We will beat them all to dust, I bet

Jane's Addiction - Then She Did


In May of 1991 my friend Jon convinced his older sister to take us along with her to the Jane's Addiction show. It was the first concert I ever went to without my parents, and as a result I remember it better than the hundreds of shows I've gone to since then, better than shows I saw last week. One of the things I remember best was when they started playing "Three Days" and where he announces "I prepared the room with christmas lights" the stage suddenly lit up with a long tangle of tiny white bulbs. I thought it was brilliant. "Three Days" was my favorite song on "Ritual de la Habitual" and with the darkness, and sudden light, and immense volume it felt so dramatic and huge, complete magic.

I was also really into "Stop", "Been Caught Stealing" and the two songs that sounded the same: "No One's Leaving" and "Ain't No Right." Basically side A of the tape got me to and from school, the hyper pace and flail of those first five songs (besides "It's Obvious" which compelled with a different type of strength) clipping minutes off of the walk each way. Side B happened more in my room, the weird intense lesson in "Of Course" kind of impossible to digest in the school hallways, and "Classic Girl" reserved as a dramatic climax for imaginary tapes I would assemble for girls. But of course "Three Days" was the center, and positioned perfectly at the beginning of side B so I could rewind and replay as many times as I wanted.

Near the end of that last tour we drove from North Carolina to Washington D.C., which is okay but we had to be in D.C. by 10 AM for soundcheck, which meant driving overnight. Sometime between 7 or 8 we reached what we were jokingly calling "the heart of darkness" and I felt skinless with exhaustion, everything felt wrong. I wanted to hear something I knew all the words to, every change and every note. And so for the first time in years I played "Ritual de la Habitual."

Here is the crazy thing, I didn't remember this song. Once it was playing it came right back to me, but if you asked me to recite the track list of "Ritual" I would run the whole thing down without hesitation, but I would definitely forget "Then She Did." Watching the sun come up while Perry Farrell's voice rang out on infinite delay and the band bubbled and rocketed with a string section, it became clear that this is my favorite song.

The arrangements are magnificent, sophisticated and painfully emotional, layers of sound that stretch out and shine with an cinematic grace. I'm completely at a loss for where they unearthed this skill, I mean this is only two years after the band released "Idiots Rule." I'm not trying to down their earlier work, I just can't believe there's no precedent. Even "Three Days", which felt so expansive, richly colored and bold doesn't suggest this strain of beauty. I can't even imagine what series of inspirations led them to it, some dark bloodmixing of Bauhaus and Van Dyke Parks and Swans without paying tribute to any of them. It doesn't help that Dave Navarro is currently impossible to look at, I mean how could a guy with eyebrows like that play so sensitively?

The evil meanderings that mark the middle third of the song only increase the force of the blow once the structure returns. Farrell's restraint as powerful as his eventual return to the acerbic catharsis of his standard mode. Once he reaches the final lines, he could be speaking gibberish and your heart would be snagged by the sheer force of the song, their self-restraint finally shed and every voice rising skywards.

But instead of gibberish we get one of the prettiest, saddest, most endearing pleas ever set to music. Farrell entreats a dead lover with a wish for the afterworld:

Will you say hello to my ma?
Will you pay a visit to her?
She was an artist just as you were
I'd have introduced you to her

She would take me on on Sundays
We'd go laughing through the garbage
She'd repair legs like a doctor
On the kitchen chairs we sat on

She was unhappy, just as you were

The last line of course is just such a vicious knife-twist but even without it there's such a heavy tugging throughout these lines, a miserable farewell that echoes every miserable farewell of his life.

That night in D.C. I was tired and surly, went for a long walk and avoided everyone I knew. Total crybaby. The show was over and we were packing everything up and Noah grabbed me to say that he wanted to thank me for playing the Jane's Addiction that morning, that he had never really heard them before and waking up during the record with the sun rising ahead of us and the strings swelling and voices bursting it was possibly the most epic moment of his life. And it was exactly how the song made me feel during those small painful hours, and I was happy to know that a record I had bought 16 years ago could still move me so fiercely, and, even better, that it could do the same thing to someone who had never heard it before, who, free of nostalgia, could be caught by the beauty of it.