Jane's Addiction "Riot" 1990
35 years ago, a show that 15-year-old me attended in Philly descended—or ascended—into chaos...
This piece was originally published in my friend Layla Gibbons’s excellent zine 122 Hours of Fear but, since copies are hard to come by now, I offer it here.
On November 19th, 1990, I attended a Jane’s Addiction concert at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, a suburb just to the west of Philadelphia. I was 15 years old. By the end of the night, I would be one of maybe twenty kids gleefully attempting to tip over the band’s tour bus in the midst of what the local news called a riot. A few kids got hurt and a cop got his shoulder dislocated or something like that.
My friend B***1, who once expressed her generalized disaffection in a note to me by writing, “I’m so fucked up lately that even my boyfriend licking my clam bores me,” drove me to the show. She was a huge Jane’s fan. She felt that the song “Obvious,” which I guess is about being judged by squares, was written just for her. In another note (remember notes?) she illustrated and annotated the song’s lyrics for me. “Fools don’t fit in / the boots that I tread in” accompanied by a pretty terrible drawing of a pair of Docs. B*** was cool.
I remember Perry Farrell was wearing a dress for at least some of the brief show. I remember they opened with “Up The Beach” and when the bass line started up, the entire crowd lost its mind. I remember Perry saying something about Philadelphia needing a “fucking enema.” I can’t remember how many songs they played; I was stoned on horrendous Philadelphia weed and everything was pretty hazy, albeit enjoyable. Polling various friends who were there afterward puts the concert’s length at around 20 minutes, at which point the band stormed off and the house lights came on. This being a Philly crowd, it was a matter of seconds before the theater was being trashed. Seats ripped off and flung like frisbees, beer and soda hurled at the stage, older longhaired rocker guys in black leather jackets starting to fight each other for lack of something better to do… it was very exciting.
B*** and I made our way downstairs from the balcony where we’d been seated. It was like walking through the archetypal saloon brawl in an old western movie. The violence, though real, was somehow cartoonish. We slipped out a side door and there, right in front of us, was a big, shiny tour bus with a determined posse of alterna-teens lined up on one side, pushing in unison with the goal of rocking it till it fell. I immediately joined in. B*** went to get the car.
I remember a jovial feeling to our bus-rocking, but also the sense that it was now our job. There was a whistle-while-you-work vibe in the air. But, all around us, there was a small riot happening. Kids were overturning trash cans; cops were tackling kids. The whole scene was lit in red-and-blue from a platoon of squad cars blocking each street that led away from the theater. There were kids getting cuffed and loaded into cop vans. I also have a distinct memory of seeing a dog digging through some of the trash from a spilled can. I have no idea where that dog came from, and the image haunts me today.
The cops were ignoring us wannabe bus tippers, maybe because they knew there was zero chance of us succeeding. I still wonder if the band was in there or if they were still backstage. I really hope they were in there. Eventually I gave up and walked in the direction B*** had gone. She had pulled her car up and was idling sideways behind one of the police barriers in classic getaway positioning. I walked right between some cops, hopped in, and off we went in a cloud of clove-cigarette smoke and patchouli stench.
There were news reports about the riot on all three Philly networks that night, and my mom told me she heard about it on the radio on the way to work the next day. Later, there would be talk spread among the kids that Perry was grumpy because he couldn’t score dope in Philly, a piece of news to which we all nodded sagely as if we, teenagers all, totally understood how that felt2.
PS: 25 years after that night, I moved to Los Angeles and met a friend of friends who soon became a close friend of mine. I started to regale him with this story one night and his eyes got wide. He had been one of my fellow bus botherers. His name is Joel Kyack; you can ask him. Reformed 1990s Jane’s Addiction fandom is a small world.
I used her real name in the print zine, but I think I will censor her appellation here on the web.
Not too many years later, I would totally understand how that felt.