MY CAREER IN FIVE SONGS
THE WAY DAVE NAVARRO sees it, the combination of talents that came together to form Jane’s Addiction in the mid ’80s — singer Perry Farrell, bassist Eric Avery, drummer Stephen Perkins and himself on guitar — never should have worked so successfully.
“We were four guys who really didn’t have any business playing together, because we were just stylistically from so many different worlds,” Navarro says. “Perry had come out of a post-punk goth band. Eric was very heavily into punk-rock music. And then Stephen and I were Valley heavy-metal kids. None of it made any sense, but somehow we found ourselves in a room together.”
Despite their disparate influences and upbringings, the group soon found they shared disdain for much of the music that was happening in their own backyards, and they united in a mission to strike back. “When we got together, you had bands like Poison, and the whole Sunset Strip hair-metal scene was flourishing,” Navarro says. “What you hear on Jane’s Addiction records is us reacting to what was going on around us and what was popular, and not wanting to be a part
