started touring, we didn’t have a trailer, so we were sleeping on top of our equipment and in the clubs after they closed up for the night. They’d lock us in all night long and come get us in the morning. And sometimes they’d forget, and we’d be sitting around the club all day, trying to figure out how to get out.

HAWKINS: In everything we do, it’s not even want anymore, it’s need. Where at one point, I might have said, “Please, may I have a cheese sandwich?” you just say to someone, “I’m gonna need a cheese sandwich.” That’s totally arrogant [laughs] and a bit bullshit as well.

DALLE: We don’t ask for much, and we’ve watched too many VH1 Behind the Music specials to know better. Trying to find a balance between conservatism and hedonism is a hard one. My grandfather was a world champion wrestler in the ’50s and ’60s and spent all of his money on costumes. He ended up living in a trailer park in Florida until he died, and that’s enough for me.

VII. PERSONAL STYLE vs. PERSONAL STYLIST

HAWKINS: The way we do it is we employ stylists to realize our vision. I mean, I’m not a seamster. [Laughs] I can scarcely stitch a sentence together at the moment. If you have that strong an identity, nobody can tell you what to wear. To be honest, I’m quite a contrary person. And if you told me to wear something, I’d rather forfeit the cover of the magazine than wear it if I didn’t want to do it. Generally speaking, you just have to maintain a little control.

BANKS: I don’t accept any styling. We’re not fashion models. We’re not actors. We’re a band. We dress ourselves. We don’t really need any help. For me, just having someone touch my hair—I don’t like it.

RICKLY: Every so often we go to a video shoot and you dress the way you dress and someone says, “Well, that’s great, but here’s your outfit.” You’ll say, “No, I’m not really interested in that.” And I don’t know what to do, because I don’t want them to get into trouble. I’m very uncomfortable wearing clothes that aren’t mine. It’s funny, because in my personal life, I’m more stylish than I am with Thursday. For Christmas, my girlfriend will get me something and say, “Look! It’s Marc Jacobs! It’s great! It fits you so nice!” And I’ll say, “That’s pretty nice. Thank you, sweetie!”

DALLE: I usually request not to have a stylist or a makeup artist on a shoot, but it goes with the territory. My style is not the most original or anything special, but it’s me. It’s important to maintain your own style on your terms, and if it means prima-donna-style tantrums in the dressing room, so be it.

VIII. HOW TO STAY SANE WITHOUT KABBALAH

BANKS: How do I avoid getting a big head? I listen to a good record and get humbled. It’s perspective: How many people have achieved massive bodies of work? And here we are with one little record. [Laughs] I just think about Bowie.

HAWKINS: We did a show in Brixton and [Queen guitarist] Brian May came down. It was the third time I’d met him. I said to him, “Brian, with everything you’ve been through—being in the most important band that Britain produced that decade, probably, playing the biggest record-breaking shows and selling millions of records, and then having a singer die of an AIDS-related illness at a time when AIDS was a real buzzword—how can you get through all that and stay the most down-to-earth person I’ve ever met?” I’ve met gardeners with bigger egos than his; he’s astonishingly grounded, a real inspiration. You know, half the people hate you, half of them love you, and eventually it amounts to nothing. Obviously, I don’t take a lot of this seriously. I take the song-writing seriously, and that’s about it, I think.

RICKLY: One thing that helps is being on tour so much, because every night it’s like a reset button, and it clears you of everything that’s been getting you bent out of shape all day. You’re just back to playing music, and no matter where you’re playing or how many people are there, it’s still just you guys playing together, just like it was in the beginning.

INTERPOL

Personnel Sam Fogarino, drums; Paul Banks, vocals/guitar; Carlos D., bass; Daniel Kessler, guitar

Formed 1998, New York City

Album Turn On The Bright Lights (Matador, 2002)

What Banks Says They Sound Like “I always prefer to say rock’n’roll. A band never has that concrete sense of what it is they do unless they are a fabricated, manufactured act where there is a concept behind what they are doing.”

What’s Next? They expect to begin recording their second album by March, for release this fall.

Banks’ Pick for The Next Big Thing Brooklyn’s The Double. “A bunch of guys playing their instruments in ways you haven’t seen before. The singer’s got a huge voice, and the drummer looks like a fucking cartoon octopus when he plays.”

THE DISTILLERS

Personnel Tony Bradley, guitar; Brody Dalle, vocals/guitar; Ryan Sinn, bass; Andy Granelli, drums

Formed 1998, Los Angeles

Albums The Distillers (Hellcat/Epitaph, 2000); Sing Sing Death House (Hellcat/Epitaph, 2002); Coral Fang (Hellcat/Sire 2003)

What Dalle Says They Sound Like “I’m still trying to figure out how to answer that question. It’s not like I can step out of the box and look at it. I just like to say we play rock’n’roll.”

What’s Next? They’re heading to Europe in February and will continue touring throughout the year.

Dalle’s Pick for The Next Big Thing L.A. punks The Bronx. “Like Black Flag Meets Led Zeppelin.”

THE DARKNESS

Personnel Frankie Poullain, bass; Dan Hawkins, guitar; Justin Hawkins, vocals/guitar; Ed Graham, drums

Formed 2000, London

Album Permission to Land (Atlantic, 2003)

What Hawkins Says They Sound Like [Sarcastically whispers] “’80s pastiche metal.”

What’s Next? In March, they’ll embark on their first major U.S. tour.

Hawkins’ Pick for The Next Big Thing London scuzz rockers Ted Benson. “I just think the bloke’s [Chris Teckkam’s] lyrics are amazing. He’s a really bright guy, but he comes across like a complete idiot, which is great. I love ‘Rock Cottage.’ I love the way he rhymes ‘rock cottage’ with ‘hot cottage.’ Which is the same word, obviously, and he says, ‘Yeah, you can’t beat a rhyme, can you?'”

THURSDAY

Personnel Tom Keeley, guitar; Tucker Rule, drums; Geoff Rickly, vocals; Steve Padulla, guitar; Tim Payne, bass

Formed 1998, New Brunswick, New Jersey

Albums Waiting (Eyeball, 1999); Full Collapse (Victory, 2001); War All The Time (Island, 2003)

What Rickly Says They Sound Like “It’s music that came from hardcore. It has a lot of new-wave influence. Contentwise, it’s really passionate, honest, and urgent.”

What’s Next? They’re touring with AFI through early April, then headlining the summer’s Vans Warped Tour.

Rickly’s Pick for The Next Big Thing Omaha emo art rockers Cursive. “They are just amazing, and I think they are making more and more of an impact. Hopefully, it’ll come to a boiling point soon.” ■ DOUG BROD & MARC SPITZ

KANYE WEST

Jay-Z’s favorite producer shows off his own rhyme skills

Kanye West has success written all over him. With a list of his more memorable production jobs literally tattooed onto his forearm and an iced-out Roc-A-Fella logo medallion dangling from his neck, it’d be hard to peg him as an underdog. But despite being the favored beat-smith of everyone from Jay-Z to Talib Kweli to Ludacris; despite having several mix tapes that showcase his ever-improving lyrical abilities burning up the underground; despite the fact that his debut album, The College Dropout, has been ready for release since fall 2003; despite his first solo single, the Chaka Khan—sampling “Through the Wire,” getting play on MTV2, West is still working like an unproven outsider.

“I paid for my video,” he says. “I got an independent promoter to help get radio spins. I wanted to get it to the point where Def Jam would say, ‘Okay, we gotta get behind this.'”

If his record company (technically Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam) needs any convincing, it may have something to do with the confusion over how exactly to market the 26-year-old Chicago native—bling or backpack? As a producer, West provided the felonious thump for tracks like the bruising Beanie Sigel anthem “The Truth,” but his solo material tends to be somewhat more conscious.

“I’m one of the only rappers who has both his parents and all his grandparents still alive,” he says. “My father was a Black Panther. My grandparents were involved in civil-rights marches. So I have a responsibility to reflect them.”

West does his roots justice on such tracks as “Jesus Walks” and “Breathe In Breathe Out,” which tackle spiritual faith and materialism. “I want people to scream these songs back at me,” he says. “I want to bring back the feeling for people. Like the feeling I had when I had Saturday detention back in school and I would pop in [A Tribe Called Quest’s] The Low End Theory.”

That’s a high standard, but West is primed. “I love the challenge,” he says. “I do music for the sake of showing off. I got the Harlem Boys Choir [on the song “Two Words”] not just because they sound good, but because I could. Some people are like that with cars, like, ‘Look what the fuck I got.’ I’m like that with music, like, ‘Look what the fuck I did.'” CHRIS RYAN

3 MORE HIP-HOPPERS ON THE VERGE

9th Wonder/Little Brother

A couple years ago, Durham, North Carolina’s 9th Wonder was just a little-known beat maker for a little-known underground trio called Little Brother. But since being publicly big-upped by the Roots’      ?uestlove, 9th has released a bootleg remix of Nas’ God’s Son album (dubbed God’s Stepson), laced with his distinctive jazzy keyboards and head-nodding snares, and landed a coveted production slot on Jay-Z’s The Black Album. Next on the plate: a follow-up to Little Brother’s 2003 indie sleeper, The Listening (probably on a major label); Atlantic is among the interested.

Young Gunz

The Roc-A-Fella family continues to bring up heavy hitters from its Philadelphia farm system (see Beanie Sigel and Freeway). With their breakout hit “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop,” Young Gunz—Young Chris and Neef—showed that they knew how to fill dance floors from the window to the wall. But if numerous mix-tape appearances are any evidence, their debut full-length, Tough Luv, will have plenty of the souped-up soul and crime rap that’s the Roc’s bread and cheddar.

J-Hood

Drafted out of high school by his Yonkers, New York, neighbors the Lox, J-Hood has been dropping snippets of his so-called life all over the underground mix-tape scene for two years now. He earned a rep with his appearance on Sheek Louch’s “Mighty D-Block (2 Guns Up),” the unofficial street anthem of 2003, that combined the best of his D-Block brethren: Jadakiss’ punch-line savvy and Styles P’s concrete realism. Check for his solo album later this year on D-Block/Universal Motown. CHRIS RYAN

LIVING THINGS

WHO Dirt-rock threesome from suburban St. Louis comprising the Lost Boys-ish Berlin brothers (Lillian, Eve, and Bosh), whose politics roar as loudly as their instruments. Says singer Lillian, 25: “In our house, it was more about Noam Chomsky books than Beatles records.”

WHAT Their full-length debut, Black Skies in Broad Daylight (DreamWorks), was recorded by Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies) and includes a dozen songs that pair AC/DC’s guitar aggression with Fugazi’s humanistic fervor (“Where do all the dead boys go? / No solutions / Just bombs below!”).

BOYS NAMED SUE The brothers’ unconventional parents named the first two boys (Lillian and Eve) after their grandmothers. “It did cause trouble,” says Lillian, “those names in the conservative Midwest. But, you know, back in the 1800s, men were called Lillian. It was no big deal. It’ll come back in fashion.”

ARMY OF NONE Yes, all three band members are registered to vote. Yes, Lillian starts mini political debates during concerts, inviting fans onstage to share their views. No, they’re not happy with the Bush administration. “Something needs to happen,” Lillian says. “If all of us get drafted in two years, there’s going to be no fucking bands to see.”

THE TAO OF STEVE On a whim, the trio looked up Albini’s number in the phone book—he was listed. “And he answers his own phone!” says bassist Eve, 21. Adds Lillian: “We sent him a tape and ended up recording our first EP [Turn in Your Friends & Neighbors] with him.” Albini, no stranger to bands on the verge, had one piece of advice. “He said for us to call our lawyer and get off a major label,” Lillian says, laughing. “Quickly.” JENNY WILLIAMS

FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND

WHO A ragtag, working-class Welsh quintet who somehow wandered into the world of American hardcore punk. After collecting Lifetime and Gorilla Biscuits CDs and producing zines, singer Matt Davies formed the group in early 2002, later touring with Yankee peers From Autumn to Ashes and Cave In. (The band’s name is taken from a song title by Illinois emo dudes Planes Mistaken for Stars, not from the Elton John song.)

WHAT FFAF’s latest release, the ragingly maudlin yet compelling EP Seven Ways to Scream Your Name, combines the start-stop fury of Thursday with occasional bursts of Britpop and ferocious metal breakdowns (which led to an opening spot on Iron Maiden’s Dance of Death World Tour). Their debut album, Casually Dressed & Deep in Conversation, is a surprise smash in the U.K. (it will be released here on Atlantic this year). For now, FFAF are virtually the only British act bringing emo to the home folks.

THE EMO-PEAN UNION? “The U.K. is starting to label everything emo-core or screamo-core,” says singer Matt Davies, laughing, on the phone from Berlin. “But it’s whatever-core in my neck of the woods! This is just the music we grew up on. I come from a coal-mining town, and there’s nothing there, just two streets, some mountains, forests, roads, and fields. Oh, and sheep. Lots of sheep.”

AMERICA GOOD, AMERICAN SNACKS BAD “All the American bands we’ve played with have been so cool; there’s a real camaraderie there,” says Davies. “But your snack food—I think it’s laced with something, maybe cocaine. At every truck stop, I’d look for something different and then say, ‘Okay, I’ll take a Twinkie.’ They’re horrible, but I’m stuffing my face with them.” ANDY GREENWALD

EMO RAP UP FROM THE UNDERGROUND

As mainstream rap becomes shallower, a new generation of hip-hop kids from places like Minnesota and Maine are winning over a new generation of fans with their diary rhymes and sensitive steez. Emo rap is already huge in the underground. On the coattails of Eminem and new sensation Slug, it may blow up in your hood, too.

Slug is having a moment, and he’d like to share with the rest of the group. On the tiny stage of the Cincinnati club Annie’s, which barely contains his rangy six-foot-three-inch frame, the Atmosphere frontman leads an audience of about a thousand underground-rap loyalists through a fist-pumping round of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”— with apologies to Bonnie Tyler and Conor Oberst. Your average hip-hop head may take one look at the self-deprecating, yet oddly charismatic, headliner (modestly outfitted in a white tee and cargos) and write him off as a patsy. But this isn’t MTV hip-hop, and these aren’t its fans. Instead, led by a coterie of ladies who look like they got lost en route to a Death Cab for Cutie show, the crowd fervently shouts along, eventually drowning out the 31-year-old pied piper onstage. “Turn around, bright eyes! / Every now and then, I fall apart.”

Every August since 1997, thousands of backpackers from the Midwest and beyond have converged on Ohio’s third-largest city for Scribble Jam, the closest thing the independent hip-hop scene has to a yearly convention. The 2003 edition features vendors hawking bedroom-made albums, T-shirts advertising labels that barely exist, and battles of all forms—B-boying, DJ’ing, rapping. But the big draw this year is Slug and producer Ant’s Minneapolis crew Atmosphere, here to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their Rhymesayers label with an all-night concert. For the assembled fans—disaffected, middle-class, and overwhelmingly white—Slug is Chris Carrabba and Justin Timberlake rolled into one. And Scribble is his Giants Stadium.

On this and every other night, the Atmosphere set sounds like the private agonies of a lovelorn coed. “What do you do, feed your issues to fucking vampires?” Slug asks the crowd between songs. “Well, I fucking rap.” During the heart-on-his-sleeve screed “Fuck You, Lucy,” he screams, “I want to stand on top of this mountain and yell / I want to wake up and break up this lake of hell.” After the self-loathing “God Loves Ugly,” he wraps the mic cord around his neck in a mock hanging.

“So what—you don’t like us,” he concludes. “Your girl probably does.”

In 2004, the hottest thing going in below-the-radar hip-hop is that most foreign of rap concepts: feelings. Feelings of love. Feelings of insecurity. Feelings of despair. For an increasingly vocal niche of the underground, rap bravado is a relic of the past—fear and loathing have replaced bitches and money. You could almost call it emo.

This taboo strategy has been responsible for some of the most exciting music of the past five years and hints at what hip-hop may sound like—and look like—a generation from now. Of the new wave, Sean “Slug” Daley is the best known. He began rapping in earnest in the early ’90s, around the time a number of like-minded artists (Rhode Island’s Sage Francis, Ohio’s Doseone, Nova Scotia’s Buck 65, and Maine’s Sole) were also testing hip-hop’s boundaries. For years, they toiled in relative obscurity, but the loosely connected scene is now threatening to break through. Atmosphere sold almost 100,000 copies of 2002’s God Loves Ugly and, after eliciting interest from half a dozen majors, are distributing 2003’s Seven’s Travels (which has spawned the MTV2 hit “Trying to Find a Balance”) through punk stalwart Epitaph, which also has signed Francis to a three-album deal. Buck 65 has been a surprise success for Warner Canada (selling 25,000 albums to date), which has reissued his back catalog and recently released his latest head trip of an album, Talkin’ Honky Blues.

But don’t let the moody introspection and the light skin fool you—these aren’t art-school dilettantes or irony-rich post-punks. They’re hip-hop kids raised on Public Enemy’s political bromides and the feel-good bohemianism of A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul—hip-hop that was humane and bookish, not mookish. And they’ve built their new template on a solid foundation of sampled breakbeats and polysyllabic rhymes. The music can be noisy and agitated, minimal or soulful. Ant cuts Atmosphere’s tracks with buoyant, warm soul samples. Buck 65 deploys a steel-guitar player. But even at its most avant-garde, it’s definitely hip-hop. And if rockers chafe at the term “emo,” these rappers are twice as nervous. “It’s a cage,” says Francis of the tag. Slug echoes the sentiment: “It’s like saying, ‘Yo, call me a bitch!'”

For 25 years, hip-hop has protected its burly, bulletproof image against just this sort of vulnerability. But times have changed. Representing the burbs or the boondocks, these MCs wouldn’t feel right rapping about a thug life they haven’t experienced. Instead, they fill their records with lyrics about family troubles, self-interrogating therapy sessions, or love notes to the ones that got away. On his 2002 album, Personal Journals, Francis, 25, floated sentiments like “I played connect the dots with your beauty marks, and I ended up with picture-perfect sheet music” and rapped about a girl who cuts herself because she can’t reach out for help. “That’s what I’m most comfortable doing: the stuff that felt like a diary entry,” says Francis. “If people feel vulnerable listening to my music, that makes sense to me.”

Though emo rappers often cite black hip-hop stars like Tupac, Scarface, and Ghostface Killah as avatars of the confessional style, the obvious touchstone for emo rap’s mass appeal is Marshall Mathers. In 1997, Eminem was just another anonymous tape slinger at Scribble, the runner-up in the annual rhyme battle. Months later, he was in the studio with Dr. Dre and cleaning out his closet.

That kind of potential—as seen at Scribble Jam, as well as on the Internet and college campuses nationwide—is pretty exciting, but it can be jarring. “Everybody’s kind of freaked out about it a little bit,” admits Slug. “They feel they might be doing a disservice to hip-hop. They didn’t know the white kids were going to relate to white rappers, and suddenly, unjustly, Slug is out-selling [black underground rappers] Murs and Jean Grae.” “Slug is ushering in a movement that can gain real traction,” says Craig Kallman, copresident of Atlantic Records. “We want to sign acts that appeal across demographics, and he can do that.” Says L.A.’s Busdriver, a black rapper who explores similar themes in his music: “It’s just an easy point of entry to latch on to one of these acts. People who seek out this kind of music are kids who are trying to rebel, college kids, mostly white kids, and there’s a class issue as well.”

