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album, 1988’s Nothing’s Shocking and ’90’s
Ritual de lo Habitual, and he returns to it
time and time again in casual conversa-
tion: injured. When his scruffy group made
its official Warner Brothers-sponsored
debut at the Kennel Club in 1985, every
major and minor rock critic in The City
was in attendance, lured by the label-
fanned aroma of Next Big Thing. But no
sooner had the weasel-wiry, squiddly-did-
dly haired Farrell taken the stage than he
stopped to address the crowd. Well, er, not
the crowd exactly, but a certain portion of
it. “I hear there are a bunch of rock journal-
ists out there,” he growled, disparagingly.
“Well, you all have huge brains and tiny
dicks! Why don’t you get the fuck out of
here!” It wasn’t said in jest — he meant it.
Full disclosure? This scribe and several
others simply shrugged and left, as he’d
requested. Words are that powerful And
many of us didn’t listen to the band — or
write about it — for more than a decade.
Life was too short. Too many other bands
needed assistance. meeting on one of the final episodes of the
late chef Anthony Bourdain’s TV trave-
logue between the host and proto-punk
Iggy Pop, wherein they were trying to
pigeonhole the one force that kept them
going over the years. They finally settled
on one solution: Curiosity. Something
you’re born with, or you’re not. This turns
into a chat about a recent HBO art docu-
mentary, which featured one woman’s
astute observation that there are three
types of people — those who see, those
who only see when they are shown, and
those who will never see. Farrell always
thought of himself as a sensitive seer, even
when his mind was a drug-addled haze.
But he disagrees with the curiosity pro-
nouncement. “I don’t think that’s the
answer,” he counters. “I think it’s PART of
the answer. But I was going to say, love.
Here’s what I think. I think we are all just
transmigrating souls, and I’m a big believ-
er in the afterlife and reincarnation. I have
no doubts about it. And I started to really
dig in and study that topic specifically in
But over time — and an edgier new
mid-'90s outfit, Porno for Pyros — atti-
tudes changed. Most importantly, Farrell
himself changed. He wishes he could
laugh at his era of being an instigator, like
Woody Woodpecker. It isn’t easy to see the
humor in retrospect, though, Farrell con-
fesses. “I did enjoy being the enfant terrible
in those days,” he says. “I use the word
‘rock’ to mean the status quo because I
really consider what we were doing to be
more punk or alternative. But in 1985, I
didn’t know where I was going. I had no
idea where I was headed. And you journal-
ists represented rock. So when I was told
that there were some rock journalists there,
I was just a fresh-mouthed punk kid, and I
just wanted to bring it, right there and
then, and let everybody know that I wasn’t
down with the status quo.”
There follows a discussion of a summit the early ‘90s. I studied all aspects of the
soul, every day, like things you cannot see
and energies that are intelligent — I’m a
huge studier, and I love to learn. But when
that energy gets into a body, it’s earned the
right to be a human being, and I am certain
of reincarnation because we are not on any
normal time constraint. And I’ll tell you
about my most important experience, and
how I learned about all of this.”
You can almost hear the anticipatory
drum roll. This, then, is A Big Deal. This,
then, is The Event, around which over half
of this interview revolves. Granted, it was
roughly '93, and the man was doing a lot of
drugs at the time, he cedes. But that in no
way implies that it didn’t actually happen.
Like Etty, his girlfriend back then was
Chinese and well-versed in Eastern philos-
ophy. But to this day, he still can’t explain
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