It may be hard to remember now but there was a time when Jane’s Addiction was the Guns N’ Roses of alt-rock, or maybe Guns N’ Roses were the Jane’s Addiction of metal. Either way, the Berlin wall between alternative and metal came tumbling down and there was no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Jane’s made it safe to wed soulful weirdness with total heaviosity and for a time — let’s say 1987, the year Nothing’s Shocking came out, to 1994, the year Kurt Cobain crucified himself with a shotgun — all seemed somehow right in the world. Commercial radio was not only tolerable, a somewhat disorienting but not altogether unwelcome development, it seemed to be tapped into the zeitgeist for the first time any 20something could remember in their lifetime. And then Jane’s frontman Perry Farrell invented Lollapalooza, a wonderfully eclectic, genre-fucking moveable feast of alt sounds and visions — lovingly referred to by its creator as a ‘Renaissance fair for delinquents’ — rolling from town to town seeding and watering the Alternative Nation. Lollapalooza proved to the major-label-radio-station-glossy-magazine-industrial complex that a mass audience could like grunge and rap and industrial and alternative without its collective head exploding. For a brief and shining moment, the lunatics were finally running the asylum. Twenty-five years later nothing is shocking, and for that alone, we salute you, Jane’s Addiction. (We’ve actually met the Jane that gave the band its namesake and we are happy to report that she’s feeling much better.) We have a pair of tickets to see Jane’s performing Nothing’s Shocking, their game-changing 1988 debut, in its entirety @ The Electric Factory on Saturday. To qualify to win all you have to do is follow us on Twitter, and then email us at FEED@PHAWKER.COM saying as much, along with your full, real name and a mobile number for confirmation. Good luck and godspeed!
JANE’S ADDICTION PERFORMS NOTHING’S SHOCKING SAT. @ THE ELECTRIC FACTORY