“My whole life I’ve always been a white kid who, for the most part, didn’t think like a white kid,” says Slug, who is of mixed-race parentage. At 2002’s post-Jam barbecue, Slug and Sage faced off in a friendly half-hour rhyme battle. But these weren’t your usual barbs. “You’re a studio art fag,” Slug needled Sage, who countered, “What are you gonna do when your fans find out you’re not white?”

Buck 65 will never have to worry about such a dilemma. Hailing from Mount Uniacke, a rural outpost near Halifax, Nova Scotia, Rich Terfry always felt like an MC in search of a scene, putting out traditional hip-hop albums but feeling out of step with the music he loved. “I’m almost 32,” he says. “I’m white. I grew up in a very rural and remote place. I love to read Russian novels. I have a university degree. That’s not your typical hip-hop experience. But the more comfortable I get with who I am, it shines through in my music.”

By the time he released Vertex, his third full-length, in 1998, Buck discovered that the standard Native Tongues-style rap he’d been doing just wasn’t going to cut it. On his next album, Man Overboard, he dedicated one suite of rhymes to his mother’s struggle with cancer. “The emotions were so real, so raw,” he says. “The stuff people responded to and which made the most sense is the stuff you really feel, so I made it a rule not to write unless I had passion for it. Ever since, writing songs has been easy.”

As Buck was self-distributing an early, cassette-only incarnation of Vertex in the late ’90s, similar pockets of resistance were developing in other out-of-the-way locales. In Maine, rapper Sole, of the crew Live Poets, was laying the seeds for what would later become Anticon records, the main source for the scene’s key releases. And in Providence, Sage Francis was trying to figure out how to combine the naked emotion he conveyed in his spoken-word performances with his braggadocious hip-hop. (Francis, a Scribble Jam regular, skipped the 2003 edition to participate in the National Poetry Slam.)

“When I was 20, I was filling out an image, rocking the Iverson jersey and fatigues and steel-toe boots,” says Anticon’s Doseone (a.k.a. Adam Drucker). Now 26, he’s tried everything from stutter-rap confessional poems to jokester narratives about hanging in a café with Jesus. “I didn’t relay any personal truths [in my lyrics] until I met Slug,” he says. Indeed, much of Dose’s best work has been free verse—rooted in hip-hop, but not stuck in it. ‘There’s no room for sanctimonious hip-hop selfishness,” he says. “We have a certain education and opportunity. I find myself rapping about personal truths, and people are attracted to that.”

Until the Anticon collective’s breakthrough release, 1999’s bombastically titled compilation Music for the Advancement of Hip-Hop—which includes a Buck 65 track and one of Atmosphere’s most moving songs, the Midwest-melancholic “Nothing but Sunshine”—the emerging scene was little more than a casual network. Not surprisingly, given its demography and distribution points, this hip-hop splinter group would soon come to be known as “Internet rap.” Says Francis: “I attribute a lot of my success to the Internet, to Napster, and to free music trade. It was huge for me. I was touring, and I didn’t even have an album out.”

In a sense, the career path of these artists is decidedly punk: low-budget albums, self-booked tours. For a time, when the regular hip-hop community in his hometown was rejecting him, Francis sold his tapes at local hardcore shows for $5. “My mentality changed,” he says, “as did my conception of who my audience could be and how I could get to them.”

“[Sage and Slug] grew up on Run-D.M.C. and A Tribe Called Quest; hip-hop matters to them, and they’re not trying to exploit it,” says Andy Kaulkin, president of Epitaph. “But there’s more to it. Sage is lyrically a punk rocker, and Slug is socially a punk rocker. Because of that, their music is very viable on both of those fronts—hip-hop and punk. I believe this is possibly the future of rock’n’roll.”

Just before Scribble Jam, Atmosphere closed out a three-week run on last summer’s Warped Tour with a date in Cleveland, playing on the same stage as emo-rock faves Coheed and Cambria and Brand New. While many in attendance clearly showed up at Warped to see Atmosphere, an equal number were curious punks, spillover from the Vendetta Red set that had just ended on a nearby stage.

Slug knows how to convert the newbies: He inspires a mosh pit one minute, a hug-in the next. At one point, he jumps into the crowd and pleads, “Do not tell your friends, your siblings. Do not tell anyone about us. This is big enough. I don’t wanna have a nervous breakdown.”

When he launches into “Modern Man’s Hustle,” Atmosphere’s poppiest number, the guitarist from political punkers S.T.U.N., who’d been watching stageside, grabs an eager young girl in an intimate embrace. They don’t stop kissing until the song is done. After the show, fans cluster around the Atmosphere merch table. Diminutive Vendetta Red singer Zach Davidson drops by to request a T-shirt in “youth medium.” A lanky teen with plaid pants, studded belt, argyle socks, checkered Vans, and a lip ring gives Slug a pound, telling him, “You’re probably the first hip-hop I’ve listened to,” as he plunks down $10 for a CD. When the crowd thins, girls angle for a moment of conversation with the weary rapper. “Sean,” cries a voice from the edge of the crowd, “I want a hug, too!”

He’s happy to oblige. “I don’t care about being the ‘lyrical miracle spiritual’ anymore,” Slug says, mimicking the rhymes that entry-level battle rappers spit. “I want to be Billy Joel, and I want to be Prince. Except I want to do it with hip-hop. I want to make hip-hop that when you listen to that shit, it’s there for you.”

THE SENSITIVE TYPES 

Who’s Who in the Emo-Rap Revolution

Aesop Rock: A member of New York art-rap syndicate Definite Jux, Aesop pours disappointment, claustrophobia, and B-boy bratitude into his slurry, intricate rhymes—”Life’s not a bitch / She’s a beautiful woman who won’t give up the pussy.” Recommended: Labor Days (Definitive Jux, 2001)

Sage Francis: Spoken-word vet turned rhyme slayer. His new group, Non-Prophets (with DJ/producer Joe Beats), brings surprisingly tight vintage hip-hop. Recommended: Personal Journals (Anticon, 2002)

Doseone: Court jester of the avant-underground: posing for photos in leg warmers, rocking hair dye to match his outfits. Recommended: Circle (Mush, 2000)

Buck 65: Nova Scotia’s storytelling mic rocker has dropped rhymes on Sesame Street, but on his latest album, Talkin’ Honky Blues, he’s a hip-hop Tom Waits. Recommended: Man Overboard (Anticon, 2001)

Busdriver: A junior member of the Los Angeles set that spawned Freestyle Fellowship and the Pharcyde, this tongue-twisting MC tackles politics and the contradictions of life in the hip-hop underground. Recommended: Temporary Forever (Temporary Whatever, 2003)

Mac Lethal: Kansas-bred 2002 Scribble Jam battle champ who cracks jokes about his mom being signed by Dr. Dre and then gets deep on the war in Iraq. Once toured with Insane Clown Posse proteges Twiztid, but don’t hold it against him. Recommended: The Love Potion Collection (Beyond Space/Lethalville, 2003)

Pigeon John: An often hilarious rhymer with a gift for sly self-deprecation. On his two solo albums, he’s played the fumbling everyman, grappling with absent parents, racial confusion, and the impossible quest for true love. Recommended: Pigeon John Is Dating Your Sister (Basement, 2003)

Awol One: Los Angeles MC who offers up throaty, free-association jams about solitude and agony. Once rapped as “Awalrus” and offered solace in lyrics like “Don’t be afraid to admit your downfalls / We all got ’em / And I think that I got ’em all.” Recommended: Souldoubt (Mean Street, 2001) ■ JON CARAMANICA

25 TO WATCH

From rock to Brit rock, from metal to electronic, more new bands you need to hear

METAL

More seductive screaming about death, blood, and ex-girlfriends

BLEEDING THROUGH

WHO Frontman Brandan Schieppati screams as if his insides were being sucked out by a high-powered vacuum cleaner, but his band’s death-metal barrage is given a haunting ambience by the keyboards of female member Marta.

WHAT The California sextet’s third album, 2003’s This Is Love This Is Murderous (Trustkill), impressed AFI singer Davey Havok, who wore the band’s T-shirt on MTV and invited them on tour.

THE BLED

WHO Tucson, Arizona, metalcore wiseasses whose heart-quaking thrash stirs up a volcanic mosh pit. When the band’s singer quit after the recording of some early demos, they turned to guitarist Jeremy Talley’s roommate James Muñoz to fill in as lead vocalist; he’s now full-time.

WHAT Sounding like a more accessible Converge, the Bled’s debut, Pass the Flask (Fiddler Records), hints at a melodic heart, especially when Muñoz eases up on the shrieking.

BANG-UP JOB During a California show last year, Conor Oberst look-alike Mike Celi swung his bass guitar a little too enthusiastically and smacked Muñoz flush in the face. The singer kept performing—even when he found a puddle of blood at his feet. He needed 13 stitches.

EVERY TIME I DIE

WHO Poll almost any member of any band whose sound is defined by the suffix -core, ask them to name their favorite new group, and most will quickly declare: Every Time I Die. The Buffalo, New York, thrash-metal provocateurs, led by brothers Keith Buckley (vocals) and Jordan Buckley (guitar) are revered for their roiling breakdowns, pummeling, punky guitars, and poetically sarcastic lyrics.

WHAT Second album, 2003’s Hot Damn! (Ferret), recalls Glassjaw and the Dillinger Escape Plan, with its hurtling emotion and intricate musicianship.

PEEK-A-BOO Upon removing the cardboard cover on Hot Damn!, you’ll find a revealing photo of a pair of SuicideGirls types going at it Britney-Madonna style.

POISON THE WELL

WHO Underground teen-punk prodigies in the late ’90s, this Fort Lauderdale fivesome are now likely to succeed the Deftones as the major-label metalcore band that average civilians can appreciate. They convincingly balance bouts of psychotic heaviness with sweeping, almost tender melodies, maybe because guitarists Ryan Primack and Derek Miller cite both Slayer and the Smiths as influences.

WHAT You Come Before You (Velvet Hammer/Atlantic), was one of 2003’s most merciless yet listenable assaults (check the near-stately “Apathy Is a Cold Body”). Producers Pelle Henricsson and Eskil Lovstrom—who worked on the Refused’s ground-breaking 1998 album The Shape of Punk to Come—helped the band incorporate touches of vibraphone, organ, and harmonica.

WHERE’S THE BIKINI TEAM? The Well lived in a bungalow in a former Swedish mental institution for a month while recording You Come Before You.

ALSO WORTHY

Boston’s Give Up the Ghost had to change their name from American Nightmare after a Philadelphia band of the same name threatened a lawsuit. Their 2003 album, We’re Down Til We’re Underground, has a hardcore fury that any of their peers would envy. ■ SARAH LEWITINN AND CHARLES AARON

ROCK

Emo drama queens and folk-punk anarchists

AGAINST ME!

WHO The exclamation point in their name is not false advertising—singer/songwriter Tom Gabel delivers every line like he’s trying to save the planet from imminent ruin.

WHAT On As the Eternal Cowboy (Fat Wreck Chords), the follow-up to 2002’s anthemic gut-churner Reinventing Axl Rose, Gabel’s revolving backup cast give his anarchic folk-punk broadsides an almost new-wave/power-pop sparkle—imagine Phil Ochs fronting the early Jam.

GAINESVILLE CONFESSIONAL Like fellow Floridian Chris Carrabba, Gabel inspires fans to desperately shriek along with every word of his songs.

THE WALKMEN

WHO New Yorkers who formed in 2000 after organist Walter Martin got an agitated call from cousin Hamilton Leithauser. “I didn’t like the singer of his new band and told him so,” Leithauser admits. After his cousin’s harangue, Martin agreed, and the Walkmen were born. People have said they sound like U2 meets Neil Diamond. We are those people.

WHAT A self-produced second album, Bows and Arrows, will be released in February on the Warner Bros.-affiliated Record Collection label; the unforgettably fiery call to arms “The Rat” is the first single.

PAST LIFE Drummer Matt Barrick, guitarist Paul Maroon, and Martin were members of perhaps the most-publicized major-label bust of the ’90s—Jonathan Fire*Eater.

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE

WHO After September 11, Gerard Way had an epiphany. Stuck as an animation artist numbly hustling his work to the Cartoon Network, he says, “I had no direction. I thought, ‘I need to make a difference in my life,’ and music was my answer.” Soon thereafter, he formed My Chemical Romance.

WHAT These flamboyant New Jersey boys’ dark, goth-tinged 2002 debut (coproduced by Thursday’s Geoff Rickly) earned them a high-profile, career-boosting spot on tour with the Used. The follow-up, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, due this summer on Warner Bros./Reprise, is a concept album about rising from the dead to seek—you got a—revenge. It’s “violently happy and ironically bleak,” muses Way.

HE NEVER DRINKS … WINE MCR has a strange fixation with creatures of the night. Each show begins with Way shouting, “Unleash the bats!” and one of the band’s signature songs is titled “Vampires Will Never Hurt You.”

THE KILLERS

WHO Hipsters from rock ‘n’ roll-barren Las Vegas who dress like the Strokes but sound like Interpol covering Duran Duran.

WHAT Their ridiculously catchy songs about girls, jealousy, and—yes—murder have started a blogging/downloading commotion. The band’s debut album, tentatively titled A Hot Fuss, will be released later this year on Island Records; the U.K. import single “Mr. Brightside” is out now.

HE’S LOST CONTROL An ex-Mormon, singer Brandon Flowers did time as a bellhop at Vegas’ trashy Gold Coast Hotel & Casino. He also appears to be Ian Curtis’ bastard son.

ALSO WORTHY

Electrifying Czech trio Sunshine have signed to Pink producer Linda Perry’s Elektra-distributed label, Custard. Straylight Run is a new ballad-oriented group from ex-Taking Back Sunday guitarist John Nolan (with sis Michelle on piano). Atlanta garage rockers the Hiss boast a U.K. buzz. ■ SARAH LEWITINN AND CHARLES AARON

BRITISH ROCK

The new Coldplay, the new Scottish rock gentry, and a touch of social unrest

FRANZ FERDINAND

WHO A post-punk, pan-European coalition—its four members hail from Scotland, England, and Germany—that now lives and practices in Glasgow’s answer to Andy Warhol’s Factory: “The Chateau,” an old courtroom and jail converted to a communal art space.

WHAT Their swaggering, erudite, and noisy five-track EP Darts of Pleasure (Domino) recalls the Kinks and Sparks at their most shamelessly tuneful.

AMBIGUOUSLY AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN POP STARS Dandies of the Brit-rock scene, Franz Ferdinand dress like self-proclaimed “gay superheroes,” have formed their own book club, and are named after the Austro-Hungarian archduke whose assassination sparked World War I.

HOPE OF THE STATES

WHO This eight-headed (six musicians, two projectionists) prog-rock collective wear matching military jackets onstage and were inspired by the spacey noisescapes of Mercury Rev and Sigur Rós (yes, they have a violinist). “We’re not a ‘the’ band, and we aren’t a garage-rock band,” says frontman Sam Herlihy. “We’re total outsiders.”

WHAT Currently in Ireland recording their debut album for Sony, the band finally will tour the U.S. this year.

MORE DEPRESSED ABOUT THE WAR THAN THOM YORKE? Hope’s video for their debut single, “Black Dollar Bills,” was banned by MTV2 U.K. for its images of “war, soldiers, warplanes, bombs, missiles, and social unrest.”

RAZORLIGHT

WHO Sounding like Television after being rolled by a posse of Camden hookers, Razorlight are led by the current poster boy of London’s rockerati: scrawny, urchinesque Johnny Borrell—who was briefly a member of the Libertines.

WHAT Their first single, 2003’s “Rock’N’Roll Lies,” hit No. 56 on the U.K. charts, and the band’s debut album will be released later this year, possibly with distribution from Universal. Their U.S. tour in March will include a gig at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.

HONESTLY, THAT’S HIS NAME Razorlight’s Swedish lead guitarist is Bjorn Agren.

KEANE

WHO Dubbed the new Coldplay by fans and the new Ultravox by detractors, this trio of pop romantics—vocals, piano, drums, no guitar!—had strangers embracing on street corners upon the release of their swoony debut single, “Everybody’s Changing.” Baby-faced singer Tom Chaplin’s voice soars like he was bred purely for pop, and an international bylaw prohibits us from mentioning Keane without including the words anthemic and epic.

WHAT In between touring Europe and the U.S., the trio has recorded its 2004 debut for lnterscope, which beat out at least ten other labels to sign the band. Even Eminem’s main man, lnterscope chairman Jimmy Iovine, caught a then-unsigned Keane at Los Angeles’ Viper Room last July.

SNOW PATROL

WHO A trio of Belfast, Northern Ireland, natives who met at Scotland’s University of Dundee in the mid-’90s and released two critically adored albums on influential U.K. indie label Jeepster. In response to flagging sales and poor label support (according to the band), singer/songwriter Gary Lightbody formed the Reindeer Section, a Scottish indie-rock supergroup featuring members of Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai, and Teenage Fanclub. Now, armed with a major-label budget and a second guitarist, Snow Patrol once again will try to make the teen girls care.

WHAT Final Straw, due on A&M this year, is dreamy, emotionally intense pop rock that sounds like a lusciously produced ode to Sebadoh. The sonic perfection comes courtesy of Jacknife Lee, former guitarist for Irish post-grunge punks Compulsion, who’s reinvented himself as a pop-savvy producer for Basement Jaxx, TLC, and Eminem.

ALSO WORTHY

Echoing the Bunnymen, British Sea Power were the band du jour at New York’s 2003 CMJ Music Marathon; the 22-20s, a manic garage-blues trio, released a live EP, 05/03, last fall on Astralwerks. ■ SARAH LEWITINN AND IMRAN AHMED

ELECTRONIC

Emo refugees, kooky Germans, and reborn rave blokes

HEAD AUTOMATICA

WHO Side project from vocalist Daryl Palumbo of emo-metal crew Glassjaw and eclectic hip-hop producer Dan “the Automator” Nakamura (Gorillaz, Dr. Octagon). While the Automator churns out dance floor-ready, industrial-strength modern rock, Palumbo’s Chris Cornell-inspired wail and garage-punk guitar ensure this as party fodder for hard-drinking, softhearted white boys.

WHAT Debut album, Tokyo Decadence, was recorded at the Automator’s studio in San Francisco (with guest vocals from Rancid’s Tim Armstrong) and will be released in March by Warner Bros. Live, the band’s lineup expands to seven members, including drummer Larry Gorman (Glassjaw) and guitarist Vinnie Caruana (the Movielife).

CALLING MR. SELF-DESTRUCT The spirit of Trent Reznor definitely stalks Head Automatica, especially on “Young Hollywood,” where Palumbo implores: “You get down on your knees / And tear open your heart / So I can love you and your disease.”

CHICKEN LIPS

WHO London dance producers Andy Meecham and Dean Meredith started making tracks under the Lips tag in 1999, gradually getting high-profile DJ play from Josh Wink and Fatboy Slim. Their singles and remixes, with live drums and bass guitar, are like high-spirited disco dubs of early-’80s New York funk (or, more specifically, ESG’s “Moody” and “UFO”). DJ Steve “Fella” Kotey was added last year as a third member to handle the group’s heavy DJ calendar.

