I first became aware of Dave Navarro's penchant for cute things bearing the likeness of Sanrio's Hello Kitty character while doing the SuicideGirls Radio show. We broadcast each Sunday out of Indie1031.com's studios, which at the time also served as home for the wild living and hard rockin' Jane's Addiction and Camp Freddy guitarist's Wednesday night Dark Matter show (which has since moved to Moheak.com's Silverlake base). In the Indie studio, there was a shrine of sorts, where people left various Hello Kitty offerings to Dave.
Having an affinity with the character myself, when I noticed the various Hello Kitty items on the counter, I asked SG Radio's engineer and co-host Jessica Sattelberger (who also manned the boards for Dark Matter and several other Indie shows) what they were doing there. She explained that people had left them for Dave. My first reaction was "Huh?" Then, after she explained that Dave was into Hello Kitty, my next was to track him down to find out why.
I called Dave up on what turned out to be his new Verizon iPhone. He was having new phone issues when I initially called for this interview, but, after a couple of false starts, we settled in for a chat that began with Hello Kitty, and moved on to his affection for his somewhat modified "Bondage Barbie" and his latest love - Angry Birds. We also talked Twitter, booty calls - and Jane's Addiction's new album, which he is currently in the process of recording.
NP: So I understand you're into Hello Kitty. Why?
DN: There's a multitude of reasons. I first became aware of Hello Kitty when I was about 7 years old. You know, it's been around for a long, long time. When I was in grade school, my first crush was a girl by the name of Rina Yasuda...Her family was from Japan, so she would go to Japan for the summers and come back to school. She would always have all this Hello Kitty paraphernalia - little rulers and pencils and stickers - and I always associated that image with my first crush. It always brought me back to this age of innocence in a strange way.
So, that's the number one reason. The number two reason is - I'm a weird motherfucker - what do you want me to say? I think in adulthood when the image is used, especially in the way that it's been used in terms of some of these young alt girls, it's transcended being for kids. A lot of young adult females have started really embracing the product. I've always found that - and I don't want to get in trouble for saying this because it doesn't stand for all of them - but for many of them the sweet little girly exterior that loves Hello Kitty and unicorns and rainbows and My Little Pony and Barbie, more times than not there's a dark hidden underside of these women's lives.
NP: I would agree with that. I mean, we do have a Sanrio Fan Club group on the SuicideGirls website.
DN: Right. So, being that there was this young experience with it as a kid, I wasn't really into it as a kid of course, but I associated it with this Japanese girl. And then now as an adult, seeing it kind of come back into the forefront of culture even more so then it did back then, with young, adult women, generally speaking a lot of them have very secretive dark pasts that force them to embrace something unique and pure and girly, if you will. There's a duality that's inherent in that which is interesting and fascinating to me.
The image itself is more of a symbol of darkness to me than anything else. Because you can take one person who's really dark and they're into really dark things, but it's the person who gravitates toward the light to hide away from the darkness that's actually more intriguing. A good example of that would be the serial killer John Wayne Gacy doing paintings of Bambi or doing paintings of himself as a clown or the Seven Dwarfs. There's such a severe contrast between the dark and the light, that's the type of intellect that I find incredibly fascinating.
NP: So it's almost like a Freemason handshake. Hello Kitty is a way of finding kindred souls.
DN: Yeah...And also for me personally, my mother was murdered when I was 15 and I'm a recovering drug addict, and so I am no stranger to the darkness. And again, I don't want to make a blanket statement and upset anybody, but I would say in about 75% of cases, adult fans of Barbie and Hello Kitty and things of that nature, there's usually a past of either abuse or divorce or maybe sexual abuse, eating disorders, something that can easily be looked up in the DSM IV, which is basically the psychiatric diagnostic manual of disorders.
I'm incredibly disordered myself. I've got plenty of them, you know what I mean? ...So when I meet adult women that are into the Hello Kitty product and the frilly, little girl stuff, I find that I ultimately identify with them better as people because of that duality of mankind.
NP: There's a level of understanding.
DN: Yeah. That's probably a way more heavy-handed answer then you wanted...But actually, it makes a lot of sense. It's the same reason why I have a collection of Barbies and I have a ballerina box. I went through a unicorn phase back in the '90s. There's always some little symbol that's supposed to represent life that I have always found is a much darker symbol than coffins and skulls and crosses and bats.
