Things escalated quickly onstage for Jane’s Addiction as a rockstar brawl broke out at their Boston show.
In YouTube footage from the band’s Friday the 13th concert, vocalist Perry Farrell can be seen shoving and throwing a punch at guitarist Dave Navarro before the lights dimmed on the venue and the show abruptly ended.
“F— you!” Farrell can be heard yelling at Navarro after leading the crowd in a chant during a performance of their 1988 track ‘Ocean Size’. Navarro held his guitar up to defend himself before crew members rushed onstage to pull Farrell off him.
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Perry’s wife Etty Lau Farrell shared a “firsthand account” of what went down on Instagram, explaining that the band started the song “before Perry was ready and did the count off.”
“Clearly there had been a lot of tension and animosity between the members.. the magic that made the band so dynamic,” she wrote. “Well, the dynamite was lit. Perry got up in Dave’s face and body checked him.”
Etty Lau added, “Perry’s frustration had been mounting, night after night, he felt that the stage volume had been extremely loud and his voice was being drowned out by the band. Perry had been suffering from tinnitus and a sore throat every night. But when the audience in the first row, started complaining up to Perry cussing at him that the band was planning too loud and that they couldn’t hear him, Perry lost it.”
Although she credited Navarro with attempting to “deescalate the situation” by keeping Perry at arm’s length, she said bassist Eric Avery came up behind her husband in the dark, “put Perry in a headlock and punched him in the stomach three times” before a crew member pulled him off. “Then Eric nonchalant walked off to the front of the stage to apologize to audience for the show ended early,” she wrote.
“Dave still looked handsome and cool in the middle of a fight. Perry was a crazed beast for the next half an hour – he finally did not calm down, but did breakdown and cried and cried,” added Etty Lau. “Eric, well he either didn’t understand what deescalation meant or took advantage of the situation and got in a few cheap shots on Perry.”
The performance came during Jane’s Addiction’s 23-city co-headlining tour with Love and Rockets.
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