Behind the Jane’s Addiction Blow-Up: Perry Farrell Punched Dave Navarro in the Face Backstage After Concert Scuffle, Says Band’s Guitar Tech

Chris Willman
·14-min read

For alarmed Jane’s Addiction fans who’ve been wondering what was really going on before, during and after the fateful Boston concert that saw the veteran group effectively break up mid-song, more details are emerging. The latest revelations include the allegation that Perry Farrell took yet another swing at Dave Navarro after all the band members were backstage — and, unlike the near-miss seen by millions around the world on video, this time the singer’s fist connected with the guitarist’s face.

The literally blow-by-blow account of what went down is part of a highly detailed, 90-minute podcast conversation between Dan Cleary, the group’s guitar and bass tech of 17 years, and Todd Newman, a friend of Navarro’s for 30 years whom the guitarist has called his best friend. Cleary is among those who was captured on fan video trying to contain Farrell’s anger and break up the fight. In the podcast, Cleary and Newman express sympathy for Farrell — and the tech says he even got a cordial goodbye text from the singer, after the reunion tour came to a sudden halt — but they clearly have the backs of the other three members, after a fracas that everyone involved seems to believe has ended Jane’s Addiction for good.

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The podcast, now on YouTube, is episode #313 of “Rare Form Radio” — and, as a fascinating exploration of the tensions that can tear a group apart, is certain to be listened to a lot more than the previous 312 episodes combined.

It includes excerpts from the audio feed at the fateful Friday the 13th show… first, of Farrell seeming to sing out of time from the rest of the band, and then of the confrontation between band members on- and off-stage. While listeners will sometimes have to take for granted that Cleary is offering an accurate description of what went down, audio of the after-show confrontation apparently has the singer complaining to his wife, Etty Lau Farrell, that other members were “trying to fuck my show up.” Navarro — who had been shoved and then had a punch thrown at him onstage — then appears to say to Farrell, “What the fuck was that, you motherfucker?” The sounds of a scuffle are subsequently heard that Cleary describes as “Perry punching Dave, and that one, he actually connected with… You can hear it, the right hand to the left side of Dave’s face.”

The narrative told by Cleary — and to a lesser extent Newman, who did not attend the Boston show, but heard about it from Navarro — goes all the way back to the first night of the U.S. tour. They both tell of how Farrell “quit the band” before the opening show in Las Vegas, even as fans were starting to come in for the gig, only to be talked into going on with the show at the last minute. “Management earned their keep that day,” says Cleary.

Throughout the conversation, Cleary and Newman say they were compelled to speak up in response to Etty Lau Farrell saying that the incident happened because her husband had finally “reached his breaking point” — maintaining that, in their view, Perry Farrell was already at a breaking point on day one of the North American tour. But they also add that, when everything was clicking, and when Farrell was “sober-ish,” the group was doing some of the best shows in its history —even if, in calamitous appearances in Tampa, New York and finally Boston, they ending up doing three of the worst.

Variety has reached out to a rep for Farrell to see if he wishes to respond to the podcast’s account of the band’s last weeks.

Cleary says that before the initial European leg of the tour — which found the original four members coming together for the first time in 14 years — they had agreed to proceed as a democracy. And one of those democratic decisions at the time was that “we just want to be four guys on stage —no backup singers, no dancers, none of that. Old school music speaks for itself. … And I do know that there was immediate pushback from Perry on that issue.” Some previous tours under the band’s name that had not included all the original players had utilized Etty Lau Farrell and other dancers on stage, but the singer went along with the other musicians’ wishes to not include that element.

But before the U.S. leg of the tour, the subject came up again, now with the possibility of having the dancers on video, which the rest of the band nixed. The other members commissioned some non-dancing video content, which Farrell turned down. In this account, Farrell, who had allegedly not attended rehearsals, showed up a few hours before the start of the Las Vegas opener with video content he had filmed “of Etty and I think some other women in the desert dancing. No dancers on the stage, but now uyou want to put ‘em behind us dancing — it’s kind of the same thing… It’s 2024, it’s a bit of a different time. You know, having scantily clad chicks on stage or on video, I don’t think it’s as empowering as maybe the Farrells might think it is… The Farrells sort of couldn’t let go of this thing, to the point that before the first show, Perry quit the band.”

