Perry Farrell

"The next orgasm I have, I'm going to lift everyone to a higher place," Perry Farrell says between songs at Los Angeles' Universal Amphitheater. "I'm going to a place that's free. Who wants to come with me? I want to know true freedom."

The crowd's approval and confusion barely register as the singer smiles. Perry Farrell is talking to God tonight. The father of Lollapalooza, author of this decade's definitive art rock as front man for Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros--and the last true celebrant of the church of sex, drugs and rock and roll--is thinking big again. He slinks around his island-themed bamboo stage set wearing red Asian pajamas of embroidered silk, his hair twisted up Coolio-style in what he calls a crown. The rest of the Jane's Addiction Relapse tour luffs restlessly through another ten-minute mike break. Guitarist Dave Navarro stomps over to get a cigarette from a woman in the wings. One of the show's exotic dancers descends from a dance tower, slides snakelike down a pole with her legs spread wide (on the last Porno for Pyros tour the dancers simulated sex with papier-mâché appendages), then joins the others offstage.

"My old friend Tim Leary said that the strongest muscle in the body," continues Perry, grabbing his crotch, "is the brain. Yeah. It just keeps getting bigger and harder and stronger and wiser, expanding, wanting."

Perry seems to be talking to his spirit heroes, like Leary or the Dalai Lama. Or to his mother, maybe, who committed suicide when he was four. Or to God--in the way a man will address God while having a heart-to-heart with himself in public.

"We live in a land where we're taught to cheat and lie," he says. "This room is where we have a chance to live in truth and honesty. Let's have some truth right now." He jumps into the crowd and shoves the mike in some kid's face. "Have you ever once thought about sucking a man's cock?" The kid admits he has. "He has! Now we're getting somewhere! We've all been lifted."

Perry's public trusts him because his questions aren't part of an act. Sometimes he gets too personal for comfort (like when he blurts out onstage, "I love my asshole because it gets rid of my shit!"), sometimes he spouts gibberish as he channels (continued on page 138)Perry Farrell(continued from page 76) Ghost Dancers, or meditates on the meaning of modern-day viruses. Sometimes he overreaches for a syncretic unity of tree of life mantra, Tahitian mythology and mystical Judaica. But we pay attention to Perry Farrell's spacey soliloquies because he's becoming the master of the grand gesture. And you may be surprised at just how grand.

Perry is thinking bigger than Lollapalooza now. He's thinking broadband cable delivery into your home. He's planning events in the Middle East that are biblical in scope. He wants to build a music-based entertainment empire that's going where no one else is going: content. Isn't it bizarre to think this druggie weirdo might just deliver your future?

As the last shards of the Jane's rock odyssey Three Days echo through the amphitheater, Perry suddenly slams a bottle of water into the crowd, pleading, "Why do we even make music? What good does it do? I figured something out this morning. You want to hear it?" The crowd roars. "This music is all part of the earth's own music. It sounds like this: Oohmm." Perry crouches. "But I like to live in the moment when people go, 'Yay!' That's what we're all doing here. The world around is going 'Om,' and we're going, 'Yay!' That's where I want to live."

Eight years ago I sat across from Perry at a coffeehouse table listening as he sucked on a foil hash pipe and told me that taking drugs is like surfing a tubing wave: The object is to get completely barreled, but then to get out the other side. And, he added with a smile, to have "a story to tell your brothers." (Perry knows both ends of this analogy; he surfs for at least a month each year at his favorite breaks in Bali, Tahiti and Mexico. He says that about eight-foot [overhead] surf is the upper limit of what he can handle, and knows about the danger of being raked across a reef.) Perry made it clear that he saw no honor or romance in getting worked on by drugs, but he also loves to talk about drug visions and demands that everyone around him share a commitment to his lifestyle. Even as he said these words to me in Amsterdam, original Jane's bassist Eric Avery and guitarist Dave Navarro were hiding in the back of the Ritual de lo Habitual tour bus, fighting to stay clean. Perry, meanwhile, shagged and scagged as if his bandmates weren't his responsibility.

