The Alternative Number Ones: Porno For Pyros’ “Pets”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Before I get into the meat of this column, we should take a moment to recognize the struggle of anyone who's ever had to spend time with Perry Farrell. I cannot even imagine what that experience would do to you. Farrell's former collaborators often speak of him as a wild-eyed, Dionysiac cult-leader genius. At the same time, every anecdote about the man makes him sound like the most aggravating little dickfuck that you ever met in your entire life. Imagine feeling like this guy had something -- like it was your responsibility to help get that thing out into the world, a vocation that would require you to be around him for any length of time. I couldn't do it. I wouldn't be strong enough.

I tend to think of Perry Farrell the same way that I think of Kanye West. Both of them have made a lot of music that I love, though it's always up for debate whether they're the parties most responsible for that music or whether they were just really canny creator-curators who had a vision of how they wanted to put other people to work. Both of them left huge cultural stamps and helped to define ideas of cool for entire generations. Both of them have been charismatic enough to perform for vast crowds and to have those crowds eating out of their hands. And if I was trapped in an elevator for longer than 10 minutes with either one of them, I might commit seppuku.

There are plenty of obvious differences between Kanye West and Perry Farrell, both in terms of aesthetic and in variations of narcissistic psychosis. But from where I'm sitting, the most important difference is that Kanye West made a lot of music that I love. Before everything turned to shit, the man had something like a seven-album run of great records, and that's not even getting into all the bangers that he produced for other people. Perry Farrell had a couple of Jane's Addiction records, and he had "Pets." That's pretty much it. From a couple of Jane's Addiction records and "Pets" -- as well as Lollapalooza and the bands he influenced and the cultural moments that he represented -- Farrell has pretty much accepted license to be a shitty little weasel-guru for decades. He lived off of that license for most of his life, at least until last September, when he finally set aflame whatever lingering goodwill he might've had left.

Perry Farrell comes with a whole lot of baggage, and maybe that's how you know that "Pets" is a good song. Even in the face of decades of ugly shitheadery, "Pets" still sounds beautiful. With any public figure who acts the way that Perry Farrell acts, you have to do the math in your head -- the intricate columns of your own personal pluses and minuses that tell you whether you want to stay on board for the ride or consign someone to your own distaste pantheon for all eternity. "Pets" isn't enough to save Perry Farrell, at least in my mind, but it's a big check in the plus column.

Jane's Addiction famously broke up just before the alterna-rock explosion that they helped catalyze. By the time "Been Caught Stealing" became the band's second Modern Rock chart-topper, Jane's were fractured beyond repair. The first Lollapalooza tour, which opened the door for so many cultural changes, was also the band's farewell. Perry Farrell wasn't the type to not cash in on the alt-rock boom. He was always going to start another band, and Porno For Pyros were that band.

Maybe I'm not being fair. Perry Farrell was leading Psi Com back in the '80s, playing mystic acid-head punk festivals in the desert when nobody was making money on endeavors like that. Maybe he was driven by the sheer love of creation as much as anything else. But everything that I've read about Porno For Pyros makes it sound like this man was operating at peak delusional-psycho capacity and dragging all the people around him down into total misery.

After Jane's Addiction broke up, Perry Farrell tried to start a freeform website called Teeth. This was the early '90s, when nobody was quite sure what the internet was yet, so he had his own ideas about what to do with it. In the Jane's Addiction oral history Whores, Farrell says that a homeless person would ask him for five bucks, and he'd say, "Well, I'll give you five bucks, but I want you to come into my website and tell me about life and do something on the computer -- even though you never worked with it. Do something artistic." I know there's been a lot of inflation since then, but there's no way that this hypothetical homeless person should've settled for five bucks for all of that.

Obviously, nothing ever came of Teeth, partly because Perry Farrell was doing some extremely nasty drugs and alienating the people around him. By all accounts, Farrell has the rare ability to ingest shitloads of controlled substances without dying or even developing debilitating addictions, and the people in his life tend to not be so lucky. Sometime during this stretch, Farrell met a guitarist named Peter DiStefano while on a surfing trip. DiStefano initially resisted the idea of starting a band with Farrell, since he didn't see himself living up to the Jane's Addiction legacy, but he eventually went along with it anyway. Jane's drummer Stephen Perkins also came along -- the Billy Corgan/Jimmy Chamberlin dynamic where the drummer always seems to stick with the off-putting frontman no matter what. Dutch-born bassist Martyn LeNoble came from Thelonious Monster, a band who'd been on the LA underground with Jane's Addiction but who never blew up.