WHAT Recently released a DJ-Kicks mix CD (!K7) that blends their own songs with a crate-diggin’ array of geeky gems from Nina Hagen, Jimmy Spicer, the Congos (via Carl Craig remix), and the Raincoats.

BUG-EYED SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET Meecham and Meredith were formerly Bizarre Inc., the early-’90s breakbeat rave pros whose U.K. hits “Playing With Knives” and “Raise Me” were club/radio staples.

ELLEN ALLIEN

WHO Playfully pretentious Berlin DJ and producer who compares her collagist beat-programming aesthetic to the dadaists of the 1920s. She earned her dance-floor props by starting the label BPitch Control in 1999 and by promoting/DJ’ing Berlin’s influential Boogy Bytes parties.

WHAT Allien’s second album, 2003’s Berlinette, is Teutonic funk with a surprisingly warm, melodic pulse, as if she sifted the beats through an electro-techno defibrillator. Distorting and dicing up her own icy, sensual vocals, she gives electroclash vixen Miss Kittin a run for the honey. Her latest, Remix Collection, was released in January.

HELLO, NASTY We hear the “B” in BPitch Control stands for “bitch.” Grrr.

T. RAUMSCHMIERE

WHO The Stiv Bators of techno, Berlin’s Marco Haas thrashes around like a dirty dance-punk performance artist, trucker hat bobbing. Live, he does everything short of tossing his laptop into a wood chipper.

WHAT Haas’ third album, Radio Blackout (Novamute), grinds synth stabs against sax squeals, mimicking ’70s cop-show car peelouts, while his exhilarating schaffel (shuffle) beats spew smoke, especially on the club hit “Monstertruckdriver.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME? Haas cofounded the Shitkatapult label in 1997 and took his alias from the Germany title of William S. Burroughs’ short story “The Dreamcops.”

ALSO WORTHY

Montreal duo Chromeo look like a DJ version of Tenacious D, and their DFA-remixed electro single “Destination: Overdrive” is a serious hoot; their debut album, She’s in Control (Vice), out in February, bubbles with addictive goofiness. Detroit DJ/producer Matthew Dear crafts meticulously minimal, delicately funky tech house on his second album, Leave Luck to Heaven (Spectral Sound/Ghostly). ■ ADRIENNE DAY AND CHARLES AARON

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the August 2003 issue of SPIN.

If you did something dangerously fun and outrageous in the late ’80s and ’90s that your parents didn’t like, you can probably thank Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction.

More from Spin:

• Perry Farrell Hits Back With Suit Against Jane’s Addiction Bandmates
• Jane’s Addiction Members Sue Perry Farrell Over 2024 Tour Debacle
• DECONSTRUCTION: Portrait of a Quiet Masterpiece

Stalking out of Los Angeles’ seedy underground after hair metal wilted, they revolutionized what rock music sounded and looked like, and became the Godfathers of the Alternative Nation.

This is their shocking history—from wiseguys and Fila headbands to goth surfers, transsexuals, Siamese Twins, Lollapalooza, and Carmen Electra.

Proceed at your own risk.

“HAD A DAD” (1959-76)

PERRY FARRELL, né BERNSTEIN (b. March 29, 1959): I was a Queens kid. I lived in Flushing for a few years, then moved to Woodmere, Long Island. But in the ’70s, everybody thought Miami was the spot. So my family moved down there and got into a better life, with a lake in our backyard and a little sailboat. It was fun, swimming and surfing.

JANE BAINTER: Perry’s dad, Al Bernstein, was a jeweler, a goldsmith from New York City. The Bernsteins were the type of New York Jews who move to Florida. His sister wore white-fringe leather jackets.

STUART SWEZEY: I’d heard his dad was some Jewish mobster guy, so I asked Perry about it. He told me stories, like Sopranos, Goodfellas stuff. Some guy would be found in a trunk with his dick cut off, stuffed in his mouth. I couldn’t tell you if he was pulling my leg or not.

FARRELL: My dad was a real character, a fun guy. Sharp, with a ton of style. Cared about his hair. Always drove a Corvette. Celebrities and regular people gravitated toward him. The wiseguys knew my dad, too. Everybody knew Al Bernstein. He was one of those guys walking around Miami Beach in the ’70s with a Fila headband and a bikini bathing suit with gold around his neck. He was a jewelry designer and repairman. I got a lot of creativity from him. My mother was a fine artist. She loved to take throwaway things and make art out of them.

CASEY NICCOLI: Perry’s mother committed suicide when he was a young boy. I met Al Bernstein when he was a little more mellowed out. Family legend has it that he was pretty hard-core in his youth. Perry blamed him for his mother’s death. Al was bringing a lot of women into the house and doing drugs and stuff when he was younger. The Al I met was an old man who was very sweet.

FARRELL: It wasn’t the worst of all situations, but I was a rebellious kid who didn’t like what he saw. I just wanted to get the heck out of there. What did I have to lose? So, at 17, I took the Greyhound out to California with a surfboard, some art supplies, an ounce of weed, and one phone number. That’s how I started my affair with California.

“UP THE BEACH” (1976-82)

FARRELL: I was living in my car in Newport Beach—an old, red Buick Regal big enough for two people to live in. If you park down by the beach, you can always shower or go surfing in the morning to stay clean. And you get yourself a banana or an orange for breakfast. You keep your clothes in the trunk folded neatly so you’ve always got nice clean threads to go looking for work.

NICCOLI: Perry’s family weren’t poor by far. But his father did not give him money or support him when he moved to L.A.

FARRELL: I got jobs as a dishwasher, and then I landed a gig as a driver for a liquor distributor. One day I was making a drop at one of those swanky Newport Beach places when this lady asked me, “Do you model?” And I said, “Oh yeah, I’m a model. I’m an actor. I’m a singer. I’m a dancer. Sure.” So she said, “Do you want to audition for our Friday-night show?” Within a few weeks, I was impersonating David Bowie and Mick Jagger at this club. I thought, “Man, I’ve got a great future here.” So I quit my job, and my girlfriend started selling bud. I had made my beginning in show business.

NICCOLI: He’d do Sinatra for them, too. Perry loved Frank Sinatra.

FARRELL: Sometimes we’d all go up to the Odyssey disco in Hollywood and get up on the risers and try to take the place over. We were just dancing like maniacs and goofballs, taking our shirts off and swinging them around. These talent agents would chat us up. One weekend, one of them said, “Look, I need a roommate. Come out here for good, and I’ll get you into show business. I’ll get you on a soap, and we’ll move from there.” So this guy took me in, and I moved from the beach to L.A.

“HUMAN CONDITION” (1983-85)

BOB FORREST: The cool bands from the original goth era had broken up—Joy Division and Bauhaus. But the scene was just kicking in here locally. All those second-generation [British] bands—the Sisters of Mercy, the Southern Death Cult, Flesh for Lulu—started playing around. And these local goth bands like Christian Death and Kommunity FK were getting a following. They really influenced Perry.

BAINTER: In the goth scene, we wore the white makeup and the black lipstick for a reason. We were fighting so many things that it was almost like we were already dead.

FARRELL: These people were such compelling figures because they grew out of isolation and made this tremendous personal statement.

SWEZEY: Mariska and Rich were two artist friends of mine who had a band called Psi Com. They found Perry through the local classified paper, The Recycler, and he became their lead singer.

MARISKA LEYSSIUS: My then-husband Rich and I had, like, 3,000 LPs, so we would just sit around and play music all day. Perry didn’t really know who Joy Division were, so I kinda turned him on to that.

FARRELL: The music of Joy Division hit me. I only found out about them after Ian Curtis died. This fellow was so saddened by love. I thought, “This is what a broken heart sounds like.” I could not stop playing that music.

LEYSSIUS: He didn’t really know anyone before joining the band.

FARRELL.: I was a loner. I wanted to get into a band because I wanted to have fun. The Paisley Underground scene was happening at the time, so I’d see a lot of ads for psychedelic bands: MUST LIKE THE BLUES MAGOOS. Stuff like that. I was actually in a Paisley Underground band for a minute. I got a paisley shirt and combed my hair into bangs, and then I thought to myself, “Shit, this is pretty shortsighted.”

SWEZEY: Mariska and I were organizing these events where we took people out in buses to the desert to see experimental bands. Just noise, you know? People like Boyd Rice would play, and Mark Pauline and Survival Research Laboratories would blow things up. Psi Com built up a following through those underground events.

LEE RANALDO: You had to get directions out there, and they didn’t release the map until the day of [the show] because they didn’t want people gate-crashing. We played one of them out in the Mojave Desert. Psi Com opened. It was one of Sonic Youth’s very first Los Angeles-area shows. A very trippy night, that’s for sure. We hung out with Perry that week—Perry and all his pet snakes and tarantulas.

FARRELL: There was the whole pay-to-play plague that was happening [in Los Angeles], where bands couldn’t get a gig on Sunset without paying for rental of microphones and pre-buying the tickets. We said, “Screw you all. Let’s go find a warehouse. Let’s go to the desert!” We would rent boats in San Pedro and rock out there with the Minutemen. [Psi Com] didn’t expect to be signed by anybody.

PLEASANT GEHMAN: Psi Com were nothing like Jane’s Addiction.

JOSH RICHMAN: They were an art-rock band. You never knew what the songs were. Was it noise, or was it art? I remember Perry onstage, and they’re playing this atmospheric goth rock, and he’s just banging on a fucking anvil. You couldn’t really sing along to it.

FARRELL: Psi Com opened up for the Southern Death Cult [which became the Cult], when Ian Astbury was still wearing that Indian hat with the feather in it. We opened up for Sex Gang Children, Gene Loves Jezebel, all these glammy, goth-type bands from across the pond.

NICCOLI: The first time I saw Perry was at a Psi Com show, and I immediately had this attraction. I said to my friend, “I want to have his babies.” A year later, I had broken up with my boyfriend, and I heard through some mutual friends that he was attracted to me, too. So I went to a Psi Com show and handed him a little note that said INSTANT MASHED POTATOES, and that was it. We started dating.

FARRELL: I thought Casey was a stunner the first time I saw her. She was like a punk Elizabeth Taylor. She stopped the show. She wore dresses and heels. Her hair was all chopped and dyed black.

SWEZEY: Perry was getting a group of people together to take over this older building on North Wilton Place. It was going to be this whole arts-collective thing.

FARRELL: I found this place that has come to be known as the Wilton House. I told the landlord that I would love to put curtains here, do the walls a certain color. I got him to believe I was this quiet, shy, gay interior decorator who’d be no trouble. He ended up getting 12 musicians, photographers, artists, their girlfriends, dogs, snakes, loud music, and ’round-the-clock junkie shenanigans. Cops were crawling around band rehearsals all the time.

SWEZEY: Perry would spend Sunday nights talking to his dad, pacing around while he was on the phone. He’d get really upset that the old man was putting so much pressure on him to succeed. Afterward he’d say, “My dad doesn’t understand what I’m trying to do, man. He says stuff to me like, ‘You gotta be a singer like Manilow, Perry. Manilow don’t answer to nobody!'”

BAINTER: When Stuart moved out, I took over his room at the Wilton House. There were a bunch of other people living there, like this ersatz goth band called Lions & Ghosts.

SWEZEY: Before Jane moved in, one of Perry’s house rules was no girls and no junkies.

CARLA BOZULICH: With most people I knew at the time, it always seemed like there was a scam behind everything they said—so that they could eventually score some drugs. Not with Perry. Perry always wanted to talk about music and art. Perry was a culture sponge. He talked to everyone that he thought had any experience that he might have missed. He just soaked it up.

DAVE JERDEN: Perry is like an antenna that picks up everything that’s going on, and then he regurgitates it through his brain. That’s his art.

NICCOLI: I had been very much into the Hollywood punk-rock scene before I met Perry. I loved Iggy Pop, X, the Ramones, and a lot of bands that Perry had never really been into. He’d never heard T. Rex. He had never even heard Iggy. He’d never heard all these bands that eventually became his biggest influences.

BAINTER: He was really into African tribalism and the ancient ritualistic arts of different cultures. He had a scarification done by some anthropology professor at UCLA.

RICHMAN: He was the first [white] guy to have dreadlocks. The first to have piercings.

FARRELL: Back in the day, I got pierced because I was hanging out around a lot of art punks and a lot of them were gay and into this mild to heavy bondage. They were so cool. But I had to take all my piercings out ’cause I’d be trying to surf out there with a tit ring, and the next thing you know, I ripped my nipple off.

SWEZEY: After a point, Perry felt Psi Com lacked the intense hard-rock energy that the Red Hot Chili Peppers had. Psi Com were sort of like mid-period Cure. Everybody was looking to the Chili Peppers as the model for success. Perry used to read about them in the “L.A. Dee Da” column in the LA Weekly. Perry would say, “Hey, all you have to do in this town to make it, man, is pull down your pants onstage!”

FLEA: I saw Psi Com at a party out near [Six Flags] Magic Mountain. This girl, whose parents had a ranch, had a party. It was real late. People were either nodded-out or had gone home. I was lying in the dirt, and this band came on that seemed like a regular sort of band. [But] then the singer came out, and he was absolutely out of his mind, on fire, shaking and quivering; every little muscle in his body was doing a different dance. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “This guy is out of his mind—who is he?” And it was Perry.

NICCOLI: Eventually, he just outgrew Psi Com. He wanted something bigger—and more control.

BAINTER: Psi Com were going in different directions. Some of them were becoming Buddhist vegetarians, antisex, antidrug.

FARRELL: One day, I just got this feeling that I’m going to outgrow my circumstances, like, “I think I’m gonna make it.” But I had to get another band going, one that was happy, outrageous, and wild. I wanted to be able to sing truthfully. I didn’t want to have to fake being in a bad mood. That’s when I left Psi Com and started Jane’s Addiction.

BAINTER: I remember Perry saying one day when Psi Com were drifting apart: “Fuck those guys. I wanna rock!”

“THANK YOU BOYS” (1985)

ERIC AVERY: Carla introduced me to Perry. She asked me if I’d seen Psi Com, and I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “What did you think?” And I said, “I think they blow.” And she said, “Oh, okay, never mind.” And then I said, “No, really—why?” Carla said, “They’re looking for a bass player.” I was on the verge of selling my bass amp and giving up music.

FARRELL: Jane thought Eric was cute. And he was a cool bass player. He seemed like a wild kid, with this kind of half-cocked grin.

BOZULICH: Without Eric Avery, there never could have been any success for Jane’s Addiction. Eric had written the music, on his bass, years before he met Perry. I remember hearing those bass lines as far back as 1982. Eric started playing those bass lines, and Perry really seemed to hear himself in there.

FARRELL: I would look at [Eric’s] body language and I could tell what was going on in his head.

AVERY: I was an outsider to the Hollywood underground-band scene. I went to shows but didn’t know anybody, and I thought that this would be a cool way to just meet interesting people. Before that, I was camped in a West L.A. bachelor pad, bussing tables and shooting speed.

FARRELL: Eric was awesome. He loved the band Flipper from San Francisco. Flipper’s big thing was to stay in one groove without ever breaking it up. They weren’t even trying to put together super-well-arranged songs, but it felt great.

NICCOLI: Eric could play these superb melodic grooves, but he couldn’t make them into complete songs. Perry could cherry-pick the best grooves and make songs out of them.

AVERY: Our first jam turned into “Mountain Song.” Later, Perry said he thought that I was either a genius—because I didn’t do anything other than play the same notes over and over—or that I just didn’t know how to play at all. One day he told me, “I want to leave Psi Com. Let’s start a whole new band.” And I was down. Perry was great, an electric, creative guy.

FARRELL: I’d go out there with just a drummer or with just Eric on bass and my vocal effects. I’d improvise lyrics, dressed in a see-through unitard—it was a big hit.

AVERY: One time, this disco song was playing while we were setting up, and I just kept playing along to it, and when they killed the houselights, we kept jamming on it. That’s where “Pigs in Zen” got started. Another time, I played on these chemical drums, and Perry sang, and that became “Trip Away.”

BOZULICH: After Psi Com broke up, Perry went through this furious change, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. He sat down with me one day and said, “I’m changing my name to Perry Farrell.” And I was like, “Huh?” And he goes, “Get it—Peri Pheral, Perry Farrell? Peripheral!”

NICCOLI: We were trying to think of a name for Perry’s new band. I said, “How about Jane’s Heroin Experience, like the Jimi Hendrix Experience?” And Perry said, “Jane’s Addiction.” So that was it.

BAINTER: They came into my bedroom and were like, “We have a great name for our new band!” I was like, “Uh, that’s not good.”

AVERY: I don’t remember who exactly was in the band when the name Jane’s Addiction came up. It was during our really early lineup with my boyhood friend Chris Brinkman on guitar. Chris used to play in his Jockey shorts onstage.

BAINTER: Chris Brinkman’s father was a business executive in Los Angeles. He married Jeanne Crain, who was this 1950s starlet. She was on the cover of Life magazine. Chris was very dynamic in the beginning, but he just spun out of control on drugs and eventually OD’d.

AVERY: I was sleeping with this prostitute named Bianca. She was awful, but she was going to bankroll us.

BAINTER: Her clients were toupeed Hollywood B-listers, like these wholesome, married game-show hosts with awesome tans and big grinnin’ teeth. A few Jane’s songs, like “Whores,” were inspired by her. She helped with money to rent venues and promote their shows.

FARRELL: Bianca was very sweet, if a little nutty. Nutty enough to want to manage us. So after Psi Com broke up, Bianca put up the dough so we could put on our own shows.

NICCOLI: We rented the Black Radio building [in L.A.], and that was a huge success. We promoted ourselves with Tex and the Horseheads and the Screamin’ Sirens!, who were, like, the big cow-punk bands at the time. We served beer and stuff, even though there was no liquor license. It was total DIY—like, 101 punk-rock style.

FARRELL: It was jam-packed ’cause of Tex and the Sirens!. We were bottom of the bill. Nobody knew who Jane’s Addiction were.

GEHMAN: The Black Radio show with Tex and Jane’s was completely insane. Beyond insane. Things got out of control so quickly. Tables and chairs flying through the air. Broken glass all over the floor. The only way I can describe it is that blur some shows get when the entire crowd is completely whacked out of their mind on different substances, and it’s like a swirling vortex, and you’re convinced that someone’s gonna die.

DAVE NAVARRO: [Stephen] Perkins and I were in a band called Dizastre, and we were fresh out of high school, playing our heavy-metal rock. One night, we went to see Jane’s Addiction, and we just loved it. They had the energy and power that we loved about metal, with a total abandon that we didn’t have any experience with.

AVERY: Stephen and David were friends with my little sister Rebecca, who told them to check us out. I remember seeing them up front in the pit at the Black Radio show. They were a couple of metal kids with long hair, and they were just rockin’ out, fist-pumping the air while we were playing.

FARRELL: Matt Chaikin, the drummer in Kommunity FK, had played that show with us, but it didn’t last. Everybody in that [version of] Jane’s Addiction had drug problems already, it seemed. Three rehearsals in a row, the guy wouldn’t show up, so I started to ask around, “Who knows a reliable drummer?”

