Jane’s Addiction 4: Kettle Whistle

Despite fragmenting in 1991, Jane’s Addiction never really went away. Perry Farrell and Stephen Perkins formed Porno For Pyros, while Dave Navarro and Eric Avery emerged in Deconstruction, which didn’t sell as well, plus Eric didn’t want to tour. Navarro ended up in Red Hot Chili Peppers for a well-publicized couple of years, which is one reason why that band’s Flea came on board to play bass when Jane’s reunited for the cleverly dubbed Relapse tour. The occasion was promoted by something of a rarities collection: Kettle Whistle served up a CD full of demos, outtakes, live versions, and some new music, somewhat haphazardly sequenced.

The opening title track was apparently a tune that had been around for years, but not properly recorded until now. It’s more on the spacey side than most of their catalog, sounding more like Peter Gabriel than Led Zeppelin. But it’s also more musical than the noisy “So What!”, which has an obnoxious vocal over a fairly standard funk pattern, and they let Flea play trumpet again. “My Cat’s Name Is Maceo” is a fairly literal lyric over a simple riff, and somehow they got Maceo Parker himself to toot along for part of it, either in 1987 or 1997, we’re not sure which. The moody strum of “Slow Divers” is described as an outtake from their self-titled live album, with some posthumous additions, and would have been a very odd if not unwelcome departure had it appeared back then. “City” is nothing more than a Perry-and-Navarro tune recorded for the soundtrack of their Soul Kiss video.

The alternate versions of familiar tunes aren’t very illuminating, and only prove that they’d yet to figure out how to harness the power the final masters would deliver. Yet the live versions are excellent, and we’re still amazed how they could make something as basic as “Jane Says” stay interesting for six minutes. Four (out-of-sequence) songs from the Hollywood Palladium show how tight they were, though we could do without Perry’s “monologue” before “Three Days”.

Even if Kettle Whistle wasn’t stellar, the kids who had the other three albums were happy to have something else to put into the rotation, and they weren’t buying Porno For Pyros. For them alone, it did the trick.

Jane’s Addiction Kettle Whistle (1997)—3