Perry Farrell's new band started out jamming in a garage, and all of the non-Stephen Perkins members would sit around smoking crack and shooting heroin together. Even Farrell couldn't really handle all that shit. Farrell later said, "In Porno, I couldn't even sing if I wasn't on the pipe. I couldn't get out of bed, I couldn't move without it." In Whores, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante, who was dealing with a lot of the same demons, talks about the band's "street energy." As in: "Martyn lived in a house with some Crips and stuff." Most of the band members carried guns. The vibes around this band could not possibly be more poisonous.

By most accounts, the name Porno For Pyros comes from the riots around the Rodney King verdict in LA '92. Farrell: "We went out and did our thing and rioted as well. We wanted to feel the street and the rush of what was going on." They looted a bunch of furniture for Farrell's apartment from some stores, and then they shot their guns at an abandoned bank. These were not poor, disaffected, desperate people. These were some guys who got off on partying while the world burned around them. Farrell's fascination had all sorts of weird sexual and racial dimensions, and he sings about it directly on the Porno For Pyros song "Black Girlfriend": "Ever since the riots, all I really wanted was a Black girlfriend... It's so exciting and foreign." See what I mean? This shit is rough.

Porno For Pyros wrote and recorded their self-titled 1993 debut before figuring out little things like credit and paperwork, and then Perry Farrell brought in his lawyer to figure out how things should be divided up. Martyn LeNoble says that Farrell told him, "You can get your own attorney, but if you do, this band will probably not exist." They wrote all their songs while coming down from being high, and Farrell co-produced the album with Matt Hyde, a recording engineer who later worked with heavy bands like Monster Magnet, Slayer, and Hatebreed. I don't have a lot of nice things to say about the first Porno For Pyros album, which mostly strikes me as a turgid echo of Jane's Addiction, with all the psychedelic wailing and funk-metal bass-slapping but none of the galactic, spiral-eyed hug-the-world reach. But I'll say this for Porno For Pyros: It's got "Pets."

I'd never heard Porno For Pyros in full before working on this column, and the rest of the album makes that song feel even more inexplicable. In the midst of so much self-impressed wheel-spinning, there's this sudden piece of weird and minimal beauty. When I'm playing the album and "Pets" comes on at track six, dead center of the record, it's like the world suddenly snaps into high-definition. "Pets" opens with a few spare, echoing bass-notes and a single guitar chord that sounds like someone twanging a rubber band. Then the groove comes rushing softly, like an edible kicking in. It's a blissful little wash, a warm haze that slows time down. When Perry Farrell's voice arrives, he's not trying to howl over a din; he's just sweetly muttering some stupid stoner philosophy. It sounds gorgeous.

Lyrically, "Pets" has a gallingly simple concept. The first verse is nothing but Farrell's cheap little Hot Topic greeting-card musings about what people are like a different ages: "Children are innocent, and teenagers are fucked up in the head/ Adults are even more fucked up, and elderlies are like children." Fantastic. Thanks for that, Perry Farrell. Along similar lines, Farrell goes on to suggest that humanity is heading for self-destruction and that everyone might be better-off if aliens came in and enslaved anyone. Farrell, for one, welcomes our new ant overlords.

I type out all the ideas behind "Pets," and they look so fucking dumb that I want to throw my laptop in a river. I can't believe I'm sitting here and attempting to elucidate the points that Perry Farrell makes in this song. But all of this is build-up to the song's four-word chorus: "We'll make great pets." The image is grim but somehow also fey, maybe even cute. Farrell twists those four words into a few different melodies, repeating them like a mantra. He might even make them sound profound, or at least like something that a big crowd could sing back to him. I don't actually think Farrell would make a good pet. I think he'd be the type that gets into the trash and leaves it strewn everywhere when you get home. Neighbors would be like, "Sorry to bother you, but the walls are thin, and your pet keeps yapping about his venture-capital pitch for an orgy at a virtual-reality amusement park." The chorus lingers anyway.

