Perry Farrell

Perry Farrell – Cover Interview

Posted on 04. Aug, 2007 by Administrator in hCovers, Music, Profiles

by Devoe Yates

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It’s 11:10 in the evening and Perry Farrell’s just finished the first show of his new Satellite Party tour. His energy is still abuzz and his kids are a bit grumpy, crying as he tries to comfort them. “Sorry, man, my kid’s having a meltdown because we’ve been at it all day and night. He’s asking for his mom.” The kids calm a bit and I ask him if they’ve been endowed with any of their father’s magical music powers. “Yeah. You know, I really stimulated people tonight at the concert, but I looked over and my kids were asleep. But they put a long day in. They like to play, but they don’t have a band yet (laughs). They’re three and five, but they play. They’re pretty good I guess. I just let them hang out and pick up instruments when they want. My kid was on stage today, he was trying to sing at the sound check. He did okay but he was shy because it was on a big sound system.”

But there was a time when Perry was a bit reticent with the microphone, himself. He recants the tale at hand, “The first time I actually ever sang with a band, I was 19 or 20 but I was awful (laughs). And they didn’t want me in the band and I was embarrassed. I went for my first audition somewhere in Hermosa Beach, and I’d sung on a microphone, I’d performed before, but not with a band. I would practice for a great while, just with headphones and a mixer and a microphone and I would sing a cappella, but it was a real startling experience to sing with a group. The microphone is taking something and kind of giving its interpretation, and when you first start out, you don’t know how to use that microphone, and people tend to like to sing into it and sing very sharp and other things. It takes a long

while to get that. But now that I’ve told you, it’ll take you no time at all (laughs). But those guys I sang with that first time, they played jazz and those guys were sticklers for technique. They said they liked to rock, but were very technical once I got there, so that was that. Then after that, every time after that, I…I won ‘em over (chuckles).”

And it’s damn true, he’s won over multitudes of loyal fans over the years with his bands Jane’s Addiction, Porno For Pyros, and now Satellite Party. He revolutionized the concert circuit with his Lollapalooza and Enit Festivals, and of recent, he’s made his mark as an environmental and human rights activist. It seems strange how much things have changed for Perry Ferrell, once the hedonistic drug fueled shaman who, in the early days of Jane’s Addiction, preached of man’s inevitable destruction at his own hands, and now the optimistic revolutionary who fights on the front lines in the war on Global Warming.

It seems perhaps that having children might’ve had a profound effect on Perry, and I ask him how being a father has changed his approach to music and life. “It disrupts and disturbs the thinking process. But it also inspires and stimulates the thinking process. You have to think of bigger things, you have to think about the world in a much wider consideration. You have them to worry about. They’re helpless pretty much and they’re inheriting everything from you. That’s how the writing process changes, you write about things that are not as self-centered, not to say that self-centeredness is too awful, you know what I mean, everybody’s self-centered. And it’s fun to be a heathen. But it’s also really fun to have kids, and take them to great places that inspired you and made you happy — and giving them their inheritances.” And that’s just what he’s been focusing on of late, our children’s inheritances, the planet and its wonders.

Over the years, Perry’s performed a massive amount of environmental work, not only planting vast amounts of trees and raising money for various activist groups, but also by changing the way people think about the planet and raising awareness about the effects of our actions. According to Perry, the necessary change in the political and industrial climate will only come once there’s been a change in our culture. Industry will follow culture, and politics, in turn, will follow industry. When the people as a whole decide they want renewable resources, hydrogen powered cars and clean air and water, the heads of industry will have no choice but to meet their demands. And Perry is driven to make this change happen through his music and festivals, “I look at at like, I’d like to know that I didn’t sit back on my ass and not help clean the planet. I really love the planet. You can use this planet for the most amazing experiences. And the worst thing about this planet, though, is when people just destroy it. They don’t honor it or care for it or love it. They don’t consider it.” Hopefully someday, if Perry and his friends have their way, the vain and pompous who drive shiny Hummers will find themselves terribly out of fashion and quite gross indeed.

And Perry’s work isn’t just limited to stopping Global Warming. Several years ago, he took massive bags of cash he’d raised from several Jane’s Addiction shows and flew into Sudan illegally, risking his life to pay for the freedom of thousands of slaves, many of them children, scarred physically, sexually and mentally. I really can’t even wrap my head around such a feat, saving the lives of thousands of people, and I ask Perry how it felt. “That’s a mighty feeling, that’s a feeling of victory.” And it seems to prove the point that one person can do so much to change the world. His heart seems to know no bounds.

Perry Farrell’s latest voyage takes him to the only place left for him to go, space, where he’s hosting a party on a satellite for all of the world to join, and I have to say, it’s a damn good time. The aptly titled Perry Farrell’s Satellite Party hit stores in May, and now Perry’s hitting the road to spread the word and the party around the world.

The album clocks in at 48 minutes, and it’s chock full of guest appearances from the likes of John Frusciante, Flea, Peter Hook of New Order, Fergie, film composer Harry Gregson-Williams and even Jim Morrison. Perry explains how he coaxed Morrison’s pipes from beyond the grave, “I’ve been friends with The Doors for a long time. When I wrote the story for Satellite Party it involved a Heavenly Host, so I needed a Heavenly Host, and knowing The Doors, I had a feeling there may be some material that still existed. I went to them and played the music and I told them the story and they agreed to let me use the vocals for ‘Woman in the Window.’” The song is a thing of beauty, robust with a 30 piece orchestra as Morrison sings of uniting together to overcome evil, intoning “Just try and stop us, we’re going to love.” The song’s power is inescapable and Perry was asked recently to deliver the recording in person at a summit for Global Warming at 10 Downing Street. Tony Blair, himself, presided over the meeting of scientists, industrialists and politicians, quite glad to have Perry Farrell there to represent the art community. The song is definitely one of the album’s shining moments, but there is a wealth of different styles and flavors to be found within its grooves.

On the writing process for the album, Perry tells it like this. “Because I was driving this thing, I brought people together and we actually took it and meditated on it for a long time and made sense of it. After thinking about it and really looking at it, you start to kind of dress it with these beautiful bits and pieces. Right now, I’m into this idea, I like these colors. My new group, we’ve got this great color scheme going, it starts off with silver and white and then grey, and then we can have a little black and then from there, I want to start using very modern colors, very saturated, like fuschias and electric blues. That’s how it was with the music, I started with basic things, programs I really enjoyed, beats and then started to add colors to it.” And a very colorful album it is indeed.

Now it’s come time to spread the music and the message to the far reaches of our strange little endangered planet. The Lollapalooza Festival he helped begin so many years ago returns again this August 3rd-5th in Chicago, and from there, Farrell will continue the Satellite Party tour, documenting the experience on film, “We’re going to have a two man crew documenting the tour, doing constant editing and posting footage up on different websites. I think it’s very exciting, and not just for filming me, but the people who are around; I’m going to ask questions to people and see what I come up with. I want to see if people collectively can come up with solutions. We just need to start talking, that’s how things change, you know.”

Nothing seems to stop this man, and Morrison’s lyrics from “Woman in the Window” couldn’t be more fitting in describing him and his growing army, “Just try and stop us, we’re going to love.” Maybe some day his dream will be realized, and there will be a global village where we raise our children together and learn to love and celebrate with our neighbors. If only all pessimists could find the optimism he has in his journeys. When asked how long he plans on touring the land for, Farrell replies, “Ten years,” and laughs. “Well, it’s true,” he chuckles. “That’s a good way to end it isn’t it?” And yes, I suppose it is. Godspeed.

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Perry Farrell – Cover Interview

Perry Farrell

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