STEPHEN PERKINS: They’d auditioned umpteen people until Rebecca finally said, “Why don’t you try my boyfriend?” The first song we jammed on was “Pigs in Zen.” I saw the smiles and their butts shaking, and I just went for it. After that I said, “Look, you gotta bring my buddy Dave down.” They had this guy Ed playing guitar with them at the time. Nice guy, but he wasn’t Dave Navarro, by any means.

BOZULICH: When David came in—that really made them irresistible to people.

PERKINS: The first song we ever played with Dave was “Whores,” and at that moment, the sound for Jane’s Addiction was born.

FARRELL: I thought, “Oh my god, they’re adorable.” Stephen and David—I called them Jane’s Teen Rock-a-Babes. They were like exuberant teenagers all the time.

NAVARRO: There wasn’t a unified thread between us. Perry had a whole freakish look of his own, like some skinny, bugged-out goth surfer in whore makeup with flailing dreadlocks. Eric was more traditional punk rock, and Stephen had this crazy Afro hair thing. I was kind of a hippie kid, a little ’60s-influenced Deadhead gone heavy metal. But you throw us together and it was a patchwork quilt—it doesn’t look like it makes sense, but it keeps you warm.

AVERY: People used to comment. “You guys are such a hodgepodge of styles. You look like four different bands.”

FARRELL: When you’re in a rock band, your best stylist is your girl. I’d borrow corsets and things from Casey. I’d wear a blazer and a corset and a pair of boots and a hat and some gloves and head out on a Friday night to mix it up.

BAINTER: Casey was working in a medical clinic and supporting them while Perry was free to pursue his creative interest. And she was giving him advice about everything—booking shows, just basic support, inspiration to be able to go and do it yourself. There definitely would never have been a Jane’s Addiction without Casey.

NICCOLI: The “Be Live!” show was another legend in early Jane’s Addiction lore. We had these classic motorcycles and transsexuals and fire-eaters on stage. We had a hot dog stand going, too. Hardly anybody showed up!

NAVARRO: It was a wild night, but an obvious financial disaster. Poor Bianca lost her shirt financially.

FARRELL: She was strutting around with the cash box, topless, with duct tape on her nipples.

AVERY: The guys in Thelonious Monster and Fishbone were there, and I think Anthony Kiedis was humping some girl in the pit.

NICCOLI: We didn’t realize there wasn’t any ventilation. It smelled like hot dogs and fumes. You couldn’t breathe or see anything. The hot dog cart was smoking. It smelled really bad.

FARRELL: All these macho biker dudes were mixing with punk rockers, artists, drunks from the Zero Zero Club, and Bianca’s clients—bowlegged old guys in sweaters reeking of cheap cologne, with white shoes and hairpieces. Transsexual dancers opened the show. It was quite the cast. There were also a bunch of underage metal-rocker kids from the Valley, friends of Dave’s and Steve’s. But the kids couldn’t handle their liquor.

NAVARRO: My friend drank himself into a blackout. I left him crashed on this couch, and when I came back, his pants were down around his ankles, and there was a transsexual hovering over him.

FARRELL: The kid should have just gone with it, chalked it up to experience, but he lost his mind—he ended up in a mental institution. It was the old panic trauma “Oh, no-o-o-o, now I’m gaaaaaay!”

“GONNA KICK TOMORROW” (1985-86)

NAVARRO: It was our first exposure to this elaborately seedy, fabulously filthy Hollywood underground scene that we’d only ever heard or read about. I was, like, 18 years old—in awe. I was over the moon. I’d finally made it at last.

NICCOLI: When you’re 27 in rock’n’roll [like Perry was] with nothing really happening, you think you’re old. That’s why Steve, Dave, and Eric were seven or eight years younger than Perry. He felt like he could mold them and they would forever do what he wanted. Eventually, they’d grow up, but by then he’d have gotten what he needed out of them.

BAINTER: I think Perry and Dave had a genuine bond, though. Both their moms had died unnatural deaths.

PERKINS: Dave’s mom was murdered. He was about 15. I met him when I was 14 and a half. I knew his mom, and I knew the guy that killed her. It was too shocking to even grasp, especially for a 15-year-old. As a best friend, I just tried to be there for him. We played music. We talked. We’d go meet girls. Whatever it took to free ourselves from the pain.

BAINTER: Dave’s parents were divorced, but they were on good speaking terms, and they would trade him off for weekend visitations. So one weekend he was with his dad, and he was going home to mom and his mom’s best friend, who he called his “Auntie.” They called and called, but no answer—very strange. Finally, Dave and his dad drive over, and they find his mom and Auntie bound and gagged in the closet—chopped up. His mom’s boyfriend, who was quite close with Dave, is just gone—never heard from again. He had even played softball with Dave and had been a second dad to Dave for, like, four or five years.

NAVARRO: I used to focus on the tragedy and how certain negative things in my life have defined me. It took a long, long time to realize that.

GEHMAN: Heroin was really taking its hold. There weren’t a lot of people doing it in the early to mid-’80s. It took hold at the end of the ’80s and continued, as we know, into the ’90s.

BAINTER: We all were total suckers for drugs.

KARYN CANTOR: Perry would say, “We all have an addiction,” but we’d all sort of say, “Well, it’s her problem” or “It’s his problem.”

NAVARRO: I admit I totally blew it with drugs back in those days. My intake was certainly a factor in the eventual demise of the band the first time around. What do you want me to say? There was always five pounds of heroin, all the booze and coke you wanted, all the girls you wanted—all looking for nothing but guys in bands. And I wasn’t even old enough to legally drink yet.

NICCOLI: When Perry and I first started dating, we did heroin together a few limes, long before it became a problem. It was just us getting high, sitting around making Christmas cards for our friends. We thought of it as a way of opening up our creativity.

MARC GEIGER: Three of the four members—not Stephen—were very into heroin, as well as many other things, and it was clearly a big influence on the band and their behavior. Perry definitely believed that drugs fueled creativity.

BAINTER: “Jane says, ‘I’m done with Sergio.'” Yeah. Sergio was a drug dealer who lived nearby. He was El Salvadoran and sold drugs to send money home to his family. I was strung out, and he was using that to manipulate me. My parents divorced, and my mother and her new husband bought this house in the south of Spain. I had the opportunity to go over there, but I couldn’t because I was strung out. I had this idea that it was this big reward of mine that if I could just get sober, I could go away to Spain. You know, “I’m going to kick tomorrow.”

AVERY: Sometimes we’d do acoustic jams on the porch at the Wilton House. I’ll never forget when Jane asked us if we’d play a sad song for her, and I had to shake my head and say, “Jane, we just got through playing ‘Jane Says,’ one of the saddest songs in the world.”

JERDEN: When I first heard [“Jane Says”], I just thought it was another good song they’d written. I didn’t know it would become the “Stairway to Heaven” of modern rock.

DEAN NALEWAY: My partner Peter Heuer and I started Triple X [Records/Management] in ’85. We were out in the clubs all the time looking for new bands to build a roster. We’d already staked out a few bands when we saw Perry handing out flyers, and we were like, “Pretty interesting-looking guy. Who is he?” We wanted to do a three-record deal with Jane’s at first. They were unknown; we had a little bit of clout. But Perry had his eye on the big picture. He knew that three records for us was too much. He really wanted to get his show on the road.

FARRELL: We told Warner Bros. we definitely wanted to sign, but we wanted to come out on our own label or an indie first and then grow organically from there. We said, “We appreciate all the money you’re offering, but we need to come out on Triple X with a live record first.”

NALEWAY: We invited everybody down for a show at the Roxy. We put up everything we had to make that live record [1987’s Jane’s Addiction]. We even sold our cars.

FARRELL: I behaved like a prick and cussed out the entire record industry in the audience. I was telling everybody they needed to lose weight. I was like, “Fuck you all—you can all kiss our ass.” It was typical overwrought histrionics. But we made sure to put on a great show because it was being recorded.

FORREST: Anthony [Kiedis] and I were watching [the show at the Roxy], and it was just so mesmerizing and powerful. It was everything that everybody who had bands hoped to accomplish. It gives me chills still, how great they were. We walked out to the car, and Anthony was all quiet and I was all quiet, and then he said, “What are you thinking?” And I said, “I’m thinking why do I even [bother to] play music.” And he said, “Yeah, me too.” And he just started the car and drove away. They were that far ahead of everybody else.

SCREAM (1986)

NALEWAY: Everybody who heard the live record loved it. But it still took us a while to spread the word. Dayle Gloria and Mike Stewart, who ran Scream, helped a lot.

DAYLE GLORIA: One reason Jane’s Addiction and Scream became so close was because they’d gotten themselves eighty-sixed from every other club in town. I was DJ’ing at [Club] Lingerie the night Perry flew off the stage and jumped up on the bar and knocked everything off. Every glass, all the ashtrays, the cherries, everything. Jane’s was banned from there, so I said, “Come and play for me. I don’t care if you break anything.” The club grew with them. We grew together. If somebody would cancel, it was like, “Let’s call Jane’s Addiction.” They became like the house band.

RICHMAN: The scene that gathered around Jane’s was ancillary to this thing that was going on with Guns N’ Roses and Faster Pussycat, L.A. Guns and Jetboy. Those bands were playing the Troubadour and the Strip, but Jane’s was selling out the Lingerie, the Palace in Hollywood, the Country Club in Reseda; they also got the Lhasa Club and the Powertools downtown art crowd. Then they started to play regularly at Scream.

GLORIA: Guns were playing to the whole Whisky-Gazarri’s-Strip thing. We represented the anti-Strip at Scream, because of the darkness of a lot of the things we were doing. We were also seven or eight miles away from the Strip in downtown L.A., where only the more adventurous rocker types would go. The Cathouse where Taime Downe and Guns hung out was more of a sleazoid tattoos, strippers, and rock’n’roll kind of thing. All the Cathouse guys looked like Bret Michaels from Poison, and the chicks were slutty Tawny Kitaen types. At Scream, all the guys looked like Ian McCulloch [of Echo & the Bunnymen], and the girls were all Siouxsie [Sioux] clones.

SLASH: We rehearsed in the same little hole-in-the-wall practice studio [as Jane’s]. One day, the Jane’s guys were coming out as we were coming in, and it was very weird—we never exchanged words. It was sort of like one of those high school things where two sides quietly face off.

CHARLEY BROWN: Jane’s hated Guns N’ Roses. Guns were their mortal enemies, as far as scenesters and stuff.

SLASH: Guns hated everybody.

FARRELL: [One day], we went over to Dayle Gloria’s place for a barbecue, and there’s Iggy Pop on the floor, listening to our song “Pigs in Zen.” There’s one of my idols, listening to our music. I got too nervous, so I just left. Dayle followed me with Iggy and said, “Where are you going? I want you to meet Iggy.” He said, “Man, I think you guys are hot stuff; I want you to come on tour with me.”

GEIGER: The first Jane’s tour was opening for Iggy Pop. Then, mostly dates with the likes of Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets, Gene Loves Jezebel, and so on. The goth thing was still the musical bent for Eric and Perry, who were the leaders of the band.

BROWN: The best show they ever played was [when] they broke up onstage at the Limelight in New York. Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy from the Cult came out and started doing Led Zeppelin covers with them. Backstage, Dave Navarro was incredibly drunk. Right in the middle of Billy Duffy’s guitar solo, Dave came out and unplugged him and just started wailing on the solo. Duffy was kind of strumming on his guitar, like, “What the fuck just happened?” and walked offstage. Then Perry and Dave went wild and got in a fistfight. Perry threw him into the drums, and the whole set just fell apart.

NALEWAY: Once, at UC Irvine, Perry didn’t want to open for Love and Rockets, so we had to talk him into doing the show, and he said, “Okay, but I’m gonna whip my dick out.” He had his usual corset on and these rubber pants that he’d cut a hole out of so his penis could hang through. Near the end, he threw the corset into the crowd and was dancing around with his dick bouncing up and down. Campus cops showed up in droves to arrest him for indecent exposure. Perry ran upstairs to the dressing room, and we had to hide him in a closet until they gave up.

FARRELL: As long as I could whip out my dick, I knew I was alive.

NOTHING’S SHOCKING (1987-88)

FARRELL: Things were hot. Enter the record companies. Soon they were all buzzing around.

NAVARRO: I don’t remember much about the bidding war. All I remember was, they took you to Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset for record-label dinners back in the ’80s. Always the same place. I don’t know why.

AVERY: All of a sudden, we had MCA—labels like that—taking us out to dinner, but we knew we were never going to sign with them, because Warner Bros. was just the right place. It was like visiting a college dorm. You could walk down the hallways and hear music blaring out of everyone’s office—what a great vibe.

NALEWAY: Their hearts and minds were already set on Warners. We could get anybody on the phone, from the top man down, which impressed the hell out of Perry. And the Warners deal gave them 100 percent creative freedom. But we played around anyway and milked it for some good meals.

FARRELL: I never ate so well in my life.

NICCOLI: When he put his mind to something, Perry always got things done. He was a leader. He stuck his nose into everybody’s business, and sometimes he pissed people off. But he always got what he wanted.

FARRELL: I liked Dave Jerden’s work on [the Brian Eno/David Byrne album] My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, so I was excited to work with him. He knew how to do a lush production with a hard-rock band.

JERDEN: I jumped at the chance to make a record with them. What other band since X—and then, even further back, the Doors and the Velvet Underground—could have segued from songs about serial killers and terminal-addiction despair to singing beautiful, tender love songs about summertime? Perry gave me a tape of all these bits and pieces of music that the band had. It had this feeling like our entire culture was in there, distilled into one idea, and that idea became Nothing’s Shocking.

PERKINS: Nothing’s Shocking was a combination of everything in the world today. Even back then, there was reality TV when [notorious serial killer] Ted Bundy was representing himself in court.

JERDEN: Perry has always been interested in the dark side, and with Ted Bundy, I don’t think you can get any darker than that. He gave me this video of Ted Bundy, and he said that he wanted to use some of the dialogue, so we worked it in. They were going through a really tough time personally. Dave Navarro was still having a rough time [with his mother’s murder]. And there were tensions between Eric and Perry.

AVERY: Our relationship deteriorated into an unspoken standoff; it was kind of like the Cold War, where both sides knew that all-out war would be devastating. It created this weird détente, this nonverbalized agreement not to escalate. So we never did. It’s surprising, with all the out-of-controlness, that he and I never got physical with each other. We didn’t even yell. In more roundabout, passive ways, we’d say things to hurt each other’s feelings.

NICCOLI: Early on in the band, Eric got drunk one night and tried to pick up on me. We were both really wasted. When I told Perry what happened, he basically stopped liking Eric. Perry just never got past that. He hated him forever because of this stupid incident. I’d kissed him back, but I was just drunk. It was nothing—just stupid puppy-love stuff.

FARRELL: But did she tell you he also went on to confess his undying love for her? That was uncalled for. I’m the kind of guy that doesn’t try to steal girlfriends. C’mon, man, you never try to pick up on your bandmates’ girlfriends—even in rock’n’roll, man. I mean, please.

AVERY: Things got really bad between me and Perry. We had a meeting to figure out the publishing. I wanted it to be split equally between everyone, but Perry wanted 50 percent for writing the lyrics, plus another portion of the remaining 50 percent for the music. Dave, Stephen, and I wound up getting 12.5 percent apiece.

NICCOLI: Perry could argue, “Well, without me, it would have just been a great bass groove in his garage forever.”

JERDEN: I drove to work at the studio one day, and Perry was in his car in the parking lot with Stephen and Dave, and they were pulling out. Perry says, “The band just broke up. There won’t be any record. See ya!”

AVERY: Warner Bros. called an emergency meeting, because Perry said it was his way or no way. We actually broke up for a day. Perry said, “It’s got to be this way, or I’m walking.” And we said, “Let’s walk.” But we compromised and obviously kept going. David made a T-shirt for our next show that had 12.5 PERCENT spray-painted on it.

JERDEN: We finished the record, and then the real trouble began. When we turned it in, someone at Warner Bros. was saying, “We’re concerned about this record. It doesn’t sound like anything else.” It was the time of Guns N’ Roses and the metal-lite thing. And this was before they’d even seen the cover!

STEVEN BAKER: In 1988, nine of the 11 leading record chains refused to carry Nothing’s Shocking because of its cover [which featured a photo of the Farrell /Niccoli sculpture of two naked, Siamese-twin nymphettes].

FARRELL: Well, obviously nudity doesn’t fly well at Walmart.

PERKINS: We had to issue the record covered with brown paper.

BAKER: We [Warner Bros.] financed a video for “Mountain Song,” which contained a few frames of Casey’s bare breasts, and MTV wouldn’t play it. So Perry said he wanted to release it as a single on video. He was like, “Okay, so MTV won’t play my video? Fuck it, we’ll sell it to break even. Let the kids who like us see what we’re doing.” Then he added 20-plus minutes of band footage [Soul Kiss]. It’s commonplace on CDs now.

JERDEN: When the record came out, the mainstream rock press just trashed it. Rolling Stone said, “This band is full of shit.”

FLEA: I remember the first time I heard Nothing’s Shocking. Perry had just finished up recording, and we were on our way to a friend’s house to watch the big Tyson-Spinks fight. On the way there, Perry was like, “Oh, this is my new record, listen to it.” And then I realized what a great, great band they were. It was just a big, weird day. I heard Jane’s music for the first time, Tyson knocked Spinks out in the first round, and then I came home and got the call that [Chili Peppers guitarist] Hillel [Slovak] was dead.

JERDEN: I went into a record store and asked this guy with glasses and a ponytail behind the counter if he had Nothing’s Shocking. And he looked at me and said, “Are you kiddin’? I wouldn’t carry that piece of crap in this store.” I knew then we were either going to make a big belly flop or we were really gonna do something.

NAVARRO: KXLU [at Loyola Marymount University] was the first local station to play our music. The first time I heard us—I think it was the “Mountain Song” demo—you would have thought I was signed up to be on the first civilian flight to the moon. It was just the biggest deal.

FARRELL: The success of R.E.M. really helped what they now call “modern rock”; it helped it catch fire. Suddenly, college radio began to become important to the record industry. One tour we’re playing a club in Phoenix, trying to get paid while this guy is choking our manager and pulling a gun on him. Then [by the Ritual de lo Habitual tour] we’re selling out Madison Square Garden.

BAKER: There were some limitations on the first Jane’s album. We didn’t have a video on MTV, and there weren’t that many [alternative] stations. They didn’t mean as much. They didn’t have the numbers they do now. Nothing’s Shocking did about 200,000 to 250,000.

JERDEN: Nothing’s Shocking eventually found an audience all right [more than a million copies sold]. There’s not one person I talk to today who’s in their thirties who didn’t listen to that record in college. Nevermind was a fucking classic record, and the press has marked that as the beginning of this big change in alternative becoming mainstream. But it wasn’t. Nothing’s Shocking was. It didn’t have the same sales, but it made the same cultural mark—and it made it first.

BROWN: That whole [Seattle] thing came out of Jane’s. There wasn’t anything like us at the time. If Jane’s hadn’t happened, Seattle wouldn’t have happened. The scene was bubbling up, and Soundgarden and Mudhoney were the first ones out there, but they were too paranoid of L.A. [music-business people], and they hesitated and missed the window. Nirvana ended up getting the credit. Jane’s got mired down because we were the first ones cutting through. Even though the sheep in the music industry hated us, they realized that this was happening, so once they didn’t get Jane’s, they started going for all the bands that opened for us, like Soundgarden.