Fans still look to him for a modern redemption ritual--rock and roll as social movement. There's community in his concept: It's a sort of village green where the gypsy love-in of the Dead meets the glam sexuality of Bowie or Jagger. Perry has survived heroin addiction, the death of rock stardom and then the death of alt rock. His big dreams are still intact. For better or worse, he's focused on the "yay," not the "om," with no apologies. Remember how every high school kid in America became bisexual sometime around 1990? Perry and Jane's Addiction did that. Eventually the dudes wouldn't go see Jane's until the chicks convinced them it was cool--"Is it metal or art rock?" "Is it for fags?" "Is it a cult?" Jane's pushed the current round of goth drama and sexual ambiguity out of the underground and into the frats a decade before Marilyn Manson.

By the time Kurt Cobain shot himself, rock star had become a dirty word. Even Eddie Van Halen says he's bummed with the label. The Seattle grunge community, including Eddie Vedder, slunk away from starmaker machinery. Some, like R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and U2's Bono had the fortitude to embrace fame and survive it. As, of course, did Perry. A few days before Cobain's death, Courtney Love asked Perry to speak with him. (He never got the chance.) Why ask a junkie to talk turkey to a junkie? Probably because Perry always comes out the other side of the tube. Perry told Spin, "I would have told him let's go to a film festival in Utah or something. Get the fuck out of town. I don't mean to make a pun out of it, but rock and roll isn't worth dying over. Fame goes away."

But Perry pops right back. In 1991, in the midst of addiction and band breakup, he launched Lollapalooza. In spite of the first Jane's show in Phoenix in July, which ended in a pathetic dopers' brawl between Perry and Dave, the band kept it together through the tour's end in August. At their last show, a September gig in Hawaii, Perry and drummer Stephen Perkins performed nude. Then Perry was named artist of the year by Spin and the critics at Rolling Stone. By spring 1992 he had a new band, Porno for Pyros. In 1995, with Lollapalooza flagging, he kicked off the Enit Festival, sporadic concert events that regularly sell out. Perry, now 38, still craves public transformation. He wants to party with you.

"Look, there's a hummingbird," Perry blurts out, pointing into the living room of his house in Venice, California. Perry's house has heavy juju on it. Even from the street you can feel it. It's the best-feeling house I've ever entered. It's not that big, not too fancy. But a feng shui lady would walk in, kiss Perry and split without adjusting so much as a napkin. We're sitting shoeless at the built-in Korean barbecue table and the sun is pouring in through an open south wall, Shaped like a Quonset hut, the blue-black house was designed by architect Steven Ehrlich. A south wall pushes back to reveal a one-lane pool. A carpenter is building a bamboo bridge over it as we talk.

"This happens to me when I do interviews," says Perry. "Hummingbirds come. The other day I saw a white hawk. Those are Indians. The white hawks are Indians."

Here's the problem with talking to Perry: His intellect and generosity of spirit that attract people to his campfire tend to come out--if you're feeling uncritical--as a kind of cosmic laughter. When he's happy, his ideas ricochet chaotically. Throw some stony pot in there and add the bottle of good Bordeaux I brought, and you get a miasma of inspired nowism. I want to ask about Perry's newfound reverence for mystical Judaism. Before I can say one word, he starts talking: "The tribe of Judah, playing the songs of David, are coming to cheer you up," he says slowly. "And harmony is occurring right now. The draw is toward the center. That's what creates harmony--and they do this by weaving. Let's see. Just as a root grows out, so does the trunk grow out. I don't know whether we're the root or the trunk right now. But the heart is at the center of it all. It's the atomic center. If you want to know anything, listen to your heart. The reason I bring all this up while we're talking about viruses"--we weren't--"is because viruses go toward the center, too. They come in contact with us to assimilate as we assimilate with the center, which is the one. They want to come in. And they're as intelligent as anyone else. I think their intention is pure."