Since Farrell mutters all the other words so quietly, it's easy enough to just focus on that chorus and to let the rest of the song fade away. The band makes that easier, working a squalling backwards-guitar groove that recalls the more psychedelic edges of '90s dance music, or maybe just like the starry drone-stomp stuff from the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" that the Chemical Brothers mined to make "Let Forever Be."

When I was 13, "Pets" had just the right level of trippiness. I was maybe a year away from my first drug experiences, and the song hinted at brain-states that I was still a little too scared to properly fantasize about. But it also worked as a weirdly catchy little ditty at a time when alternative radio was full of weirdly catchy little ditties. "Pets" sounded soft and inviting, and the music hinted at profundity that the lyrics couldn't match. There's delicious sustain all over the guitars -- so much that they sometimes sound a bit like violins. It made being a pet sound like fun.

"Pets" wasn't the first Porno For Pyros song that the world got to hear. Instead, Warner Bros. sent out two companion-piece tracks, "Cursed Female" and "Cursed Male," as a two-song promo single. On the album, they put those tracks together into a continuous suite. "Cursed Female" didn't have a video or anything, but there was enough appetite for anything Jane's Addiction-related that the song still reached #3 on the Modern Rock chart. (It's a 5.)

In the Whores book, Peter DiStefano says that Warner thought the band was crazy to release "Pets" as a single because of that line about how teenagers are fucked up in the head. To me, this seems unlikely. "Pets" is far and away the prettiest song on the album, and you can't really complain about its objectionable lyrical content when it's on the same album as "Black Girlfriend." But Jed The Fish, a DJ at KROQ, played the entire Porno For Pyros record on the air, and the people who called into the station really liked "Pets." The band made a video with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the married-couple directors who would later make Little Miss Sunshine. It's a colorful, kaleidoscopic clip that distorts everyone's faces with a geometric funhouse-mirror effect, and it pairs the band members with female bodybuilders. It was just arresting enough to make for memorable MTV spectacle.

Porno For Pyros played their first show at a Los Angeles AIDS benefit with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Beastie Boys, and Fishbone. They did a whole lot of crack-fueled touring, but they never had a main-stage slot on the Lollapalooza tour, possibly because Farrell's involvement with the festival had really dwindled since the first one. They did, however, play Woodstock '94, though they had to fly Farrell out on a private plane because he was on a bender and missed his flight. Porno For Pyros also put in a joke-free appearance on HBO's Larry Sanders Show. (They played a whole song, but it wasn't "Pets," so you shouldn't feel like you have to watch it.) Most of the band's performances were supposed to be circus-spectacular deals with acrobats and dancing girls and whatnot. I never saw the band live, and I'm at peace with that.

An early Rolling Stone feature about the band revolved around writer Kim Neely's attempts to get anything remotely print-worthy out of a couple of excruciating interview sessions. At one point, she describes Farrell as "Peter Pan who only wants to talk about fucking." That's pretty good. It's a shame that nobody writes that kind of band profile anymore, but honestly, we don't currently have very many bands rich or famous enough to merit that kind of takedown.

The self-titled Porno For Pyros album debuted at #3, and it eventually went gold. "Pets" crossed over to the Hot 100 and peaked at #67. It wasn't exactly a smash, but Jane's Addiction never made it to the Hot 100 during their initial run, so that was an achievement. None of the other album tracks had any effect. Porno For Pyros had the hype and the pressure that comes with being the post-Jane's Addiction band, but that wasn't enough to make them the next big things. Once the Porno For Pyros album cycle settled down, the band went on a series of songwriting trips to beautiful places -- to Tahiti, Fiji, Mexico, Indonesia. That sounds like it would be really fun if your band didn't have Perry Farrell in it. The trips also gave the group a chance to detox, but they'd go back into binge mode whenever they got back home. One handler calls it a "two-year surf trip," but they did get around to making a second album eventually.

I don't think Porno For Pyros' 1996 album Good God's Urge is a classic record or anything, but I like its spaced-out psychedelia more than the leaden churn that dominates the first LP. Good God's Urge has a pretty sense of float, and it sounds faintly effortless, even though the band was more or less in a constant state of crisis. During the recording sessions, Martyn LeNoble quit for a bunch of reasons. Perry Farrell was hogging most of the publishing money. LeNoble wasn't getting along with Farrell anymore. He tells a story about waking up to see Farrell, quivering and paranoid, standing over him with a knife and believing that Farrell would've stabbed him if he hadn't woken up at that moment. LeNoble was in his own druggy, depressive spiral, and he says that he attempted suicide once. The other guys in the band didn't notice, and he checked himself into a psych ward soon after.