CHRIS CORNELL: I think a lot of people out there [in Seattle] think that rock’n’roll changed in the early ’90s when Nirvana showed up, and everyone had a big hit. But it didn’t really work that way. There were bands like Jane’s Addiction that laid the groundwork. Musically, [Jane’s] had a huge impact on Soundgarden.

HENRY ROLLINS: Jane’s was the only band I saw in those times who had that I-will-follow-them-anywhere type of crowds. There were a lot of great bands around at that time, but Jane’s had this tribal thing happening with their fans. It was very powerful.

FLEA: Without a doubt, to me, they are the most important rock band of the ’80s.

“THREE DAYS” (1988)

“I’m either going to be a famous artist or a famous waitress.” —Xiola Blue (Ben is Dead magazine)

NICCOLI: Perry wrote a song called “Xiola” for the Psi Com album. She was Perry’s girlfriend before we met. She was maybe 13 or 14 when Perry met her. She was this really colorful, crazy, risk-taking, artsy girl who was a lot of fun to be around.

FARRELL: Well, I guess the word that people would probably use for her is precocious. When I first met her, she was wearing a chartreuse and yellow dress, and her hair was green and in dreadlocks. And I think she was wearing yellow lipstick and yellow tights, and she had very light freckles and a very pale face. She was the kind of girl who looked like a 1920s cigarette ad, except in vivid ultra color.

BAINTER: Xiola came back from the East Coast to visit Casey and Perry, and they had a long weekend. Xiola had her hair in braids, and she influenced Perry to pierce his nose and to wear his hair in braids, too.

NICCOLI: We all had a physical relationship—me, Perry, and Xiola. She spent three days with us, hence the song “Three Days.” We got high and danced with each other and made love and listened to beautiful music. Made flower bouquets. It was really romantic. We had a room we called the “Love Garden” decorated with plants and tapestries and candles. Xiola was so colorful and creative, but also a hard-core heroin addict. She was a trust-fund baby. Friends found her overdosed in her apartment in New York. She was only 19 years old.

FARRELL: When she died, it was just kind of a jolt. An electric jolt.

BAINTER: Perry was devastated. It was like the first wake-up call—”Oh, maybe all this fun with drugs isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

NICCOLI: We did the sculpture for the Ritual de lo Habitual cover in honor of Xiola. It’s Perry, me, and Xiola, like we’re these abstract bodies lying on a bed. Xiola’s family is so opposed to anything related to Jane’s Addiction. Perry talked up the Ritual album cover, where he’s in bed with two lovers at the same time, and one of them is their daughter, who’s dead. It really made her family angry.

FORREST: Far be it for me, of all people, to be sounding like an old fogy, but celebrating drugs and sex is going to have some dark fallout—I can guarantee you.

“JUANA’S ADICCION” (1989-91)

“Señores y señoras, nosotros tenemos mas influencia con sus hijos que to tiene. Pero los queremos. Creado y regalo de Los Angeles, Juana’s Adiccíon.” [“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have more influence over your children than you do. But we love them. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Jane’s Addiction.”]

FARRELL: That’s Cindy Lair at the beginning of Ritual de lo Habitual. She was the Latin Marilyn Monroe. We met her, and I thought, “Holy Mother, this girl is just gorgeous.” I actually wrote it out, but I don’t know how to speak Spanish fluently.

JERDEN: It’s a ballsy way to open an album. It’s like, “We have your kids.”

FARRELL: The theme of Ritual? Well, uh, I guess it’s pretty self-explanatory. We were having a lot of sex. In those days, I pretty much would run away from people to hang out with my partner—a partner or two—and have some fun. And [the album] was a reflection of it. I like to build things on the run. It’s a certain time of your life, and you’re in a certain state of mind, and if you can grab the things around you and place them together, they start to tell a story. So I guess that was the story of my life right there. We came up with the title when we were doing seven shows at the John Anson Ford Theatre. I think Casey and I came up with “Ritual of the Habitual” for that particular event. I thought it was funny.

JERDEN: We were supposed to start recording Ritual in June or July, but because of his rift with Eric, Perry just didn’t show up for weeks. We started recording without him. Eventually, Eric and Perry decided they would just come in at different times to do their stuff.

BAKER: They played as a band on the first record. With the second record, it was more like they were laying down their parts separately.

NAVARRO: I found out recently that we were in such poor condition that we had to stop and take a break for several months.

FARRELL: Was it me that time out had to be taken for? Casey was really sick, and she had to be taken to rehab, and she wouldn’t go unless I went with her. Maybe that’s where this break comes from.

NAVARRO: I have absolutely no recollection. I couldn’t even tell you who was in bad shape, but I’m certain I was one of the culprits.

FARRELL: Me, too.

AVERY: I was clean at this point. I just had this sense of why am I even in this band anymore? What’s the point? This just doesn’t have much to do with me anymore. I felt so apart from the rest of them.

JERDEN: There was one magical day when I got them all together and we cut “Three Days.” I set the whole band up, they played it, and that version is what’s on the record, note for note.

NAVARRO: My memory of recording Ritual lasts about five minutes. In my head, we spent five minutes in the studio.

JERDEN: After we finished Nothing’s Shocking, I got a call from Warner Bros. saying, “We’re very concerned about this record.” And I’ll be damned if I didn’t get the same call after the second record.

FARRELL: I turned in the cover artwork, and they said, “Oh, boy, here we go again!” [Warner/Reprise CEO] Mo Ostin and [Warner Bros. Records CEO] Lenny [Waronker] said people were getting arrested for selling albums that any local law-enforcement type decided was pornographic. They said retailers were so cautious that the record could wind up selling 1,000 copies.

BAKER: We came up with this idea of printing the First Amendment on a separate cover. Few people bought it. Most fans bought Perry’s original version.

FARRELL: I only agreed to do a second cover if they’d guarantee to run the original uncensored.

JERDEN: When the label told us that “Been Caught Stealing” was going to be the single, we were surprised. I hate to classify it as a novelty song, but we just considered it a fun track. We were adding some vocals to it one day, and Perry’s dog was trying to get into the vocal booth with him because one of her toys was in there. She happened to bark on cue, and we kept it.

TED GARDNER: Ritual was the [album] that took off. The commercial success stemmed from “Been Caught Stealing,” the single. That was the only [Jane’s] single that made it to radio in any mainstream daytime airplay. It was one of those quirky little songs. No one really took any notice of it until Perry said, “Hey, let’s do a video for this song.” It was timing.

JOHN NORRIS: Back then, the word alternative did sort of mean something, and that sure as hell was an alternative to everything else MTV was playing at the time. There was drag in it, played for laughs, years before the Foo Fighters did it. There were no chicks with big, sprayed hair. And you’ve got your lead singer, who you’re supposed to see, wearing a stocking on his face. There was something in the air, and Jane’s was pushing the boundaries. The network played the hell out of it.

NICCOLI: When Perry got the first draft of the “Been Caught Stealing” video [that I directed], he called me and said it was horrible and it sucked and that I had ruined his career. When I heard we’d been nominated [for MTV’s Best Alternative Video], Perry didn’t want to go [to the Video Music Awards]. He didn’t feel the need for the fanfare; he’d rather stay home and smoke crack. I wanted to go, because I worked really hard, and I heard [their manager] Ted Gardner would accept the award on behalf of “Jane’s Addiction,” and it triggered something in me, like “Why would I want him, who doesn’t even respect what I do, to accept an award for something I worked so hard on?”

PERKINS: We should’ve been together in one place at one time [for the MTV Awards] and gone up as a band. But there were communication failures, no focus, no sharp intention. It was scattered, and it was shown right there on national TV.

FARRELL: I was nice and high. I just didn’t feel like getting out of the house; it wasn’t that important to me, the whole attitude of MTV and what it stood for. Casey wanted to go, so I said, “Have a good time.” I didn’t watch the show, but eventually I saw a clip. She went up there pretty loaded.

NORRIS: I call it the “train wreck.” But it was entertaining. She was ranting about Perry and what a genius he was while Navarro was trying to stick his tongue down her throat.

NICCOLI: Perry disappeared the day before the show with some chick he’d picked up at a 7-11. He saw the show sitting in her bed. That’s why I made such a fool out of myself when I accepted the award. I was so drunk and sad about Perry. I don’t remember Dave kissing me. He was pretty out of it himself. I was in a total blackout. I’m still really embarrassed, but, oh well, it’s only rock’n’roll!

GARDNER: It was decided that the band would tour and then Jane’s Addiction would break up and go their separate ways. That was between the band and myself. No one else knew. So we all picked the places we wanted to go—Australia, New Zealand, Yugoslavia, Vienna. We played Rome at Easter and stayed in this quaint, beautiful hotel two blocks from the Vatican. In the café next door, they were selling espresso and heroin, which was kind of interesting.

PERKINS: The Ritual tour ended at Lollapalooza, and that was the end of the band, basically. Communication between Perry and Eric was gone.

FARRELL: The tour behind Ritual was half the reason we wound up unable to stand each other.

PERKINS: We’d come to L.A. to do shows but wouldn’t sleep here for more than a week. We did three nights at the [Hollywood] Palladium and then kept touring. Came back and did four more at Universal Amphitheatre. More touring. All in support of Ritual. It may have broken the band internationally, but it may have also broken the band’s spirit.

ALTERNATIVE NATION (1991)

NAVARRO: I think of Perry as the godfather of alternative rock. I call him “the Don.”

JIM ROSE: At that time, there was nobody more in tune with alterna-America. That guy’s ear was so firmly to the ground you’d need more than a Q-tip to clean it.

FARRELL: Lollapalooza was really a party. The concept is just throwing a party with you as the host. So what are you going to have for the people there? You have one day of their time. And you have a field or someplace that will allow you to rent it. It’s really no different from any of the other parties we would throw in Los Angeles, except it’s now become a macrocosm of them. It’s the same attitude.

GARDNER: [Jane’s] were due to play the Reading Festival [on their last tour], but Perry lost his voice, and we couldn’t play. Stephen Perkins and I still went [to England], and we met up with Marc Geiger from Triad Artists Agency [who represented Jane’s Addiction]. Marc and I were lamenting the fact that America did not have a music festival along the lines of Reading. So we came back from Europe for the American leg of the [Jane’s] tour, and Marc brought up the idea, “Why don’t we invite a bunch of our friends to play on the tour and create something like Reading.” Marc Geiger planted the seed. Perry watered it, christened it, and when it popped up it was Lollapalooza.

GLORIA: Perry approached me and Mike Stewart about doing Lollapalooza with him—when he’d just had the idea. We had dinner at Tommy Tang’s [restaurant], and me and Mike were looking at him like he’s a total nut. Of course, millions of dollars later….

GEHMAN: I can definitely see how Perry would have been inspired to start Lollapalooza, coming from places like Scream, which always had really diverse bills. There’d be some total punk band, some speed-metal band, some band that was kind of arty and melodic, all playing on the same night. He knew it would work, and he took it to the bigger, national level.

ROLLINS: I had a great time. It was wonderful to play and then get to see the Butthole Surfers and Ice-T back-to-back, and then later on see Jane’s Addiction—every night.

ROSE: We [the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow] were probably our nation’s first beloved “Jackasses.” The kids used to faint. We’d call them “falling ovations.” That particular era was the debut of snorting a condom in the nose, pulling it out the mouth, putting it in the mouth, and blowing it out the nose. We had the amazing Mr. Lifto, who did his unconventional weight-lifting act. He lifted incredible amounts of weight with his ears, nose, tongue, nipples, and the part of him that was most a “mister.” Before Lollapalooza, it was very difficult to get a gig in the U.S. because promoters are less likely to take a risk on the unknown. But I got the call from Perry, and it was all about his belief in what we were doing artistically and how it would work perfectly with what he was planning. I’m talking to you from my home in Maui right now, and I guarantee you that prior to meeting Perry Farrell my only goals were a pop-out couch and a toaster.

GEHMAN: Oh, God, the Jim Rose Circus was better than most of the bands on that tour.

ROSE: We debuted an act on Lolla ’92 where a guy would thread seven feet of tubing into his stomach via the nose. And on the outside end of that tube was a clear plastic cylinder. We’d fill that cylinder with the most god-awful concoctions, pump it into his stomach, have him bounce around a little to mix it up, and then pump it out of his stomach. Because most of the concoction was beer, we called it Bile Beer. We’d pour it into glasses and offer it to the audience. Basically, we offered throw-up. One day, Chris Cornell showed up and drank it. Well, that made tons of press. And the next day, Eddie Vedder shows up and drinks it. Then Al Jourgensen from Ministry. Flea drank it. Each time one of these people drank it, there would be massive amounts of press and hundreds of kids would be jumping onstage to drink it, too. It finally narrowed down, in the bile-guzzling derby, to Eddie and Al, who would come on daily and have a chugfest to see who could outdrink the other. At the end of the tour, Eddie was ahead by about a quart.

FARRELL: I liked walking the grounds of Lolla, passing through the art gallery, and seeing the chair that was made out of nails. Then I’d go through the film tent or watch people listen to poetry. I remember bungee-jumping while Soundgarden were on. And, of course, having sex during the day is always exciting.

GARDNER: In ’91, there was an element of risk. It was like, “God, what if this is a dismal failure?” In ’92, we were getting offered Corvettes. There was a promoter that said, “Play my venue, and I’ll get you all Corvettes.”

JAMES IHA: Lollapalooza ’94 was one of the coolest rock bills I’ve ever played on: the Beastie Boys, the Breeders, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars, L7, Boredoms, and Green Day. Stereolab and the Flaming Lips on the second stage! I have memories of the Beasties and Tibetan monks playing basketball. Everyone was welcome to play, although most of the bands weren’t that athletic. I certainly never expected to see Nick Cave at the free-throw line.

RANALDO: In some ways, the tour [Sonic Youth] headlined in ’95 killed Lollapalooza, because I don’t think it was as successful as some of the other tours. Maybe it got to be too much to sustain it. Maybe Perry got tired of dealing with it.

GARDNER: It depends on how you want to measure success, but we never had an unsuccessful year.

FARRELL: Finally, Ted just stopped caring. Or I just stopped caring, by my behavior. The worst thing that happened for me was that I lost the respect of the people who worked around me. And they decided to make all the decisions without me in mind. I had no chance to balance the show out. That’s when the art got lost.

GARDNER: We got lazy. We got successful. We got fat. We forgot what the core of Lollapalooza was, which was the music. We started to look at how to make it bigger. “Can we get the Beatles to headline? Oh no, one of them’s dead.” Things like Ozzfest and Lilith Fair took the traveling-circus concept and fine-tuned it to a specific demographic.

CORNELL: Booking Metallica had a huge impact on the fraternal aspect of Lollapalooza. The band was always wanting to hang out, but their crew was putting police tape across everything. So you couldn’t walk in and say, “How’s it going?” because it’s fucking police-taped off!

ADAM SCHNEIDER: Perry left William Morris [Agency] and Lollapalooza in a very public dispute over the booking of Metallica to headline Lollapalooza in 1996. Then he went out and did the ENIT Festival that same year with Porno for Pyros and Love and Rockets co-headlining. [Love and Rockets, as well as Black Grape and Buju Banton, later pulled out of ENIT; due to poor ticket sales, many of the dates were canceled.] All the money Perry made on Lollapalooza ’96, he poured into ENIT, because he felt strongly about putting together a lineup that he wanted to see. It was with total respect to Metallica. Metallica are their own thing. It just wasn’t the Lollapalooza aesthetic defined by Perry.

FARRELL: I’m not interested in the money. I prefer to draw from the spirit world.

RICHMAN: Perry would put his own cash into anything he believed in. He’s succeeded, he’s failed, but he’s always put himself out there.

GEHMAN: Lollapalooza just became the corporate co-opting of something that I had basically grown up with and participated in. It was good for what it was, but eventually it became like a parody. I mean, it was literally parodied by The Simpsons—Homerpalooza.

FARRELL: I wish I’d have been one of the cartoons. They didn’t even get me in the episode.

“STOP” (1991-96)

AVERY: I was so fed up, I finally decided to split. I really didn’t have any feeling for it anymore. I just felt so uncomfortable being so unliked. And I was nearly clean. I’d watched something that was really close to my heart grow into this machine that was created by Perry and the record company and Triad. So I said, “Dave, I’m splitting.” And he went, “Oh, okay, cool. Me too.”

FARRELL: We just didn’t take care of each other.

NICCOLI: Our film Gift was meant to be a full-length feature film. We just named it Gift because it was like our gift to the fans. It had no structure, no real story line. We had no script. It was a lot of documentary and fantasy mixed together. We went to Mexico and filmed our wedding in a place called Catemaco; it’s a big witchcraft town. We got married by a Santería princess. We had to be cleansed before. They roll an egg over your body. Then they break the egg open and if it’s black, it means that there’s evil in you. We hired these two goons who presented themselves as seasoned filmmakers, but they were just fans who really hadn’t done anything. It ended up a nightmare, because we didn’t really get along with them. They kept trying to say it was their movie. I was on drugs and not in my right mind, and neither was Perry. By the time the film was finished, we weren’t together anymore. It just took so much out of us.

NAVARRO: I was not only self-destructive, but destructive of everything around me. I regret my attitude and my behavior back then, but I don’t regret the outcome so much, because that was in ’91, ’92. Everything happens for a reason. Perry and Stephen got to do Porno for Pyros; Eric and I went on to do Deconstruction, which was a very experimental album. And after that, I joined the Chili Peppers.

FLEA: The whole time we played with Dave, I felt like we were adequate. We were doing the job, but we didn’t really connect a lot. The thing that made the Chili Peppers great was the fact that we just improvised like crazy. We’d get together to rehearse and jam for three hours. That’s really the force of our band. Dave wasn’t into doing that. He wanted to play songs; he didn’t really wanna jam.

NAVARRO: They have a great work ethic, and they’re spiritually minded, healthy fellas. I’ve been asked, you know, “How do you feel about making one of the least successful Chili Peppers records [1995’s One Hot Minute]?” And my answer has always been, “Not only do I love that record, but it is, to this day, the most successful record that I have ever been a part of, commercial-wise.” When I listen to that record, I hear myself growing as a musician, and I couldn’t have had a better group of guys to learn from.

FLEA: We were playing at the Grand Olympic Auditorium [in Los Angeles] when I was playing bass in Jane’s a few years later, and all of a sudden, I felt this amazing energy coming out of Dave. He was on fire. Just going crazy and playing his ass off. Completely putting his whole heart and soul into it, and I realized I never felt that from him in the Chili Peppers. I just don’t think he felt comfortable enough to really let loose in the Chili Peppers, whereas with Jane’s, that was really his home.

PERKINS: The first Porno for Pyros record was the result of three months of playing in my garage. There are some great songs on that record: “Black Girlfriend,” “Packin’ .25″—but it wasn’t the next Jane’s Addiction. We wrote the second record, Good God’s Urge, in Tahiti and Fiji and Mexico. It was less hard rock, but I thought the songs were wonderful, too. We just never put the time and energy into pushing it. We never toured real hard and never got involved in trying to break it.