Since everyone's going to ask: The guy seems pretty damn healthy. Maybe he's unkillable. He snowboards and surfs. Considering his intake of red wine, he might as well be French. Except he's a vegetarian. "Meat is delicious," he says, laughing. "But I don't like the way I look when I eat meat. The last piece of meat I ate was wild boar at Aspen last New Year's. I wanted to go down the slopes like a wild boar. But it made me sick. Plus I hurt myself really bad because I was snowboarding like a wild boar, man. I had a concussion, and I almost broke my hip."

He giggles occasionally at what comes out of his mouth. Answers float by in a landslide of goo. I have hours of this stuff on tape. It gets easier to understand, after a while, and some parts ring true. Cloudbreak Entertainment manager Roger Leonard told me: "He comes up with such challenging ideas--whether it's in terms of festivals or marketing or live shows or recordings. The possibility is always there for Perry to kick up something no one else has even thought of." When asked if taking input from Perry is a hassle, a William Morris executive, speaking off the record, laughed in genuine appreciation of Perry and said, "Yeah, but he comes up with great ideas. That's what we want from him. That's why he's involved."

Down on Venice Beach, Perry's new Mount Mehru studio is buzzing. Leonard, Cloudbreak manager Adam Schneider and a Scripture-spouting technogeek named Aaron Chasen are there. As Chasen walks me through, engineers rig a studio for Perry's latest recording project, dubbed Gobballee: an eclectic album of songs that are not Jane's, not Porno, just Farrell and friends. This interactive CD, set for release in the fall by Warner Bros., is Perry's current enthusiasm. He records almost daily. New computers have arrived, the T1 line is in and a small team of programmers and technicians are setting up the server that will run Web sites for Cloudbreak and other projects.

Perry and his crew talk about doing a lot more than just making records. They want a piece of tomorrow's entertainment delivery system. During the next year and a half, they'll experiment with recordings, radio, live shows, tour packaging, cable and software. Like a mini-Microsoft. With a rocking house band. To pull it all off, they will rely on the established musical instincts of Perry and Cloudbreak and tap Perry's vast root system of talent and ideas. That network includes musicians, the William Morris Agency (which co-owns Lollapalooza with Perry and Ted Gardner), the Enit Festival, Evirt (virtual events on the Web), Warner Bros., Perry's bands (Jane's Addiction, Porno for Pyros and the new Gobballee group), his surfing and snowboarding posses and his technology hands. Who doesn't he know?

Asked what they're working on, one technician says, "Video communication software applications--well, TV, basically. The Internet is going TV in a big way." With its broadband capabilities, fiber-optic cable will be able to carry TV, telephone, audio and computer signals through one pipe.

"With broadband, all your communications are going to occur in video," says Chasen. "We've spent a lot of money on technology in the past year. We want to be there to deliver the content."

This kind of talk is common at high levels in entertainment these days, especially in the terror-stricken music biz. Downloadable CDs, videos, films, games--you name it. The demise of retail. Live-broadcast recording sessions featuring separate musicians in different parts of the world--hell, live-broadcast Perry Farrell on the toilet, live-broadcast everything. Perry's crew is developing software to these ends. The Jane's Addiction 1997 tour available on pay-per-view for five bucks any time you want it. The release of your own remixes of audio or video right back into the system for sale. Total interactivity, total fan contact. Total chaos. Who pays for what?

"Broadband media is going to change our lives," Chasen says. "Part of that change will be going from a retail-oriented system toward an advertising- or sponsorship-based system. This will create a tremendous infrastructure problem in the entertainment business. You're going to see fortunes made and lost in a short period of time. The price of music is inflated, let's face it: Twenty bucks for a CD that costs two bucks to make? Broadband is going to provide content at a much lower price and advertising's going to want in on it. So how's that going to affect the industry? Well, that's part of what we seek to find out. We want to be the test pilot for this change."

