“Señores y señoras
Nosotros tenemos mas influencia
Con sus hijos, que tu tienes
Pero los queremos
Creado y areglado
De Los Angeles
Juana’s adiccion!”

Listening to Jane’s Addiction, the wonderful SoCal alternative pioneers, always takes me back to Tallahassee, Florida. I lived there for a couple of years at the outset of the nineties. For a good part of that time I lived in a little studio apartment that had been carved out of a turn of the (twentieth) century house in the shadow of the Florida capitol building. It was my first solo apartment and I loved it – the freedom of living alone for the first time in my nearly two decades. It was tatty, dirty, tiny and didn’t have screens on the window or air conditioning. That latter feature of the apartment was a little bit of a problem in the hot Florida summers. It meant either suffocating or leaving the windows open to the varied fauna of the Sunshine State.

In hindsight, I should count myself lucky that the only Florida wildlife that caused me grief was cockroaches. I could have played host to any number of creepy critters, many potentially lethal, looking for a home. At the time, however, I found it difficult to find any gratitude that all I had was what turned out to be a massive infestation of Florida’s most unwelcome resident – the palmetto bug. For those of you lucky enough to have never dealt with these lovelies, they are basically giant flying cockroaches. They have the capacity to breed rapidly and in enormous numbers, resistance to most poisons developed to kill them and no apparent fear of man. After my first warm day in the new apartment they were everywhere – on the walls, the ceilings, nooks, crannies – particularly at night, the time you least want to come across a two-inch flying cockroach. I fought a losing battle with the palmetto bug army that had taken up residence in my apartment for months. The only way I could kill them was physical stomping. To this day, there is no sound that I find quite as satisfying as that of a cockroach exoskeleton crunching under a boot. Unfortunately, for every one I stomped, three more flew in through my unscreened windows.

The last straw in The Great Cockroach War of 1990-1991 took place one steamy August morning at about 3 a.m. I woke suddenly, and in the moonlight, saw the unmistakable shape of a palmetto bug’s multi-faceted eyes staring back at me from a distance of about half an inch. The fearless bastard, no doubt the Achilles of Palmetto Bugs, was sitting on my forehead staring at me. As he brazenly loped away from my shrieking, impotent counter-attack I knew that something had to change. It was time for biological warfare – weapons of mass destruction.

I don’t know why it never occurred to me just to buy some screens for the window, but it didn’t. At some point I had a conversation with one of my drug-addled at risk friends about my cockroach problem. “Man, what you need is a gecko” was his apparently knowledgeable response. He told me that geckos are natural predators of cockroaches and other insects and that if I got myself a handful, my cockroach infestation would be in my past. Inspired, I headed down to this reptile place on the south side of Tally and happily came home with a cardboard box full of a half dozen Tokay geckos (if one is good, six is six times better).

Now, I never saw one of my phalanx of geckos catch a cockroach and I can’t say for sure if the cockroach population in my apartment ever fell. What I can tell you is that a sub-tropical Florida apartment – with ample insect food – is a perfect environment for gecko propagation, as evidenced by the baby Tokay geckos I began to find in my bathroom at night. I can also attest that waking up with a Tokay gecko on your face is scant improvement over waking up with a cockroach on your face.

Insect and reptile problems notwithstanding, Tallahassee is where I started to learn to love music. I had two friends that had the music bug and very different tastes. One of them leaned towards the classics of the Deep South, blues tinged rock that still shapes a lot of the music I gravitate towards. The second friend was excited about the new “alternative” sounds coming from the West Coast – the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, Sublime and Jane’s Addiction. It was the latter band that I really fell for and that kept me slightly sane in those bug infested summer days.

I picked up Jane’s Addiction’s self-titled debut one day, based on my friends recommendation, and was stunned from the first listen. This was music like I’d never heard – from Stephen Perkins’ machine gun drums that announce the opening of “Trip Away”, to Dave Navarro’s cranked up Jimmy Page guitar and the funky bass line. But it was Perry Farrell that made Jane’s Addiction something really special. He seemed to throw any semblance of a vocalist’s rule book right out the window. Farrell would alternate between shrill shrieking, evangelical preaching and threatening whispering seemingly without method. On this first Jane’s Addiction record, and by the way who releases a live record as their debut? On this record, Farrell is at his purest, rawest, most filthily shamanic. I spent many a night thrashing about my infested apartment to Farrell’s When the cockroach battling got to be a bit much for me, I would blast this album as loud as my cobbled stereo equipment would allow, as if I could blast them sonically from my life. The live version of “Pigs in Zen” on this album became my cockroach stomping song.

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A while back when I did my interview with Turnbaby, I mentioned that I hadn’t played Z any of the “heavier” bands in my library. No Nirvana, no Black Sabbath, no Soundgarded and no Jane’s Addiction. I don’t know why that has been the case as some of this music is integral to who I am and the whole point of Z’s Music Monday is to introduce the boy to just that music. At least a part of my reluctance to pull out the rockers were lingering concerns about Z’s fragility. Well, his Mum whacked our delicate flower’s head off the mantle the other day and he lived, so this weekend we cranked up the stereo and brought out Jane’s Addiction. Z seemed to be a big fan of “Ritual de lo Habitual”, particularly the opening track. He loved both watching and participating in the cockroach stomping dance. He laughed like crazy during the Papa-throws-me-in-the-air-and-mostly-catches me dance that we developed during “Obvious”. I’m here to tell you, Z is ready to rock.

Image Credits:

Palmetto bug

Gecko

Florida state phallus

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