FARRELL: Porno was more degraded than Jane’s. I had so much fun in Porno. I was close to everybody. It was the first time [guitarist] Pete DiStefano was ever involved in a big rock situation. And he lost his mind. It was very exciting to be there as we gently lost our minds together. But eventually I just disappeared.

“RELAPSE” (1997-2001)

RICHMAN: The people want Jane’s.

PERKINS: Dave and Flea started hanging out with us and helping out with Porno after Pete DiStefano was diagnosed with testicular cancer shortly after Good God’s Urge. Knock on wood, he survived, and he’s doing great. It all started when we did a song together [“Hard Charger”] for the [1997] Howard Stern movie Private Parts.

AVERY: Perry called [to ask me to rejoin], so we got together for lunch. I was looking at it more as an opportunity to heal the rift on a personal level. I wanted to say, “Let’s each agree to just go our separate way as friends.” It was going that way until he asked me if I wanted to come back; when I said no, he just flipped out. He was so angry. And I said, “I’m really sorry it’s going this way, Perry. I’d hoped that we could part as friends today.” And he said, “We were never friends!”

FARRELL: He knew very well why I was asking him to lunch—to invite him back to play and tour with us again. He could have said politely, “It’s not going to happen.” He could have saved me the heartache of winding my hopes up and then embarrassing me at the end of the meal by saying no. But it was Eric’s mind game to see me squeal and squirm. That’s kind of the wrong time to say to a guy, “Hey, I know I just crushed you, but let’s be friends.” Ever see a cop beat the crap out of a guy, and then when he’s putting him in the car he says, “Watch your head”? Fuck you.

PERKINS: We just decided, “Let’s do Jane’s Addiction with Flea.”

FLEA: They asked me [to play bass on the “Relapse” tour]. I tried to be as faithful as possible to what Eric did. I didn’t want to interject my own personality into it at all. It was like being asked to play in the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Led Zeppelin or Joy Division or some great epic band. I wanted to honor that. I didn’t want to change it at all.

SCHNEIDER: Relapse was an aptly named tour.

NAVARRO: I don’t remember much of it.

FLEA: There was some severe, crazy decadence going on. It started off being absolutely incredible—some of the best feelings and shows and energy that I’ve ever felt in my life, complete power. But it ended up being sporadic, then terrible. Because of drugs, it became a complete fucking mess. The focus got diluted. People still liked it, but I just knew what it could’ve been because I knew what it was in the beginning of that tour, and it was a mighty, mighty thing.

FARRELL: I have a friend named Aaron Chason. We’ve been friends since ’91. I worked on Gift with him. We were trippy friends. Aaron disappeared and then resurfaced, having graduated from yeshiva, which is Talmudic studies. In 1999, he came to me proclaiming Jubilee, which is a 50-year cycle where we are encouraged to free slaves and bring people together through massive parties and gatherings. And he figured I was the guy for the mission. He set out to teach me about Jubilee, and we went on to study Torah and Kabbalah. And when the hour of Jubilee struck in 2000, ironically, that brought the band back together to record. I’d gotten into electronic music and computer software and had written a solo album, and I wanted to go out and proclaim freedom, and I needed the best band I could think of to do a tour, and that was Jane’s Addiction. So we got back together for a tour [in 2001], and we ended up raising money and freeing people out of Sudan, people that were in captivity.

PERKINS: We raised $120K on the Jubilee tour and took it into Africa and freed slaves, actually bought slaves, $4K a slave. Used Jane’s money and did something, and I feel like we can do it again. Let’s do something for the environment.

STRAYS (2001-03)

AVERY: I think the power that we had in the ’80s was that people could feel religiously about the band, and I don’t know if that will hold up as well if it’s marketed in a way that’s just like more of the usual rock hype. I don’t know whether or not it will speak to people. We’ll see. I would just hope that the band continues to make some decisions with at least a nod to what it used to be and what it means to people.

NICCOLI: It’s different from what I thought Perry would end up doing with his life. I just didn’t think he had to reunite the band. Not that it’s a bad thing. It’s none of my business, but it’s just a weird thing to me. I see Perry as being somebody who might have evolved into something really unique and different without ever having to go back.

FARRELL: Personally, I care a lot less about the past than I do about the future. I only care about the past if I was part of something great. Now that turns me on. And this much I can safely say: I feel in my heart I was part of something great.

JERDEN: [New Jane’s Addiction member] Chris Chaney is an amazing bass player. What’s interesting is Chris Chaney played with Alanis Morissette, and now Eric Avery is playing with Alanis Morissette. They kind of switched spots. But I’m going to be honest with you. To me, Jane’s Addiction is Jane’s Addiction when it’s got Eric Avery in it.

BOB EZRIN: Let’s say they’re pretty well drug-free. Each one of them has his own peculiar, individual personality and character. And they’d spent so much time apart that it’s really pronounced. I’m sure it was like that for a lot of other bands, like the Eagles or Aerosmith. When they come back together, it’s difficult defining a common point of view or even a common interest.

FARRELL: I’m not a guy who believes in 100 percent abstinence unless you want to give a blessing. I’ve offered up certain chemicals as a sacrifice, but that’s mysticism. I still drink and smoke [marijuana]. But I moderate. I would never be drunk when I have to take care of my kid. I had a little boy [Yobel], and there is no room for that when you have a kid who is helpless and needs to be taken care of.

NAVARRO: I’m really looking forward to starting a family. [My fiancée] Carmen Electra has been an amazing, grounding element in my life. She’s just done nothing but bring positive energy into my life; in a lot of ways, I’ve changed spiritually as a result of this relationship.

CARMEN ELECTRA: I want a medium-size wedding. My last [marriage, to Dennis Rodman] was what it was, but I want to have a real one. I want this one to be very traditional. I want to do it right this time.

EZRIN: My job on [the new Jane’s Addiction album] Strays was to bring a sort of commonality to the process and make everyone think it was a group effort again, and not just a bunch of solo projects trying to be strung together. And that wasn’t hard at all. They are so naturally in love with each other.

FARRELL: Working with Bob Ezrin on the new album meant a lot to me, because I knew that Dave loved Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which Ezrin produced. Dave learned The Wall [as a kid]. He can play the whole album, so I knew he’d instantly have a lot of respect for him. I knew we’d be in good hands.

ROSE: I still have all the faith in the world that Perry will create some-thing very innovative for this upcoming season, although it’s still a little murky what that might be. I grossed my first million dollars on a kid who had six piercings and three tattoos. That’s your neighbor today. I couldn’t give a ticket away for that.

FARRELL: A musician spreads his message through microphones and singing and records and television and now computers. Now the phone is linked to the computer and TV. I’m interested in linking all of them in a live situation and a festival situation. That’s where I’ve put my time and effort for the last years—trying to get a festival fully interactive and fully wired. That’s what’s going to be different about Lollapalooza. I’ve put it back together; I don’t want to be last in line on something that I helped create.

ROBERT HARVEY: I don’t know much about the history of [Lollapalooza]. I’m just into seeing Jane’s Addiction. My bass player got me into them. They’re massive, yeah.

PERKINS: To me, the future of Jane’s Addiction is better than it ever was. At 18, I thought we would be the next Led Zeppelin. We’ll make ten records. We’ll do this our whole lives. Here I am at 35, and I’m still in Jane’s Addiction, so I guess in a way it came true. Each of us had a vision. Back then, there was a sharp focus on those visions, but it diluted quickly. Now we can hold the focus.

NAVARRO: It’s 2003, and we’re in the best shape we’ve ever been in as a band and as friends. I believe that everything happens for a reason. And that we wouldn’t be here in the best shape of our lives and ready to embark on an amazing tour if we hadn’t broken up in 1992. So in certain aspects, I’m grateful. We have a chance to correct some of the wrongs that we did to each other.

FARRELL: My father got to see me perform a few times before he passed away. It’s funny, ’cause I used to whip my cock out all the time, and it’s always like, “Fuck the world, that’s how it goes.” So one night, there’s my dad, and it’s the first time he’s gonna see me, and I’m thinking, “Am I gonna kinda shy away from this now, or am I gonna just do my thing?” And I said, “Man, I gotta do it.” So out goes my cock, and I’m rockin’ out, and I put on a really energetic performance, and after I get offstage, I see my dad come flying at me with a towel. He put it around me because I was sopping wet. He wasn’t trying to hide my nakedness. He was putting the towel around me because he didn’t want me to catch cold. ■

Additional reporting by AnnaMaria Andriotis, Andy Downing, and Amanda Petrusich

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the February 2005 issue of SPIN.

When Bikini Kill founder Kathleen Hanna was kick-starting the riot grrrl movement, her idea of “high-tech” rarely went beyond smoking pot and listening to the Slits on vinyl. Although Hanna, 36, has embraced technology for her dance-punk outfit Le Tigre, she relies on fan mail more than iTunes when looking for new music. “I totally go out and buy stuff when people tell me to,” says Hanna. “Every time I’ve gotten a recommendation from a fan, it’s always been good.”

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CAROLE KING TAPESTRY (Ode/A&M, 1971)

“This must have been my mom’s record. I think I was four or five, and I remember sitting in the back of a station wagon, looking out the window and listening to ‘So Far Away’ while waving to my best friend Becky Downing.”

BLONDIE EAT TO THE BEAT (Chrysalis, 1979)

“I remember driving in a Rabbit to Baltimore and listening to this and Squeeze’s ‘Black Coffee in Bed’ and having my mind blown. We had a precursor to HBO, called Super TV, when I lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and they played all the videos, in album order, from Eat to the Beat. My best friend Angela and I sat and watched the whole thing and were just like, ‘Whoa.’ We were 12 or 13 at the time, and back then we didn’t even know what videos were.”

YAZ UPSTAIRS AT ERIC’S (Sire, 1982)

“I used to hang in friends’ basements in the ’80s and listen to music. That’s how I got into Soft Cell and Echo & the Bunnymen. But Upstairs at Eric’s was my favorite shit. I was obsessed with Yaz. I didn’t have this record—I didn’t actually have very many records in junior high and high school—but I’d hear it at teen dance clubs. Ten years ago, I got into it again because they had it on the jukebox at a club I worked at in D.C. as a dancer.”

FRIGHTWIG FASTER, FRIGHTWIG, KILL! KILL! (Caroline, 1986)

“My first band, Viva Knievel, actually played with them once. Frightwig was just a hugely influential band on Bikini Kill. There are lots of radical political moments on this album—really feminist, but it was also really funny and really beautiful. There’s this one skit about this fucked-up rich valley girl who loses her Amex checks and is trying to get new ones. There’s also a song on it about hating some stupid groupie who’s fucking around with someone’s boyfriend—stuff probably from the band members’ lives.”

THE SLITS CUT (Island, 1979)

“Obviously. Especially the song, ‘Typical Girls.’ I remember getting stoned and listening to Cut in my apartment in Olympia, and being, like, ‘This is the most bugged-out shit I’ve ever heard.’ Really theoretically smart and sonically full. Bikini Kill really loved bands like the Slits and the Raincoats and ESG. ESG’s Come Away With ESG really influenced Le Tigre.”

PUBLIC ENEMY IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK (Def Jam, 1988)

“I had this album on cassette and used to jog to it while I was on tour with Bikini Kill. I had a lot of nervous energy, and this just lit a fire under me. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s possible. Making a near-perfect record is totally possible.'”

BLUE ANGEL BLUE ANGEL (Polydor, 1980)

“This was Cyndi Lauper’s first band. I bought the vinyl right when I moved to New York in 1997. Her voice is just incredible. I found it at a record store that had ten copies, and I bought all ten. I have four sealed copies left, and I’m keeping ’em for when mine wear out or if I meet someone who’s really into singing. There’s a certain pitch that she hits and I start crying and I can’t stop and I don’t know why. Something about the truth in her voice.”

BRATMOBILE THE REAL JANELLE (Kill Rock Stars, 1994)

“I was at probably their first show, when they opened up for the Melvins. It was scary—guys in the audience were threatening to kill them and stuff. I was a huge fan, though, and played with them all the time. We were on the same label, so any time they put out a record, the first thing we did was get our hands on it. This record is really well-produced, and Allison [Wolfe]’s singing is really good.”

LAURYN HILL THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL (Ruffhouse, 1998)

“I bought this at [New York hip-hop store] Fat Beats when I turned 30, and it was really inspirational. She does it all—she sings, she raps, she produces. It has all these references to Stevie Wonder and old reggae songs that I love. Again, a close-to-perfect, classic record.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the March 2002 issue of SPIN.

Alanis Morissette is at one with the universe. Thank you, Canada. She wrote her new album, Under Rug Swept, in her native land on electric guitar in addition to her usual piano, and it’s a welcome return to pop after 1998’s murky, PMS-ing Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. Apparently, the rock gods have been smiling on the 27-year-old alt-pop queen. In the past year, Morissette worked out differences with her label, Madonna’s Maverick; performed at a slew of charity concerts (pro-choice, clean energy, etc.); overhauled her personal life; and toured the Middle East. She even did a Gap ad. But, we’re happy to report, she still says fuck a lot.

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SPIN: This record is much catchier than your last. Sonically, it’s closer to 1995’s Jagged Little Pill.
Alanis Morissette: Yeah, it’s more structured, which feels good. After the big overwhelm of Jagged Little Pill, Supposed was like my way of saying, “Fuck you, leave me alone, I just need to insulate myself”—not adhere to any structure or expectation that I felt coming at me at 100 miles per hour. There was a lot of pressure. I thought, “If this is what the artistic process has now become, take me off your mailing list.”

You’ve said songwriting is scary because it shakes up your life. Did this album do that?

Yeah. I hadn’t been writing at all before I started this record, for like nine months or something—not in my journal, nothing. To me, writing is like talking with God. So whenever I stop, I feel a separation from myself, from joy. I was feeling numb. I was in a relationship that I wasn’t sure was going to be continuing, but I really wanted it to. As soon as I started writing again, I knew that I had to put my seat belt on. I broke up with my boyfriend, and over the next eight months, I changed some friends, got a place in Canada, changed my bandmates, changed my dynamic with my manager, renegotiated my contract with Maverick, reinvestigated my spirituality, and wrote a foreword for a book. Started painting again. But the biggest [change] was my romantic relationship.

Speaking of which, was there any stuff that didn’t make your list in the new song “21 Things I Want in a Lover”?
Oh yeah! I have, like, 673 things. I wrote a new list the other day. It has to be updated after every guy. [Laughs] I want someone who can be a complete dork with me and have no shame and be really disgusting. Because life is just so fucking short. Without a map, I wander aimlessly. And infatuation just blurs the whole thing for me. So I can go, “Oh, spirituality is very important to me, and this person, no matter how much I want to fuck him right now, does not believe in God.” That list has saved my ass on a few occasions.

Are you interested in casual sex these days, or does it feel like that drains your mojo?
There’s a part of me that feels 53 years old and would just love to be in a committed relationship, and then there’s a whole other part of me that is very 27. I’m still on an adventure, I’m still investigating, I’m still defining who I am in every moment. I believe you can be in a relationship and be really free. I have a sense in the back of my mind of wanting to have kids a little later and stuff, but I’m not having kids anytime soon. These are the things that I write about in my journal. I have a little more writing to do, obviously.

Why did you decide to do a Gap ad?
My initial response when they called was, “What about sweatshops, and why would I do a Gap ad?” They said my payment would go to a charity of my choice, and immediately I went, “Oooh.” And then they said it was going to be a Supertramp song, and the theme of the commercial would be the encouragement of generosity and contributing. Then they said that Liz Phair and Macy Gray were doing it, and I love those guys. After investigating about sweatshops, I decided to do it. I think maybe some people might not know what led to my decision. I’m a capitalist/socialist/communist—I believe everyone should be allowed to be entrepreneurial… but it would be great if there were a cap on everyone’s incomes. You can make this many millions per year, and the rest goes back into the world. So that’s why I thought this was cool—money going from a corporation to a charity.

Do you have a salary cap?
Yeah, definitely. I give at least 10 percent of my income. I’d like to build that up to 20.

Do you ever think, “I gotta show my belly and get the TRL kids”?
In the mid-’90s, I was responding to the patriarchy and my anger and frustration and my eyes rolling, so I was like: overalls, jeans, not showing my body. Having struggled with body image and eating disorders, I was specifically not going to be overtly sexual. In the past couple years, I’ve started to tap into embracing my womanhood—but without feeling like I have to adhere to some stereotype of how a woman should look. There’s a part of me that loves glamour, and there’s another part that could go camping for seven months and wear the same thing every day and be dirty and disgusting and feel happy doing that. So to me, it’s just fun. And it’s also only one piece of the pie of what I present.

What do you think of the sexuality Britney Spears puts across?
There is an element of power in it. I’d just love to see the other pieces. I just miss them. Your body is what it is. All shapes and sizes are sexy to me, anyway. It’s fun to see skin, but what about the rest of you? Why aren’t those pieces being shared?

Are you sad there aren’t more female songwriters on the radio now?
The pendulum swinging is always so funny to me. I just watch it swing back and forth. I’m somewhere walking between it, hoping I won’t get bashed by it.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the May 2000 issue of SPIN.

Slipknot have a motto: People = Shit. It’s a straightforward enough sentiment, but sometimes Iowa’s most famous metal nonet like to reinforce the theory with visual aids.

“Shawn [Crahan, percussionist] decided to take a shit onstage in Virginia Beach last night,” drummer Joey Jordison says. “I’m the only one down with that, so he threw a turd at me. When I went to take a shower, I had this big shit smeared on my sock.” Jordison (a.k.a. #1), is loudly discussing feces as he and bandmates Crahan (a.k.a. #6), vocalist Corey Taylor (a.k.a. #8), and bassist Paul Gray (a.k.a. #2) stroll through the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. D.C., where they are scheduled to play a show tonight.

Not surprisingly, the guys are enthralled by the museum’s collection of animal skeletons, stuffed undersea specimens, and ugly, overgrown insects (“I just happen to be fascinated with the bug world,” Crahan says). Slipknot have built a brief but already noteworthy career as connoisseurs of the gross and grotesque.

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To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article was originally published in the May 2006 issue of SPIN.

Two years ago, Red Hot Chili Peppers went to Europe to play in front of the largest crowds of their 20-plus-year career. After surviving numerous personnel changes, drug problems, erratic recordings, relationship dramas, and assorted crises that have broken up countless bands, the Peppers have released back-to-back multiplatinum albums–1999’s Californication and 2002’s By the Way. Against all odds, they had reached genuine superstar status and this jaunt saw them headlining three nights at London’s massive Hyde Park. But for Flea–from day one, the bass-playing yin to singer Anthony Kiedis’ yang–these looked like the last shows he would ever perform with the group.

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“To tell you the truth, I really didn’t think I’d be here right now doing this,” he says, sprawled barefoot on the floor of a sun-dappled practice room—lined with books and classic punk-rock photos and posters—in his idyllic, rambling Malibu home. “A multitude of things had built up, and it just wasn’t a comfortable time. The band had always been a sanctuary for me-—no matter what was going on in my life, the band was a place where I could just be myself and rock. All of a sudden it didn’t feel like that, and I just thought it was time for me to not do it anymore.”

