If it was in a club or an open field, you never felt like you were being treated like a dummy. You felt that you were in on something really cool. They cared about you and they wanted to get you off. Whoever put it together had something in mind. The stage was adorned with statues, candles and other artifacts pulled from who knows where. The lighting onstage was epic yet intimate. And it was, from the front row to the back. The gigs, on the outside, had all the trappings of a big rock show. One night that comes to memory is Atlanta 1991 when the band had members of Ice-T’s Body Count come up onstage and play Sly Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Whitey, Nigger”. At the same time, he had you in the palm of his hand. He already expected you to be smart, so he didn’t play down to you. And the raps he laid on audiences were not sugar-coated. It wasn’t some rap that he used every night. But when Perry told the band to bring it down so he could say something to the audience boiling at his feet, he really did have something to tell them. They used cliche in an almost traditional sense.

Speaking of parents, the JA song “Ain’t No Right” has more stick-to-your-ribs insight than anything my father ever laid on me. In the blink of an eye, they made other bands seem outrageously unhip and outdated, like when the Wizard of Oz got his shit put in check. Jane’s Addiction pointed it out without pointing to it. Easily more thought-provoking than any corny “message band” ever hoped to be. Ferocity, too hip surfer zen aloofness, drugged out stratospheric abandon, served up with an almost childlike naivete.

They came at you on several levels at the speed of sound. It’s not a ticket to the show, but it’s a necessary document of one of the finest live bands there ever was. That’s why putting out this record is a damn good idea. There were moments like this all through Jane’s concerts. Or, when the band stepped down on “Mountain Song”, it was a body shot. A song like “Three Days” on record is a great piece of work, but when you were standing in front of the PA and those big chords pounded you after the drum jam, it was incredibly moving. The studio versions of the songs are great, but they’re nothing compared to what they became at a Jane’s Addiction concert when the songs mixed with the moment. Jane’s was a band that needed to be seen to be heard to feel the full impact.

That being said, I think it would be hard for any band to capture such a brilliant thing in the studio. efforts, “Nothing’s Shocking” and “Ritual De Lo Habitual”, are brilliant but in my opinion never captured the soul-expanding gift that the band delivered live. From a decade that will be remembered musically as the one that gave us new wave and all those hair bands, Jane’s was a stand-out whose records still deliver and whose shows are still talked about years later. Jane’s Addiction was one of the truly great bands.

What album is cat in the kettle on