This might sound ludicrous, if not for one thing: Perry makes money. Even though Lollapalooza was canceled this year after last summer's dismal showing, it grossed as much as $26 million in previous years, according to Pollstar magazine. His concert performances sell out, as anyone who tried to score a ticket to the Relapse shows can attest. His two primary Jane's albums have gone platinum and Porno's eponymous debut went gold. More recently, the Private Parts soundtrack featuring Porno's Hard Charger went platinum. String those results together and you'll see why Perry is free to pursue his social reconciliation programs.

"The great mystics I know--the great sages like Tim Leary--draw people together," Farrell says. "They make it exciting to go to their homes. It's, 'Come to my party."'

Perry Farrell wants to be a sage. He sprinkles his conversation with stories about ritual feasts in Bali, or the tireless good humor of the Dalai Lama and the power of the Jewish Shechinah (the presence of God in the world). He studies, he observes and, most important, he makes himself vulnerable. That has given rise to three mighty paternal impulses: one, to find inspiration in his woman; two, to care for other people's children as if they were his own; and three, to throw legendary parties. (One party was apparently recorded on video. The tape allegedly features Farrell, a woman, and plenty of sex and drugs. The tape was the subject of a recent court battle between the tape's Web distributor and Farrell's lawyer--the same lawyer who fought the distribution of Poison singer Bret Michaels' sex tape.)

First, the women. To call him an incurable romantic would be an understatement. "Jane" was a prostitute who supported the band when it formed in 1986; she inspired the band's acoustic song Jane Says. The 1988 and 1990 Jane's albums Nothing's Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual were inspired by Farrell's grand love affair with Casey Niccoli. She is an artist who fed him great literature and collaborated on artwork. (That's a sculpture of her as nude Siamese twins, heads aflame, on the cover of Nothing's Shocking.) Niccoli was the co-director and co-creator of Perry's Warner Bros. --backed feature film, Gift, in which Niccoli wraps a telephone cord around her arm and shoots up. She was his Classic Girl, who, as the song goes, "gives her man great ideas." They were infamous junkies together, this generation's Sid and Nancy. (Once I was riding through Venice, California with Perry and we picked up Casey. "Do I smell like alcohol?" he oozed. "Do I smell like heroin?" she countered.) In October 1991 Perry was arrested for "being under the influence of a controlled substance" at a Santa Monica Holiday Inn where he and Casey were staying. They couldn't clean their house anymore, the story goes, so they had just moved into the motel.

Ritual was also dedicated to Perry's former lover, "our beloved Xiola Blue," the woman represented with Perry and Casey in the nude threesome on the album's cover. Blue was an outstanding beauty worshiped by both Farrell and Niccoli who died of an overdose at the age of 19. Perry and Casey broke up after Jane's did, and Perry quickly picked up a new muse, Kim. Current girlfriend Christine Cagle appears covered with juicy orange slices on the cover of Porno's latest, Good God's Urge, and also adds backing vocals.

Is Perry a classic codependent? Maybe just a Casanova. In his brilliant letter to parents in the liner notes to Ritual (the censorship battle over the album's cover art included the arrest of a Michigan retailer on obscenity charges) Perry writes: "I used to wish sometimes that I were a woman. A woman is the most attractive creature nature has to offer a man. Why then is it such a shame to see her unclothed? I feel more shame as a man watching a quick-mart being built."

Perry told me proudly while we were snowboarding that his girlfriend is pregnant. When I asked him if he had any other children, he said, "Not of my own. I have a child who I raised over the years as if he were my own. This will be my first child by blood.

"If I took care of you and your children," he explains, "and I looked after you as if you were my blood, my brother, my lord, my cousin, my child, your relatives would know that you were in good hands. They'd want to help me when I'm down because I helped them. It's a metaphysical principle. It's a law I hold to myself."