Flea, born Michael Balzary in Australia 43 years ago, is truly the pivot point of the Chili Peppers. With guitarist John Frusciante, he forges the riffs that are the basis of their songs. Alongside drummer Chad Smith, they make up one of rock’s most versatile and powerful rhythm sections, the backbone of the band even at its lowest points. And with his high school friend Kiedis, Flea gives the Chili Peppers a style and soul that has come to symbolize the spirit of latter-day Los Angeles. So while the band has persevered through lineup changes that resemble a game of rock’n’roll musical chairs, Flea’s departure would be serious business indeed.

Eventually, that cloud lifted, the Chili Peppers got back to work, and the result is their ninth studio album, Stadium Arcadium—a 28-song, double-disc set that adds up to some of the the best work of their career. Working once again with longtime producer Rick Rubin, the band returned to the Hollywood house where they recorded their 1991 breakthrough, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and emerged with a record that mixes old-school Chili Peppers funk with mature melodicism—plus a supersize dose of Frusciante’s flamethrower guitar. From the Zeppelin-esque crunch of “Readymade” to the delicate slink of “Hey,” it’s a power-house statement of purpose, an album that Flea describes as “the sum of everything that we are as a band.”

The making of Stadium Arcadium was as notable as the outcome. During the almost yearlong recording process, this notoriously fractious gang of four were able to put aside their differences, their competitiveness, and cohere better than ever. “This time,” says Kiedis, “those egos—and when I say ‘those egos,’ I mean all of us—were feeling decent and confident, respectful, as excited about the other guys’ stuff as we were about our own. If someone came in with a great chord change for a song or a great rhythm or a great groove, by the time it was finished, everybody had jizzed all over it, and it had become a real community piece of property.”

In John Frusciante’s house in the Hollywood Hills, the living room has one piece of furniture, an L-shaped sectional sofa in front of a purple-painted fireplace. The rest of the space is given over to dozens of guitars, thousands of CDs and LPs, and scattered recording equipment. Sheet music for Charlie Parker’s bebop classic “Ornithology” lies open on the floor. (When I enter Flea’s house a few days later, he’s practicing the same song on his trumpet.) Many of the guitar effects, background vocals, and assorted sonic treatments on Stadium Arcadium were recorded in and around this room. After years of heroin and cocaine addiction, Frusciante, 36, looks clear-eyed and healthy (he runs and meditates every day), and his excitement about the new album is palpable, even overwhelming. Since the previous Chili Peppers record, he’s been unable to slow the music pouring out of him—during the band’s time off, he recorded and released no fewer than seven solo albums, and he brought that cascade of ideas back to this project. “The last few [Chili Peppers) albums had, like, 15 songs, and there were maybe four songs with guitar solos,” says Chad Smith. “This time he solos on pretty much every song. When we go out on tour, it’s gonna be the fuckin’ John Frusciante Rock Show!”

Frusciante certainly operates in his own universe—he casually brings up “that which existed in negative existence” or says, “I just resent going through life having my brain telling me what to do all the time.” Dressed in a black T-shirt that reveals his needle-battered arms, with black sweatpants and olive socks, he acknowledges that it was his all-too-human relationship with Flea that almost torpedoed the band. “By the Way was a tense time for me and Flea together,” he says. “We just weren’t really seeing eye-to-eye, and we weren’t really understanding each other.

“Every time we make a record,” Frusciante continues, “I have sort of a concept, and my concept for By the Way was kind of selfish, because it didn’t have a lot to do with where we would come from. I wasn’t really into doing stuff that was funk based or blues based. Things I would describe as not having that would be the Smiths or Siouxsie and the Banshees or the Cure—I wanted to do something along those lines, and I wasn’t very open to things outside of that framework.”

Flea says it wasn’t the musical direction but rather the attitude Frusciante struck that was so problematic. “I felt that what he was doing didn’t warrant any input from me,” he says. “It’s not like I didn’t like what John was doing, ’cause how could I not like what John’s doing? He’s a great musician. But I didn’t feel welcome to express myself naturally. And once I started having that feeling, I just shut down and kinda withdrew from the process, and it wasn’t a happy feeling.” (After our interview, Flea calls to emphasize that “I don’t blame John for that time I was unhappy in the band. It takes two to tango, and it would break my heart if that’s how it came across.”)

Kiedis notes that creative tension is something of a constant for Red Hot Chili Peppers, which is perhaps predictable for a band of strong personalities whose songs grow almost exclusively out of in-studio jams. “Sometimes there’s a bit of confrontation chemistry, which is good for the creative process,” he says. “Sometimes it’s the dark energy in this band, the mental illness that we all have a touch of, that drives us crazy and makes us hurt inside and makes us have to go bang on something until we find a cool beat. There are a lot of different levels to the chemistry—it’s not like there’s this great sense of constant brotherly love. Sometimes it’s the antagonism that really gets the ball rolling. But it’s a fine line between letting that create rather than destroy.”

After playing the 2004 Hyde Park shows and other huge European festivals, Flea remembers sitting in an airport with Frusciante and “feeling a cloud lift between us.” Right then, he knew he wasn’t leaving the band, and the rabid L.A. Lakers fan (Flea blogs about the team for NBA.com) could get back into the game.

“Did you see that Woody Allen movie Match Point?” Flea asks. “There’s one classic line where this chick is talking about some couple, and she goes, ‘Oh, yeah, they’re really doing great—their neuroses really interlock just perfectly.’

“I think that you can get settled into something, and everyone knows his place, and that’s cool,” he continues. “But if you didn’t go through the emotional pain, it wouldn’t be growing and changing, it’d be staying in one place, and we’d probably be a very boring act. We could have made the same record five times in a row, but to have growth, you gotta go through it. Like (P-Funk leader) George Clinton said, if there weren’t any humps, there wouldn’t be any getting over.”

In November, Flea and his girlfriend, model Frankie Rayder, had a baby girl they named Sunny Bebop. The new parents asked Frusciante to be the godfather.

The recording of Stadium Arcadium took awhile. Smith’s son, Cole, who was born when the sessions started, celebrated his first birthday March 28. (“By the time we go on the road, he’s going to be our tour manager,” says Smith.) An album that was supposed to be a quick-hit, 11- or 12-song blast took on a life of its own. The Chili Peppers ultimately completed 38 songs and considered releasing three separate albums—the 28 songs chosen will be spread over two discs titled “Jupiter” and “Mars.”

“I remember when we were, like, an adolescent band,” says Kiedis, “and I heard that Metallica was going into the studio for a year, and then taking another six months to finish, and I was like, ‘What freaks! What could you possibly do for that long?’ But I get it now.”

What caused the marathon? Credit an unexpected outpouring of material and the ambitions of mad scientist John Frusciante. First came the songs. “It was kind of like Christmas every day,” says Kiedis. “I’d get in the car at the end of rehearsal, and I’d stick in the CD that we’d recorded and be like, ‘Wow, I’m not exactly sure what we’re going to do with this, but I know it’s going to be great.’ Every day it was like that, like one gift after another.”

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ recording methodology goes something like this: Frusciante, Flea, and Smith jam every day in the studio, working up bits that any one of them might bring in. “We were getting two and three musical ideas a day,” says Smith, “and most of them were pretty consistent, high-quality stuff.” Once those raw grooves take on a more defined shape, they get a title—written down on a whiteboard—and then Kiedis takes them, tries to fit a melody and lyrics, and works with Rick Rubin to construct a real song.

At this point, the affable Smith’s part is basically done; he was finished with this album almost a year ago. Since then, he’s played on other projects, like the new, Rubin-produced Dixie Chicks album and a solo disc by former Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes, recorded in Smith’s living room. (Only in the upside-down world of the Chili Peppers would the drummer be the band’s steadiest member. “It’s all relative,” says 44-year-old Smith, “but I’m sort of the normal guy.”)

Meanwhile, Frusciante is adding layers of guitars, effects, and background vocals—and this time, he aimed for the stars. The guitarist rattles off inspirations for his work on Stadium Arcadium—from the Wu-Tang Clan to Electric Light Orchestra, from Jimi Hendrix to…Brandy?!

“I realize she’s not really a hip person to mention because of the TV show or whatever, but I’m crazy about that album Afrodisiac,” Frusciante says with absolute sincerity. “Her singing is just so awesome. A lot of the blues things in my playing were coming more from singers like her and Beyonce than from guitar players.”

Despite Smith’s striving for a dense, constantly shifting sound, Rubin says he doesn’t find the album excessive at all. “I don’t feel like it’s challenging the way System of a Down is,” he says, citing another band he has produced. “Even when it’s complicated, it’s really digestible. And there’s a wildness to it, a certain live quality in the air that’s different. Things were kind of musically a little out of control. We realized it was going past the edges, but there was something exciting about that.”

Darkness has fallen in Anthony Kiedis’ Spanish-style house in Beverly Hills. We started speaking late in the afternoon, with Kiedis sipping tea while slung across a leather chair in a small library, but as the sun went down, he made no move to turn on any lights, and now I can hardly see him in the shadows. It’s unclear whether this is the result of his intense focus, some strange head game, or whether, if you’ve seen the things that Kiedis has seen, a small detail like interior lighting is hardly worth noticing.

Stadium Arcadium is the Chili Peppers’ first release since the publication of Kiedis’ best-selling memoir, Scar Tissue, in 2004. Alternately harrowing and hilarious, the book’s drug-consumption-per-page quotient is enough to humble Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs combined. The singer’s account of his lengthy battle with heroin addiction—alongside tales of his hard-partying father, actor Blackie Dammett, and turbulent affairs with actresses, models, and designers, including Ione Skye, Sofia Coppola, Yohanna Logan, and Jaime Rishar—ultimately resembles the lather-rinse-repeat instructions on a bottle of shampoo.

Kiedis, 43, claims that there was nothing cathartic about writing the book. “I had already processed the difficult things—the father stuff, the drug stuff, the self-loathing stuff, all of the psychologically intense and debilitating aspects of my life—before I did it in a more comprehensive body of work,” the singer says. “I don’t think I’d be of a mind to write a book if I hadn’t already dealt with all the major issues that were destroying me.”

Kiedis says people approach him every day to thank him for the book and tell him what they’ve taken from his experiences. Still, he expresses some misgivings. “I could have been a little bit more considerate,” he says. “I was trying to put everything on the table—and in my spirit of ‘Here it all is,’ I said things, particularly about girls I’ve had relationships with, that I regret.” Certainly, the farewells to some of his girlfriends (“I looked at Jaime one day and thought, ‘I’m not in love with her anymore’…It was as if a fog had lifted”) feel more intimate and uncomfortable than the lurid drug binges.

As for Kiedis’ longest-running partner in crime, Flea says that he hasn’t read Scar Tissue. “I think we have very different perspectives on our shared history,” the bassist says. “I picked it up and read one thing that kind of bummed me out, and I also read something that was really fuckin’ nice, too. But it was hard for me to read, and I didn’t want to go into rehearsal and feel that I might bug out.”

It may be true that the memoir didn’t lead to any personal revelation for Kiedis, but his continued growth as a songwriter and singer suggests otherwise. The lyrics on Stadium Arcadium are still hard to interpret literally—and sometimes rely too heavily on a kind of rhyming-geography game—but there’s an evocative sense of imagery that is sustained through a huge batch of songs. A notable strain of religious and biblical language (“God made this lady that stands before me,” “I’m consecrated, but I’m not devout”) runs through the album, which, he acknowledges, seems like a theme. But Kiedis says he hadn’t taken notice of it until someone recently pointed it out. And at some point in the recent past, he turned into a real vocalist—even on sweaty funk workouts such as “Charlie” and “Warlocks,” he sings where he previously would have just shouted and mugged.

“I’m so proud of Anthony,” says Flea, beaming. “When we first started this band, he couldn’t really sing a note. He would scream and holler and rap, and to see him coming up with all these great melodies and singing all this stuff—it’s probably, more than anything, the reason why we keep improving.”

“When you’re trying so hard to get the ears of the world, it’s really easy to be super-extroverted, to the point of obnoxiousness,” says Kiedis. “And it worked quite well, being the loud, brash, crass, aggressive guy. But instead of losing my voice or becoming a caricature, I found a way to make a transition into something new and different. And that would have been more difficult if I had been born a singer.

“I guess we’re all born with voices and the ability to dance around as kids,” he continues, “but I don’t think I came into this world with people saying, ‘Oh, this kid’s got a hell of a set of pipes on him.’ No one’s ever accused me of that my whole life.”

The Chili Peppers, Smith reminds us, “started as a joke band,” best known for songs like “Special Secret Song Inside (Party on Your Pussy)” and for donning socks on their dicks. “We did not have longevity written all over us,” says a deadpan Kiedis.

But somewhere along the way, the group turned into a rock institution. As they approach the quarter-century mark, they’re in rarefied company. Which bands can claim that kind of endurance while still making new music that anyone cares about? There’s U2, R.E.M., and MetallIca, and…well, who else?

Kiedis resists the comparison with those monolithic groups. “When I look at those bands, they seem like elders,” he says. “When I was, like, 20 years old, I was aware of all of those bands, and they seemed like they were in a different world than us.” The alt-rock luminaries he felt more kinship with—Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, Smashing Pumpkins—were simply unable to keep it together for the long haul. Flea says that he feels a certain affinity for anyone who’s still out on the road after so many years. Still, he says, “it seems like those guys know what they’re doing, like they’re really smart, and it always seems to me like we’re kinda bumbling along.”

But Rick Rubin counters with a simple, and fairly unarguable, statement. “U2 and R.E.M. aren’t making better records now than they were when they broke,” he says. “The Chili Peppers feel like they just get better.”

And why shouldn’t they? It seems as though they’ve finally found the lives—and the sound—they’ve always wanted. Gatherings of the band now feel like family affairs, with significant others, babies, dogs. Frusciante recently bought a beach house to share with his girlfriend, Emily; Smith has his wife, Nancy, and Cole, and teaches drum clinics for young players; Flea continues to devote time to the public music school he helped found five years ago and is practicing his trumpet with new dedication. Only Kiedis—most recently linked to 20-year-old model Jessica Stam—remains not settled down, though the specter of drugs, so long his band’s true nemesis, seems buried for now.

“I’m feeling pretty good today,” says the six-years-clean Kiedis, “and unless you pull out a huge bag and put it on the table, I’ll probably be just fine. I have no interest in going back to the fear and confusion of my life during the last time I was using. I’m wearing life as a more loosely fitting garment, which fits me just fine.”

And as the band gears up for a lengthy tour—European dates in the spring, then the States starting in late summer, possibly with opener Kanye West—even the most reluctant Chili Pepper is fired up. “I’m definitely ready to get out there in the world,” says Frusciante with a smile. “I don’t have a problem with touring, because now we get along. Sometimes those guys feel like we’re not friends, and I’ve definitely gone through phases with Anthony and Flea where they think we’re not friends. But the narrow-mindedness that comes from me needing to occupy my brain all the time sometimes isolates me from the people around me.

“When we toured for By the Way and Californication, I kept my headphones on all the time,” continues Frusciante. “I think this time, I’m going to take the headphones off.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

On this week’s episode of SPIN Presents Lipps Service, host Scott Lipps spoke with Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell. The guitarist released his latest solo album, Brighten, last Friday. Lipps and Cantrell discuss the record along with how Chris Cornell’s daughter, Lily Cornell Silver, brought him to tears, his relationship with Eddie Van Halen, how Alice in Chains formed, and much more.

Since it began in 2018, the acclaimed podcast has featured many of the biggest voices and personalities in music, including exclusive interviews with Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, David Lee Roth, Shepard Fairey, Courtney Love, Dove Cameron, Mick Fleetwood, Nikki Sixx, Perry Farrell and many, many more.

More from Spin:

• Gym Class Heroes’ Travie McCoy Talks New LP On ‘Lipps Service’
• Waterparks Talk New Music On ‘Lipps Service’
• Train Talk ‘Jupiter’ At 25 On ‘Lipps Service’

In the last episode, Lipps caught up with his longtime friend Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue, about his new memoir, THE FIRST 21: How I Became Nikki Sixx. They touched on how Sixx got into music, how he was inspired by everyone from the New York Dolls to Cheap Trick to Aerosmith, and what he remembers from the ’80s Sunset Strip music scene.

Every week, a new episode of SPIN Presents Lipps Service is available wherever you consume podcasts (Apple, etc.), and you can listen to the full episode with Jerry Cantrell below.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the June 2000 issue of SPIN.

Swallowed by a loaner Versace suit ($855 retail), Moby faces down a gauntlet of tabloid flashes outside London’s Earl’s Court arena. It’s the Brit Awards 2000. the U.K.’s openly sloshed Grammys alter ego. and pop watchers are working up a buzz over grumpy Oasis geezer Liam Gallagher‘s feud with smirky boy-band geezer Robbie Williams (“He’s a fat dancer.” quipped Liam|. But frankly, nobody gives a toss. A star power vacuum exists in Euro-pop. and no better indication is Moby’s presence as a Best International Male Artist nominee. As he shuffles into position, a publicist must inform the paparazzi who Moby actually is.

More from Spin:

• Moby Ascends to a Higher Calling
• Moby Takes Us On a Summer Stroll Through His 10 Most Essential Modern Architecture Buildings
• The 90 Greatest Albums of the ’90s

“Moby! Moby! Over here!” the photogs shout, and the artist, hands deep in pockets that don’t belong to him. obliges, sort of. Alone on the sidewalk, he shifts his tiny bald head to and fro. Click! Click! But with his big-eyed stare, he looks like a milk-carton orphan, not gossip-column fodder.

“You know what I said before about how I’m starting to feel successful?” he asks me, referring to an earlier comment about his eerie dance floor ballad “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?” being such an unexpected European hit. “Well. I just changed my mind.” Waving wanly, he’s led backstage for interviews.

Formerly known in the U.K./U.S. as the Christian vegan rave DJ who was the American “face” of early-’90s techno, Moby spent much of the mid-to-late ’90s alienating a potentially adoring fanbase. After “Go.” his Twin Peaks-sampling kick-drum anthem, was a U.K. Top 10 hit in the rave blow-up of 1991.

He gradually morphed into an agitprop, Jesus-thanking, disco-punk pariah with a penchant for flinging off his shirt. Goaded by journalists who had tired of dance artists murmuring about “wicked” bass lines, Moby critiqued his peers and pontificated on the inhumanity of consumer capitalism. Signed by Elektra, only to mutually divorce later, he became perhaps the most hated “sellout” who never sold any records.

But with the startling popularity of Play, his most recent album, all’s being forgiven. In the U.K.. where DJs are already taken seriously in the pop world, the album was No. 1 on the mainstream charts, outranking Oasis and Santana: “Why Does My Heart,” which emanates from a heart-wilting sample of the Shining Light Gospel Choir, has moved 700.000 units throughout Europe and is being rerecorded by Elton John as a benefit single for his AIDS foundation. But in the U.S., where Play was snubbed by countless labels (Universal, RCA, MCA,  Virgin, Astralwerks, Sony, Maverick) before V2 picked it up, it’s also taken off. going platinum, being nominated for two Grammys, and breaking two modern-rock singles, “Bodyrock” and “Natural Blues.” Moby also DJ’ed the MTV Video Music Awards (in a gold lamé tuxedo) and appeared in-studio to yuk it up for an entire week of Spankin’ New Music.