Newman, who had come out for the Vegas opener, further discusses with his host how Etty Lau Farrell was “out in this public area yelling about how Perry is going home and the tour is over, and this is in front of our Live Nation reps, who are the people that basically promote the tour and front the bill for the tour. And when they start hearing that people are going home before the first show, obviously they get very squirrelly and very concerned.”

According to Newman, “They don’t want to disappoint the fans, and they were a few hours away from showtime, so they collectively decided, well, we should just go and play anywhere. And ideas were being thrown out, like, do we know any pepople who would know the songs that are in Vegas? Or do we just play instrumentally and say, ‘If you know the words, sing along, we’re having a problem with the lead singer’?”

The show went on, but Cleary says that “from that point, Perry did kind of pull away from his bandmates” and there was “no joyful interactions, no talk… But even after that kind of weirdness, the band did continue to support Perry through the entire tour. If there was ever parts where… he wasn’t quite sure what part of the song they were in, they would go and say, ‘Here we are.’ If he had a great show, they were the first people to be like, ‘That was fucking awesome. You’re amazing.’… There was some talk of the fight that ended up happening in Boston was brought on by sound issues on stage, and I have to push back on that in a big way, because… this one’s tough to talk about, because it has to do with: Are there other factors involved than just stage stuff?”

“The three worst shows, this man was clearly fucked up, and we knew it from the moment we saw him earlier in the day,” Cleary says. He refers to a widely circulated, horrific review by a critic of an apparently woeful Tampa show, an article he says was “tough but also kind of spot-on,” saying that show was “like, holy shit — call the police. There’s been a murder.” Then they got to the first of two shows in New York City, which instantly became buzzy on social media as a disaster. “The first show was the worst show I’ve ever seen in my life — I’m not saying just with Jane’s; it was the worst show I’ve ever seen… He didn’t know where he was in the songs. He didn’t know the words. He was singing words from other songs. These are not sound issues. … And also, he had a bunch of fantastic shows throughout the tour. The sound doesn’t change — we’re the same all the time.”

One thing Cleary and Etty Lau Farrell (who addressed this issue in her Instagram comments) apparently agree about: drunkenness is not a big issue for Farrell, despite many reviews noting the singer’s signature wine bottle. “He isn’t drinking a shitload of wine on stage,” says the tech, who notes that he believes “emotional issues” factor into it, along with the possibility of “substances.”

A heated argument erupted after the first show in New York went wildly wrong, but “they heard each other” and “got some stuff off their chest. After a string of rough shows and bad vibes and problems, Navarro was pulling Perry in, hugging before the show, (saying) ‘I love you, let’s go kick some ass’… And they turned in probably one of the best shows I’ve ever seen the band do in 17 years. It was magic.”

Next up was Boston, with Cleary offering a still more detailed account. He notes that there is fan video going around of an earlier point in the show in which Navarro taps Farrell on the arm, “and what he’s doing is, he’s saying, ‘I’m gonna take my solo again, because you just sang over it a minute ago, and I stopped because you don’t know where you’re at.’” At another point, in the tech’s account, Farrell saw Navarro, bassist Eric Avery and drummer Stephen Perkins huddling about how to proceed, and “in his mind, I think, there’s some kind of paranoia going on there. And it sucks, because these guys just want to have a great show, all four of them. If Perry has a rough night, they’re not happy; they want him to kick ass every night… (Farrell) thinks they’re talking about him, which they are, but not in the way he thinks. They’re trying to figure out how to fix this stuff… So he goes over and starts screaming lyrics at them, which was just strange.”

During “Ocean Size,” “for the history of the band, it all fell apart in this moment… Perry is getting angrier and it’s almost like when someone becomes a werewolf.” The podcaster then plays a sound file of Farrell allegedly saying “Fuck these motherfuckers… fuck him” before he body-slams the guitarist. “I’m tuning a guitar when I see the push. Guitar comes right off and I make a beeline for both of these guys — and here is where it gets real sad.” Cleary becomes emotional, in recounting the incident, relating it to times when he had to physically defend his mother and his sister growing up. “I love Dave (and) it felt like seeing a little kid getting bullied on the schoolyard for something he didn’t do. And he’s been through enough shit in his life, and worked so hard to get back to this point. To see that happen just triggered something in me: ‘I’m not gonna let this happen to this guy.’ Eric had the same feeling.” The guitar tech also wonders aloud why Farrell went after Navarro, who has famously fought back from long COVID and other health issues, rather than the other two members.