Part of helping people, of course, is helping them party. Onstage, at his shows and festivals, Perry wraps these impulses into one grand work. He talks at great lengths about inclusion. Perry's responsibility as host is to be as real as possible about sex and drugs. The climax of a December 1997 Jane's show in Portland, Oregon brought it all together. As the band cranked through a dramatic version of Ted, Just Admit It, Perry remained true and direct. In contrast to the show in Los Angeles, he offered no between-song banter. He was angry about something. Hurt. His go-go dancers fed into Farrell's bad night. They hurled themselves like sexual projectiles at the audience after dropping their leopard-skin wraps, and they writhed wildly on their dance towers in G-strings. It was the most naked moment of the "I-Itz M-My Party" show, followed by Perry's most wounded-sounding howl. He threw off the last words, "Sex is violent!" over and over and then goodnight and gone.

"Ask yourself," he says, when I ask him about his morality. "When your self ills, then don't do it. It's that simple. You can moderate, you can have a little fun. Just keep happiness." He has always described his legendary sexual, chemical, physical and metaphysical experiences as "research."

"The point of the research is that there's great power out there," he says, "and it has the potential to be very beautiful or very ugly. I like to see everything. And that means I have to be careful what I really want to see.

"What would happen if I were to make a big mistake? Your inertia might cause catastrophes--because not only are you descending, but people that trust you get pulled down with you. You don't want to fuck up."

"It sounds to me like you feel responsible for what you bring to people," I say.

"I am," he shoots back.

Me: "Is it a burden?"

Him: "Is it for you?"

Farrell is going to be a dad. Is it a coincidence that he's also, in his own style, returning to the religion of his people? Perry says these developments in his life were simultaneous.

Perry Farrell is a Jew. He was born Perry Bernstein in 1960, the son of a New York jeweler. Banging around in southern California, having a bad time in his early 20s, he took his brother's first name as his last, creating a play on the word peripheral. He changed his identity, partly to embrace his new persona, partly to escape.

"You're not talking to a guy who has always felt a connection with Israel," he admits. "I didn't like being Jewish. I was bummed. I didn't practice Jew, which I don't think is the most important thing anyway. Music is the definitive form of religion. Music and mathematics everybody understands equally.

"Just like everyone else, I didn't like Jews. The beauty of the Jews, I saw as I got older, is in the brilliance of their metaphysics. It's a beautiful system. I think they're incredible people. But I think everyone's incredible. I would like to see everyone dancing."

When it comes to the actual practice of Judaism, Farrell picks only the parts he likes--which aren't many. But he considers himself well informed. He discusses texts with Chasen and others and soaks it in.

Now, in a premillennial rush toward history, Farrell has been swept up in Israel's celebration of its jubilee.

For most observers, this jubilee marks the 50th anniversary of Israel as a state, which was declared on May 14, 1948. But for Perry and his crew, biblical jubilee is the main event. Leviticus says jubilee is to be celebrated every 50 years after the people of Israel (those led by Moses through the desert, that is) come into the land. The text dictates special practices, such as the freeing of slaves and the return of land to its original owners, that sanctify the entire year as holy. Perry, Chasen and those who share their brand of messianic Jewish mysticism are inspired by this concept of biblical jubilee, and see Israel's 50th birthday as much more than just the secular anniversary of statehood that most Jews and Israelis have been celebrating. It's a year filled with portent, possibly heralding the messiah and the dawn of peace on earth--or, conversely, Armageddon.

Three religions converge at one spot in Jerusalem: the broad plateau that is crowned by the Dome of the Rock mosque. It is here, according to believers, that Allah ascended into heaven, that Jesus Christ preached and that Abraham offered Isaac to Yahweh. Islamic and Jewish religions claim this site as a most holy place. Chasen believes that jubilee is ripe for a new fanatical push to rebuild the Jewish temple there, and that such a move could cause a conflagration.