Says V2 president Richard Sanders: “We never thought we’d go gold or platinum or anything close. We just wanted to rehabilitate a great artist’s career.” Other industry insiders who swore Moby was dead to them are even repenting. “When I met [big-cheese trance DJ] Sasha, he was downright mean and dismissive; he really hurt my feelings.” Moby says. “Then after he heard the record, he apologized. But I can never be vindictive—people had decent reasons to hate me.”

Still, whether your career was just rescued from the dustbin or not, few places are more disorienting for American musicians than the Brit Awards. Despite the fact that U.S. hip-hop, R&B, and pop have colonized the cosmos, house-proud locals still cling to their role as pop’s tastemaking scamps. Or at least after downing a flute or three of the bubbly.

At the table for Moby’s European label, Mute, everyone’s been notified that their man won’t be winning. But Play‘s chart triumph—released last June, it fell off the charts only to crawl back on and upward since— assuages the troops. Moby’s longtime Euro manager, Eric Harle, a German ex-DJ dressed like a “hitman for Kraftwerk” in hues of black and maroon, winks and moans, “Why have I been associated with losers my entire life?” Standing and fidgeting nearby is Moby running buddy and New York City painter Damian Loeb. A six feet two, lantern-jawed reddish-blond who’s nearly a foot taller than his sidekick—”We’re like Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy“—Loeb, 30, is a super protective relative by proxy. Moby, 34, has no surviving immediate family or current girlfriend.

“So. where is he?” Loeb barks impatiently. “Who’s walking him through [the interviews] back there? He’s not by himself with those assholes, is he?!”

Later, when Moby still hasn’t arrived at the table, Loeb rolls his eyes: “Why exactly am I here? I just came from a place [new bud Elton John’s palatial Kensington crash pad] where there were heated pools, a beautiful Swedish woman, and every DVD ever made!”

Me: “Damian. are you Moby’s best friend?”

D: “Yes. I am.”

Me: “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
D: “Yes, I suppose it is.”

Moby takes a seat, and the show explodes with generic boy band 5ive, wearing long black leather coats and decimating “We Will Rock You” with the “surviving members of Queen.” Brian May solos through gritted teeth as about 50 muscle boys and girls bang on giant, back-lighted tom-toms. “At the Grammys,” Moby observes, “it was like every inch of the place had been hosed down with money. At least here it’s kind of trashy…The Grammys were only worth it because 1 got to sit between Britney Spears and Jamie Foxx, and he was leaning right over me the whole time, macking on Britney, but in this clumsy, teenager-at-the-mall way. He was looking down her dress, going, ‘Yo, baby, you look fine! You got a boyfriend?'”

Moby’s nature—part hair-shirt contrarian, part goofball gadfly—is always dueling. The restless son of an often-unemployed single mom in late-’70s/early-’80s suburbia, his role model as a punk shorty was John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon (“He made a big splash with the Sex Pistols, gave it up to do a couple of bizarre, uncompromising records as Public Image Ltd.; then for partly selfish, partly fun reasons, totally sold out, but in a really interesting way”). Of course, on a mid-30s. am-I-a-loser? level, Moby was thrilled by the Grammy affirmation. But in a weird way, the attention he’s received (for his most innovative record!) from both the masses and a bewildering celebrity coterie is even sweeter. You can see him, for a mad minute, taunting his elitist enemies: “Piss off, I got Madonna on the other line.”

Mick Jagger, Tom Hanks, David Bowie, Oliver Stone, Matt Damon, Sting, Maxwell, Joe Strummer, etc., have all paid respects. Donatella Versace flies him around to DJ parties. Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche clowned with him on VH1 exclaiming: “You have no idea how much your record means to us!” John Waters, for whom Moby composed the opening theme of his film Cecil B. DeMented, says. “His music is sexy, dark, funny, and completely original. And considering all the sampling he does, I think he sees the incredible irony in me saying that.” Even Lucy Lawless, a.k.a. Xena, Warrior Princess, is a convert. “His music lifts you out of tedium and takes you on some kind of fruity existential journey,” she enthuses.

Says Moby, with his usual faux-naïf wit: “I like being alone, but only by choice, and I get lonely quickly. When these famous people are nice to me, it feels good, so I’m happy to hang out with them. It’s better than being at home, depressed, reading The Hobbit.”

***

The video for “Natural Blues,” with its haunting sample of should-be-legendary folk-blues singer Vera Ward Hall, features a latex-aged Moby being wheeled down a corridor of deathly senior citizens, looking through a scrapbook and then watching home movies of his young life. Later, Christinia Ricci, a ravishing Angel of Death in a white evening gown, carries him to his final reward.

Directed by garishly arty photographer David LaChapelle, the video literalizes Hall’s sampled lyric, “Ooh lawdy, trouble so hard/Don’t nobody know my troubles but God,” with a gorgeous flair. The story line: Moby, tortured artist, wincing bittersweetly as time slips away.

Which is effective, if self-indulgent, pop imagery. But the song is so much more than that, and so much more than Moby. “Natural Blues” is one of several Play tracks that recast vocals of rural blues-gospel artists, mostly from the Sounds of the South box set of 1959 field recordings by influential archivist Alan Lomax, Moby adds other samples, piano, synths. drum machines, and guitars to time-shift the context.

And for many listeners, hearing the aching grain of these voices transported into the digital present is an exhilarating yet sobering experience. Like Lomax, Moby is a white interlocutor of African-American voices who is crossing long abandoned roads; and that choice is fraught with a country’s worth of emotion. As these songs join with the rest of the album—traces of hip-hop, house, techno, synth-pop. punk—there’s a sense of immense possibility, both terribly lost and defiantly infinite.

“I’m not into much techno stuff,” says Matt Barton of the Alan Lomax-founded Association for Cultural Equity. “But it struck me how deeply Moby seemed to respond to the source material on a musical/historical level, as well as emotionally. He wasn’t juxtaposing sounds for the hell of it.”

Beastie Boy Mike D adds, “As soon as I heard ‘Honey’ [which flips a vocal sample of gospel-blues singer Bessie Jones and a Super Cat piano break, via Boogie Down Productions]. I felt like. ‘Man, why didn’t I think of that!’ Play is a record nobody expected from anybody.”

What Mike D is too polite to say is that Play was the last thing anybody expected from Moby. After his too-visionary-too-soon, major-label album debut, 1995’s Everything Is Wrong—similarly sprawling with house, techno, punk, blues, new age. classical—found little love, Moby began to unravel. His attempt to politicize the glass house of rave—which was becoming increasingly white, anal, and snooty, much like ’80s punk/ indie rock—was translated as the haughty damning of an evolving scene. His admirable mission to make DJ music work as “live” performance somehow resulted in him cavorting like a headless chicken to a DAT playback. Or worse, assuming crucifixion poses atop a keyboard—naked. His pained “rock” album, 1996’s Animal Rights, released at the height of “electronica” fever, was widely dismissed.

“It took me a couple of years of therapy to figure out that he wasn’t doing this to hurt us,” says Marci Weber, who’s been Moby’s co-manager/den mother for almost a decade. “We respected his individual vision, but after seven years of fighting to get respect as a dance artist, then to start playing speed metal or whatever…people felt betrayed.”

To top if off, Moby began a sort of public, Andy Kaufman-esque satire of a debauched pop star. Here was someone who trumpeted a drug-free, fresh-squeezed, meatless lifestyle of prayer and devotion knocking back cocktails and scamming women at East Village hellholes. Or donning a powder-blue tux and howling 70s covers in an irony-sodden lounge act. Then there was the record-label party where Moby, loitering by the buffet table, decided to make his presence felt. According to one observer, “He and a friend were seeing who could gross the other one out. So Moby eventually just pulled out his, um, thing, and peed all over the sushi bar.”

When I press Loeb about this period, he laughs and says. “I know. I know.” Then he pauses and replies: “Well, the guy’s mother did die, you know.”

Moby’s mom, Betsy Hall, went in for a routine February ’97 checkup and was diagnosed with lung cancer; she passed away that September. “She really was a special woman,” says Loeb, “just giving and kind and quirky and understanding; basically, it was always the two of them. Then that was gone.”

Adds Moby: “I miss my mother as a friend more than anything else. There wasn’t the tension that a lot of parents and children have. She was completely unjudgmental about my life and my music, so I have a tendency to throw things in people’s faces, like, ‘Why aren’t you okay with this?'”

***

To this point, the myth of Richard “Moby” Hall reads as follows: suburban-bred white rave brat—supposedly great-great-great-grand-nephew of Moby Dick author Herman Melville—computerizes black voices (divas, toasters, rappers, blues/gospel singers) as an ego-starved piny to locate his lost soul. Well, Moby was actually born in Harlem, New York, the only child of broke college students. His parents’ marriage was a mess, and his dad, a chemistry T.A. at Columbia, went out drinking one night and drove his car into a wall. The crash, a suspected suicide, was fatal. He was 26.

“Suddenly, my mother is a 23-year-old widow with a two-year-old son,” says Moby. “It was fairly grim.” The pair moved in with her parents in tony Darien, Connecticut, while she finished her degree, then celebrated her graduation in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in 1969. “These are my memories of being four in the summer of ’69: Some nice businessmen giving me peanuts to eat on the plane; going to the most disgusting day-care center in the world; and my mother’s friends sneaking me into Myra Breckinridge, an X-rated Raquel Welch movie.”

As for many, the summer, and the hippie idealism, gradually darkened. Mother and son ended up in working-class Stratford, Connecticut. “This was ’78-’77, the economy was bad, my mom was unemployed, we were living on welfare and food stamps,” Moby recalls. Their house was a sort of communal hippie pad—”a lot of people listening to music and smoking pot” (which Moby tried at age ten). Then there were Mom’s awful “bohemian” boyfriends. “There was the guy who played pedal steel in a country band and stole things from her; the guy who worked on a fishing boat; the guy who worked in a gas station and threatened to kill her with a butcher knife.”

The two returned to Darien. moving into a house bought with a small inheritance from Moby’s grandfather. Moby took music theory and guitar lessons (classical and jazz fusion), read Faulkner, Rimbaud, and Bukowski, discovered new wave/punk, worked in a record store, and envied suburban opulence up close. “My grandfather had owned a company down on Wall Street, so they were wealthy, but we had nothing…That, along with having no father, being short, no good at sports, and on welfare, gave me a sense of inadequacy that I think I’ll hold on to until the day I die,” he says with a rare belly laugh.

Music gave him a cause—”It made our little disenfranchisement seem romantic.” Inspired by the Clash, Gang of Four, and Public Image, he formed the straight-edge punk band Vatican Commandos, wearing earrings and skirts to Darien High during ’80s preppie mania. He lied about going away on “exotic” vacations. None of this was an aphrodisiac. “At that time, the most ego-shattering thing a girl could ever say was the word weird: I prayed for someone who just wouldn’t look down on me. I remember a girl once mentioning Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, and romance was in the air.”

“He was a brilliant, eccentric child,” Geraldine Marshall, Moby’s high school English teacher, told a local paper recently. “His writing was very odd, but 1983 was the age of punk rock, and he was influenced that way.” The Commandos played Pogo’s in Bridgeport, where Moby saw bands like the Gun Club and local heroes Mission of Burma; they released a seven-inch EP, Hit Squad for God. “We were anti-church, anti-suburbs, anti-long hair, anti-whatever.” But after a year as a philosophy major at the University of Connecticut, punk’s anti-Reagan-and-stuff denial felt just as stuffy as pink-pants, country-club Christianity.

“When you find yourself staring at some band in an indie-rock club with 50 other white kids holding Rolling Rocks, and nobody’s moving, you realize your worldview is pretty limited.” says Moby.

So, a good five years before grunge, Moby shelved his guitar to spin records. These days, with every ex-punk frontman, record-store clerk, and would-be fiction writer DJ’ing at a local café/bar laundromat, this isn’t worth a shrug. But then, in the suburbs, it was a total, advanced-geek refusal. Building his skills at local dives, Moby earned one ardent fan. A jumpy high school dropout, Damian Loeb showed up at a Greenwich “alcohol-free, new wave” joint, and it was friends at first sight. “From the minute I met him I knew Moby was going to do really well; some people just have a unique glow.”

Meanwhile, Moby was being drawn to the glow of the Manhattan club scene. “It was the late days of the [Paradise] Garage. Red Zone—what attracted me first to dance culture, as a white, straight kid from the suburbs going out to these mostly black, gay clubs, was just how foreign and interesting and wonderful it was. It really was alternative. New York was dirty and dangerous, and sexual politics were weird, but at these clubs, Latinos, blacks, whites, men, women were celebrating!”

Around the same time, a youth-minister friend challenged Moby’s knee-jerk dismissal of the Bible, and later, reading the Gospel of Matthew, he was overwhelmed by the conception of Christ as “an iconoclast who was humble, and a stern and adamant figure who was loving and merciful.” Jesus became a role model—a benevolent punk rocker of sorts—and dance clubs became Moby’s sanctuary. “House music and dance music was so atmospheric and sexy and religious. It really, really affected me.”

Around 1989-90. Moby, along with Loeb and an aspiring hip-hop DJ, Adrian Bartos (a.k.a. Stretch Armstrong, who’s now a top New York radio jock), moved into an East Village apartment, turntables in tow. Moby set up a home studio, dubbing himself M.O.B.Y. (Master of Beats, Y’all), and started making house hip-hop mix tapes, naively dropping them off at clubs and radio stations. He finally got a gig at Mars, the multilevel West Side hot spot, where he even backed up Big Daddy Kane and Run-D.M.C. “Damian would bring a video camera,” says Moby. “And we have some horrifying footage from when my hair was really long, and I’m playing tambourine along with ‘The 900 Number.’ and Serch from 3rd Bass is rapping.”

Realizing he was no mixmaster, Moby decided to just spin for cash and kicks while producing tracks at home. His early work—as Voodoo Child, Brainstorm, Barracuda—was touched by hip-hop, house, and techno, but his punky, playful spirituality set a fresh pitch. When “Go” became a U.K. smash, Moby DJ’ed around the world. For a time, raves were his new place of worship, but the rush didn’t last. He was drug-free amid an Ecstasy free-for-all, and unlike most U.S. DJ stars fetishized in Europe, he was neither black nor Latino. In America, techno (rooted in New York, Chicago, and Detroit’s clubs) was becoming a Europhile novelty craze.

“What disillusioned me about the punk scene is what disillusioned me about the house-music scene and, later on, about the rave scene. It was always the tastemakers championing musical virtues I didn’t care about. Hardcore punk decided to champion obscurity and aggression. With house music, you’d go to these industry events in ’90-’91, and it was so bloodless and professional. Techno lost its celebratory quality.”

Now a successful elder, he’s optimistic, if still combative. On house music’s ongoing outsider status: “A lot of these kids, white and black, want music that reaffirms their masculinity. House music still really pisses a lot of people off, but why? It’s such warm, inviting, universal music. I’m straight, but I love going to house music clubs and flirting with women and gay men. This is a leap most of America seems unprepared to make.”

But you feel Moby reining in his need to debate every issue. No less chatty, he’s much less judgmental. “See, in the suburbs, you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, you’re fed a lot of culture, and people don’t see how their opinions simply reflect their own privilege. At one point. I thought about every ideological position I’d taken over the past 20 years and realized, more often than not. that I was generally full of shit.”

***

You know you’re on a real tour bus when the guy next to you heaves his legs over his head, yells “fire in the hole!” and ignites a fart with a Zippo. In this case, that guy is Moby. But even here, among his likably nerdy road crew, the “little idiot” (as he dubbed himself years ago) seems a tad out of place. When talk proceeds to deviant sex acts (“The Cleveland Shocker!”) and unreleased Who rock operas, he takes his soy something-or-other and moves to the ground level of the double-decker to talk.

In the midst of a grueling 21-month tour, Moby is rightfully proud of Play and wants as many folks as possible to hear it. Tonight’s London show was a roaring, sold-out stompathon. Backed by crack drummer Scott Frassetto, punky bassist Greta Brinkmann, and turntablist DJ Spinbad, Moby gave the new songs a sweaty flourish, soaking through his CBGB T-shirt. The band fleshed out older club tracks like “Ah Ah” and “Feeling So Real,” as Moby played un-wanky guitar, worked the congas and keys, and bantered about the “good ol’ rave days.”

Now, on a ten-hour haul to Amsterdam, as the bus pulls onto the ferry that’ll take us from Dover to Calais, we walk out on the boat’s bow to watch the sunrise. Moby keeps clearing his very sore throat. With a hoodie over a rumply T-shirt, and more stubble on his face than on his head, he’s gnomish or monkish, depending on the light. Either way, he’s beat. Still, Moby is unnervingly cooperative, refusing to bitch about any promotional duty.

“I think some of the alt-rock heroes—Trent (Reznor). Pearl Jam. Smashing Pumpkins—got used to the music scene existing in a certain way and assumed that large numbers of people would buy whatever they put out. Artists forget that for every record that gets popular attention, about a million records get ignored. I know, I’ve made some of those records! When I went to England to promote Animal Rights, they could only find two writers to talk to me.”

Even after a crap Amsterdam show the next night, he’s coughing in the dungeon-like dressing room, doing a fanzine interview with a teenage girl in a pink Underground Resistance T-shirt. He knows how
much work, and luck, goes into a hit record. Mute/V2 had to license songs to ads (“Porcelain” cascades delicately for Microsoft), TV shows (Dharma & Greg), and films (The Beach, The Next Best Thing) to push sales. Tons of remixes were sent to DJs. “Bodyrock,” a churning parley of sampled rap vocals (Nikki D, Spoonie Gee) and Moby guitar, benefited from vague parallels to rap-rock and Fatboy Slim. Moby showed up on VH1’s Say What? Karaoke and just concluded an MTV-funded college tour with Bush.

Says Moby: “Maybe I am cheapening [the music] by hyping it in all these ways. But how can I condemn commercial pop culture if I’ve never even been a part of it?” His I’ll-go-anywhere-and-talk-to-anybody vow finally exacted a toll after a 12-hour bus ride to a show in Prague. After losing his temper and kicking in a door, Moby returned to Manhattan.

Greeting him upon his return, however, was an unsettling sight. Plastered on the side of a building in SoHo, only blocks from his apartment, was a towering 90-foot-high image of a semi-hunched figure, standing beside a desert highway, tummy provocatively exposed.

It’s “Moby for Calvin Klein Jeans: Dirty Denim.”

Considering Moby’s self-denying politics and weak physique, the ad raised the question “Who’s he trying to kid?” Says the spokesmodel: “What, like I’m going. ‘Hey ladies, check out my lack of a six-pack’? In reality, I know I’m not an attractive person, but it’s like taking pictures on a bad vacation. When you look at them later, the vacation doesn’t seem so bad. Of course, it could be a problem if I’m making out with a girl, and she’s like. ‘Uh. could you hold up that ad again so I can get in the mood?'”

He may be joking, but at times, Moby’s lowly self-esteem is so relentless that it borders on performance art. The “Attack of the 90-Foot Moby!” as one observer calls it, is a promo move already making him squirm. “We both have these crippling insecurities, and it never seems to get any better.” says Loeb.

The kick of so much dance music is its skin-tingling immediacy, but Moby’s shameful, misfit ambition drives him to deepen and elevate those sensations. “I hopefully have made a record that can improve the quality of people’s lives for a brief little time, and I know that sounds really arrogant,” says the 90-foot-high pop geek with the lowly self-image. “But, you know, I am from the suburbs.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.