Eventually, Porno For Pyros replaced LeNoble with Mike Watt, the former Minutemen/fIREHOSE bassist who'd just released the guest-heavy solo album Ball-Hog Or Tugboat? (Watt's only Modern Rock hit as a solo artist is "Against The '70s," an anti-nostalgia cautionary anthem with Eddie Vedder on vocals, Dave Grohl on drums, and Krist Novoselic on Farfisa. It peaked at #21. Good song!) The members of Love And Rockets, a band that's been in this column once, all came in to play on one song from Good God's Urge. Farrell was supposed to repay the favor by singing on a Love And Rockets track, but he no-showed the studio session because he was on another bender. Dave Navarro, formerly of Jane's Addiction, played some guitar on Good God's Urge, too. Farrell decided to direct his own video for lead single "Tahitian Moon" and film it in Tahiti, and it was apparently an expensive boondoggle where everyone was high the whole time. The song is pretty good, though. ("Tahitian Moon," Porno For Pyros' last top-10 Modern Rock hit, peaked at #8. It's a 7.)

Porno For Pyros didn't do a lot of touring behind Good God's Urge. At the time, Perry Farrell's big idea was the ENIT Festival, a Lollapalooza-style tour that would match Porno For Pyros with bands like Black Grape and the Sun Ra Arkestra, as well as rave DJs. Farrell also wanted tree-planting ceremonies and horny psychedelic art to be part of the whole deal, and he sank a ton of his money into the planning. But the tour had high production costs, and it didn't sell many tickets, so most of its dates got canceled. In Whores, Love And Rockets' David J describes how Farrell would talk about ENIT: "It wasn't just a music festival, ENIT was going to attract extraterrestrials. These ENIT festivals would be staged simultaneously on other planets and would be all hooked up via satellite. He was going right out there... The drugs got in the way. They were constructive to a degree, but then they became detrimental." (I wouldn't say that Whores is a fun read, necessarily, but I definitely mowed through it in a few days.)

Good God's Urge didn't sell. Soon after its release, Peter DiStefano was diagnosed with testicular cancer; he later made a full recovery. After a few tours with Mike Watt, Perry Farrell floated the idea of bringing Martyn LeNoble back into the band, but then he dismissed LeNoble from the stage mid-performance at LeNoble's first show back. Porno For Pyros recorded one more song, "Hard Charger," for the soundtrack of the Howard Stern biopic Private Parts. For that recording, the band had a whole different lineup, with Dave Navarro on guitar and Flea on bass. At that point, Farrell must've realized that he had three quarters of Jane's Addiction back together, so he mounted a Jane's reunion tour. Flea stood in for original bassist Eric Avery, who still hated Farrell. ("Hard Charger" peaked at #23 on the Modern Rock chart.) At that point, Porno For Pyros were done. The Jane's Addiction reunion went through a bunch of different phases over the years, and the band will appear in this column one more time.

In 2009, the original Porno For Pyros lineup got back together and played a one-off set at Farrell's 50th-birthday party. They reunited again in 2020, playing a pandemic-era webcast for Lollapalooza. In 2022, the four original members of Jane's Addiction were supposed to get back together to tour, but they had to change plans because Dave Navarro was suffering from long COVID. So Porno For Pyros, rather than Jane's Addiction, played their first proper for-the-public reunion set at Florida's Welcome To Rockville festival. The band released a few more songs, and Martyn LeNoble eventually left again.

Last year, Porno For Pyros headed out on a reunion tour that was also a farewell tour, with Mike Watt back on bass. When it was over, Jane's Addiction finally launched their long-promised classic-lineup reunion tour, and it exploded in spectacular fashion. In the wake of all that, Martyn LeNoble went on record, calling Farrell "the worst frontman I’ve ever worked with" on Twitter. So don't hold your breath for another Porno For Pyros reunion. "Pets" or no "Pets," we should be fine without them.

GRADE: 8/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's Beavis and Butt-Head trying to figure out how they feel about the "Pets" video: