Features

Return to Lollapalooza with Perry Farrell (Relix Revisited)

What’s your perfect meal and what would you have to drink with it?

Well it depends on what time of the day. Right now [afternoon] I just had matza and caviar with keefer. I would have a lemonade with some Grey Goose and aloe vera juice with a shot of paprika.

Who is DJ Peretz and why is he following you?

Peretz is my Hebrew name, so that’s… it’s my real name. As far as DJing goes, I just got very inspired by writing electronic music and eventually wanted to spin. Spinning is really physical work for the brain. You can DJ maybe forty minutes and it’s like doing a full body workout for your brain. And I love just getting in there for a couple of reasons. It’s very mediatative. It sounds… what’s a better of saying this? When you start to take and combine these sounds the next thing you know… I know what it’s like. It’s like swimming underwater, that’s the feeling. If you’ve ever gone Scubaing, where you go down and go, “wow, no one can talk to me and I am truly here.” No one has the excuse… it’s impossible to get to me.

What is your most transcendental surf moment?

I would say it was on the island of G-Land, Garajautan. It’s in Java. It was the first time I had surfed big waves. We were on this island-there were only three people staying there aside from the people that lived on the island-and I’d have to scream before the sets came in to get my courage up to take off on these waves because they were double-overhead and then pitching. If it’s overhead, it’s scary but you can do it but when it’s two times over your head, it’s something your body doesn’t want to do. You just have to do it. I remember this one wave, dropping in and getting into the position I see in the surf magazines. There’s this position where you go backside and grab the rail of your board and you tuck in backside and you kind of start trimming. One of your arms is in the water and you’re tucked in like a…

Like a pig-dog.

Yeah, exactly, like a pig-dog. I was going to say tucked in like a fetus.

It’s super hairball going backside in that situation as opposed to frontside.

Yeah. So there it was and I’m looking through. And my two buddies, of course I was only the guy out there and they were watching me, so I had to do something for them, stoke ‘em on the shore and that was it.

Rumor has it that a documentary about Jane’s Addiction was made but never released, gaining similar lore to that of the Rolling Stones’ Cocksucker Blues. Confirm or deny?

I know that we made a movie back in about ’97 that we’ve gone through a series of “should we let anybody see this? I don’t think so.” You can probably pick it off of Ebay if you wanted to. [laughter]

Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?

It wasn’t in the pale moonlight, I’ll tell you that much.

What do you think Jane would say today?

Jane? I think she would say, “For a limited… for fifty dollars, please buy these limited signatures of the real Jane on these record sleeves.”

What was it like working with Bob Ezrin? How much influence did he have on the final product?

Well, you’re talking about a fellow who produced The Wall.

I feel like you guys come somewhere between Pink Floyd and Alice Cooper [who Ezrin also produced].

Yeah. [laughter] When you go to a guy like Bob Ezrin, inviting him to come in and play with us, you’re hoping that he’ll do for you what he’s done for the other people he’s worked with and you pray that you get some of that stuff. I felt freer just knowing that Bob was working with us, freer going home at the end of the day instead of staying around and knit-picking on every little tiny sound. I knew that it’s going to be great. My ears started to develop and listen the way Bob listens. I think it’s pretty amazing that my sensibilities of what a high is and what a low is and what an east and a west is have changed because you see the process and you realize that there is a process to the inevitable sound. It’s the same thing like a painter when you first look at their canvas. He’s getting started but he’s only using white. There’s a process to it. So with him, we got to experience and learn. He’s also a great musician so what he can add to things is not just one atom. I sing and that’s the only thing I would say, “leave it up to me.” Everything else, I have to say that I get to work with the best people.

If you could watch one person get hit in the nuts, who would it be?

Oh man. I don’t want to say. Believe me there’s a few people who I would just love to change their face.

Any politicians? They have always been popular for this question.

No, I mean it’s not even politicians. Politicians… you almost have to just throw your hands up and just… what can you say? They’re a certain breed of people. They are important because I don’t want to be a politician and I don’t want to be a copy. I don’t know, sometimes I wonder if there were no cops. I say to myself, “do cops create these things or are they there to stop these things?” It’s a silly argument I have in my head because then I come to the conclusion that, “no, people would really be fucking with each other if there wasn’t somebody to mediate.”

How long did the album take you? Some would say thirteen years while maybe it was literally a year in the studio. What would you say?

I would say, all added up, it took about half a year. That’s if we didn’t have to go off on tour but those things were important too because you get to practice the songs and maybe come back with a better approach to it. If nothing else, the song you already got, maybe you decide this part here, we don’t even need this part and that part there, I think we should play it this way. So, it’s good because older bands usually, well not usually, but older bands sometimes run into the problem that they start an album by going into a place and writing while they’re recording the album. When the younger bands get started, you’ll be playing the same material a year before you get in the studio to record it sometimes, at least six months before you start to record, and you get to work these things through and really understand the song. So it was nice because we got a dose of that while we were recording this. We didn’t just stay in the studio and slap things into the mix. We had a chance to go play them and then come back. And I would it took us about ten months to finish and really there was four months of DJing, touring and people and holidays.