Today’s Vinyl: Jane’s Addiction (bootleg)

If, like me, you nearly crapped your pants when you saw Perry Farrell collaborating with 50 Cent and Kelly Rowland for an ESPN NCAA football intro a few years ago, you’ve either ignored the commercialization of everything fringe or you’ve clung to the nostalgic memory of Jane’s Addiction as a genre-bashing LA band who sung primarily about prostitutes, heroin, or prostitutes on heroin. Jane’s Addiction actually hit the mainstream pretty quickly with Been Caught Stealing and then promptly imploded, but for a few years they were a reliable bitch-slap to the absurdity of hair metal and the turgidity of Guns N’ Roses.

Any band with a rabid fan base and a good live act spawns an underground market for illicit recordings, and Jane’s Addiction bootlegs were everywhere for the first few years of their existence. This seven inch is one of half a dozen or so I picked up at various record shows over a couple of years, and features a ripped-off Ralph Steadman drawing on the cover. The tracks are live boots from a 1986 LA show and the sound quality is predictably awful. I saw the band a number of times, including an opening slot for Iggy Pop at the Austin Opera House, but an early show at the Back Room here in Austin may have been the most memorable, where Farrell took the stage in a corset and bondage gear and started going on about what a “nice cock” he had and that we “should see it sometime.” Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your predilection), we never got to.