My old pal and seasoned music critic Mike Breen wrote a thoughtful, nostalgic, and bummer of a blog post about Perry Farrell, currently on tour with his new project Satellite Party. For many of us, Farrell was an avant garde art-rock prophet, a multimedia visionary who emerged from Venice Beach in the late 1980s and spread the word of weird to the masses. According to Breen, who was one of fifty or so fans who bothered to catch Satellite Party at a Cincinnati, Ohio club, the shock of the new has given way to the yawn of the boring. From Cincinnati CityBeat's Spill It blog:
I have had to leave concerts for a variety of reasons. I confess, I've been thrown out. I've gotten sick. I've gotten bored. I've gotten too drunk to remember anything anyway (a sort of mental exit, I suppose).
But I have never had to leave a show due to depression. That's exactly what happened tonight…
With Jane's Addiction, Perry was a Tasmanian devil driven by freakazoid, banshee-like impulse and dangerous debauchery. You couldn't stop watching Perry when Jane's was in their heyday (though Stephen Perkins is a fascinating drummer to watch play). I've seen different incarnations of Jane's and I've seen Porno for Pyros. All good shows. And I have seen Satellite Party twice before tonight, both times at Lollapalooza in Chicago. They didn't do too much for me. Perry seemed pretty chill at the most recent Lolla a few weeks ago. I didn't see that hunger, that prowess, that theatrical mania in his eyes (though he's still oodles more tolerable than, say, the singer for Mink, whose Rock Star stage moves were more phony than a prostitute's moans of "Oh yeah, baby, that feels so good"). I loved seeing Perry play the kids' stage at Lollapalooza, where he did "Pets' and a cover of "Whole Lotta Love" (a song with the words "fucked up" in it and a song about – just guessing – fucking?). He seemed even mellower than he had on the main stage, surveying the kiddie crowd and beaming proudly, perhaps moved by the curious generational overlap.
He surveyed the small crowd at Bogart's tonight, too. His glance around the venue seemed to say, "Wow, how humbling, but these people really love me." The audience may have been small in numbers, but almost everyone there seemed to love seeing their hero on stage. Perry's children's-stage haze seems to have stuck with him and, while he's graceful and still somewhat engaging on stage, he came off a little like an AltRock Icon version of Perry Como. Comfortable and familiar, but not even remotely provocative.
Link (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)