Cleary describes how Avery got Perry in a headlock, while the singer was “still flailing away,” and the bassist got in “two body shots… to the stomach.” In her account, Etty Lau Farrell had counted it as three, calling Avery’s action “a cheap shot” when in her mind her husband had already been disarmed. “Eric said, ‘I didn’t know how to get his attention. I had to get his attention to get him to try to stop him from going towards Dave again.’” Cleary describes their actions as being “like clowns at a rodeo… trying to divert Perry’s attention from Dave.” To Farrell’s wife, Cleary says, “Even if Eric had kicked Perry’s fucking ass, it’s not a cheap shot.” He notes that he exchanged texts with Etty after the incident, and says he wrote her back, “Eric did what I wanted to do. And he wasn’t trying to hurt him — we were all trying to protect Dave. And also, your husband threw the first and the last punch of the night.”

“Again,” Cleary says, “I want people to understand it didn’t end there.” He plaus the audio of Farrell backstage “being consoled,” and “eventually Dave walks up to ask what the fuck happened, and Perry punches him again… So any of of this talk of cheap shots… (But) I feel for him, because something is going on mentally. He looked crazed.”

Says Cleary, “I enjoy Perry. I’ve had great talks with him. He sent me a beautiful text the other day — basically a ‘I’ll miss you’ kind of text. He’s a good dude, most of the time. And then there’s times when it’s kind of this, but we’ve never seen this crazed version before. Which is what makes it so scary.”

Newman shares Navarro’s point of view: “I was having a conversation with Dave that just reminded me of that, talking about the footage… He said to me, ‘You see where I’m playing and then I kind of put my hand out after he kind of body checks me, and then he throws that punch. And you see the look of shock on my face.’ And Dave is saying … ‘It’s weird because I wasn’t shocked that he body-checked me.’ He wasn’t shocked that he threw a punch at him. He was shocked by the look in Perry’s eyes that he’s never seen before… ‘like I was seeing something demonic going on.’ And that’s where the shocked look from Dave came from.”

Cleary and Newman share notes on the podcast about how widely spread the video footage instantly was, to the point that it made international headlines and because a topic of discussion on Howard Stern’s and Bill Maher’s shows. “We’ll be seeing this clip the rest of our lives.”

Cleary shares that he went to the L.A. Rams game over the weekend and ended up in the suite of  “South Park” co-creator Matt Stone. “He was like, ‘I’ve known Perry for a while, like peripherally — no pun intended. That was really sad to see.’ When I said goodbye, I said, ‘I’d kick myself if I didn’t tell you I was a fan from day one, and I would love if you put this in a new episode.’ He laughed and said, ‘It’s not a bad idea. But honestly, it bums me out too much.’ And I think that’s how everyone collectively feels.

“No one’s trying to villainize Perry,” Cleary continues. “He did do this, and I know this band is over with, but I really do hope that he’s able to figure (things) out… I think that Perry’s apology that was posted on Instagram was heartfelt — and I know that for sure because I’ve checked in and I know that he’s hurting. I feel if I could take that away, I’m sure we would all love to take that away. He’s gonna go through that for a while and it sucks, but I do hope he gets the help. And I appreciate all that he and Etty have done… and what the band has done. I just hate that, at the moment, this is what Jane’s is going to be known for. … This ended on nobody’s terms. It feels like losing someone in a car accident.”

In Etty Lau Farrell’s most recent statement, on Sept. 21, she reiterated that her husband had “been pushed to his absolute limit,” but also said that the couple were consulting medical professionals. She said Perry was taking time to “reflect and heal,” and would be seeing an otolaryngologist and neurologist, after the cancellation of the second half of the band’s U.S. tour, which was to have concluded in L.A. with a hometown show Oct. 16. She said Perry is “the gentlest of souls” and told fans “we are equally astonished at Perry’s physical outburst as you are,” further thanking supporters for “checking in over and over again to make sure we are well taken care of. Offering love and compassion… and even your homes for us to escape to.”

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