"These are things that need to be discussed, not through extremism, but through debate and creativity," Chasen cautions. "We're not trying to scare people. When you look at the way jubilee is observed, it's all about celebrating through music and song. We're not proclaiming the biblical jubilee. We're just going there to celebrate it for ourselves. Our job, as musicians, is to be the celebrants. And to help educate people so they don't resort to fundamentalism."

Whatever happens, one thing's for sure: Farrell wants to play the jubilee.

The exact plans keep changing, but the goal is to head to Israel in September for a huge concert to bring on the peace. This jubilee concert will launch the Gobalee record and tour. Perry explains simply, "Well, a gobballee is one who is eaten." As in gobbled. Hey, they laughed at the name Lollapalooza, too. Perry's traveling festival will then slowly make its way home from the Middle East.

For Farrell this is perfect. He gets to go on a pilgrimage to the promised land. (Are they going to let him bring along his naked pole-dancers and deliver long monologues on how to give people orgasms with a feather?) Perry doesn't want this to be a one-time affair. He's already planning annual "concerts for peace" from Israel, with musicians from around the world. Just in time for the millennium.

Can a musician be a shaman? I was once sitting in an RV with David Bowie in New York when he told me a story. On trips to Japan, Bowie often visits a Buddhist monastery, and on one tour the head priest said that organized religion is finished. The priest said this in the monastery, where people devote their lives to its practice. Moreover, he said that it was up to celebrities such as Bowie to lead people in the right direction. It made a great impression on Bowie.

Ersatz priesthood is really no more weird than the rest of Perry's life. He was in Aspen on New Year's Eve when Michael Kennedy died. Farrell was staying at a condo in Aspen owned by a self-styled sex therapist. The house is set up for sexual encounters. Perry had a girl and his crew with him and they were having a great time.

They saw a body being carried off the slope. "We see these lights coming and we were laughing because we were giddy," he recalls. "We had just gotten off the mountain, and we're going, 'Whoa, oh my God, look at this!' All of a sudden something came over me: 'Shh! Hey, don't laugh! What if it were someone in your family?' So I said, 'I'm going to go inside.' The other people said, 'We're going to the market.' So they headed down there and ran into Michael Kennedy. They tried to resuscitate him. And my friend was there when Michael Kennedy breathed his last breath.

"That night we're having a good time because it was New Year's Eve and we were with friends and loved ones, and this guy talked with me," he continues. In one version of this story, Perry says it was the guy's suit that caught his eye at the bar. "He said, 'Poor Ethel Kennedy is so sad.' And I said, 'Do you want me to speak to her?' He said, 'Well, maybe.' I never did speak with her. But the next thing I know, he's telling me my room is ready and he took me to the hotel where they were staying. And he led me into this room he gave me for the night. And I started to talk about John Kennedy. I said, 'John Kennedy was a great man, wasn't he?' He said, 'Oh, the best.' We talked about JFK for a little while, and I said, 'What's his name?' And the man said, 'Saint Shaughnessy.' That was the highlight of the night. We traded coats, and then he left."

Perry saw Michael Kennedy's lifeless body, then had a conversation with someone who implied that JFK's name in the afterlife is Saint Shaughnessy. OK. Who knows how much of this actually happened? It doesn't matter. For Perry, this is the fabric of reality.

"I have a funny image of myself as a particle," he likes to say. "You create a wave with particles--a single particle is never going to be as big as a wave. And you can be the funny little guy who starts to direct the wave by causing a slightly different resonance, by humming a slightly different tune. Interaction is the strength of the universe.

"If we put as much effort into peace as we do sports, I'm sure peace will occur. You just have to direct the focus. The solution is created by all of us. Don't be mistaken. The solution does not occur because somebody says, 'Hey, let's separate these guys from those guys.' No, somebody says, 'Hey, let's all do this together.' That's the solution. When we all say, 'Let's do this.' And then peace will happen."