NP: I hear that you have a rare bondage Barbie.
DN: I do.
NP: I'm told that that was something that Mattel came out with and then rapidly stop producing.
DN: Well, you know the origin or Barbie right?
NP: No. Do tell.
DN: Barbie was a knock off of a German doll called Lilli, and Lilli was a novelty item for adult men. It was a little figurine of a hooker. So the original Barbie was based on a hooker doll. That's absolutely true.
NP: Wow, I had no idea.
DN: Yeah, you can Google it*. It was a novelty hooker doll for adult men and it came with little outfits. That is what it was intended for. The creator of Barbie saw that doll and decided to make a PG version, or a G-rated version for children in America and it took off like wild fire. So, again, if you take Barbie for what she stands for in today's culture, it's a pretty benign symbol of modern society. But if you do the research, you're talking about a doll that was based on a hooker in Germany, and there's all kinds of taboo that goes along with that. And then just for me to use it on stage and for me to have it on my amplifiers, there's a whole other element of that just being really fuckin' twisted.
The bondage Barbie...I ordered it online and I think it eventually got discontinued. We ended up getting out the black tape and made her a little more bondage-like than she came in the package. Let's just say we modified her. Since then I received another one that came as a result of friendships that I made on Twitter. There was a girl on Twitter who's kind of like an alt model, and, in a round about way just through Tweets and what not, I became friends with her and her husband, who live in Florida. Her husband thought it was kind of amusing that she and I had this online flirtation having never met. He created a Barbie doll made in her likeness, and they sent it to me as a gift for Christmas. So, I wasn't able to actually connect with the girl, but I was able to have my own Barbie version of her as a gift from them with their blessing. So now I got two.
NP: Nice. Two Barbie's can have a lot more fun than one. I hope we're going to see some interesting Twitpics.
DN: Oh, I've already Tweeted them out, they're all over the place. I've taken one of them to a movie. When I drive around with one I always buckle her in in the passenger seat.
NP: I saw that Twitpic.
DN: Yeah, there's lots of things like that. My appreciation for these modern day icons is a lot deeper and more twisted than one might think. Also, just being a sufferer from a few disorders myself, I certainly identify with the types of adult females that tend to gravitate towards them.
NP: Listening to your Dark Matter show, you're very honest about your life and your past. I know you don't always like doing interviews because by nature they're invasive...but the show is very much an open door into the mind of Dave Navarro.
DN: Well, it is in the sense that it's an open door into the aspects of the mind that I allow it to be opened into. A lot of people are struck by the honesty on the radio and my honesty online, and they think that I'm this open book. But, believe me, there's a few doors that are slammed shut. I'm aware that what I'm saying is being heard, and I'm aware that what I'm writing or Tweeting or posting is being seen, so it doesn't paint the whole picture. But yeah, when it comes to sex and drugs and you know, things that I may have done in the past that I learned from, I have no problem sharing those things. Frankly, I have found that the more open we are, the more confident one is about who they are, the less anybody has to hold over you. If I'm sitting here talking about all this stuff, what's anybody else going to say? There's nothing to dig up. So in a lot of ways it's freeing and it's empowering, and it helps a lot of people who are listening that may or may not have gone down some of the roads that I have.
NP: In your recent Twitter posts I noticed that you've been having fun pointing out the irony of posting seemingly private messages in a public forum.
DN: Well, sometimes I'll get negative responses from people. That's just the way the internet is. Instead of going to war with those people, I just create a JPEG of their message to me and post it and let everybody else go to war for me. Because that way the sender gets inundated with the multitude of the negativity they threw my way, and all I'm doing is saying, "Hey, this is what somebody said to me." A perfect example is this one guy sent me some kind of nasty message and his avatar was of, I think, a newborn child that he had. I pointed out, basically, what kind of a father is going to print those kinds of things next to a photo of his newborn infant child. I just took a screen shot of it and just Tweeted it back.
You know, it's fun. I can't really pay a whole lot of attention to the stuff that people say online. But if I have a moment where I can use technology in an advantageous way without mixing it up personally, I'm by all means going to do that. I think that's just the smarter way to go about it, because at the end of the day, I didn't really say anything back to this guy.
NP: It does annoy me when people say things online that they would never have the balls to say to someone in person. There's a weird amount of hate spewed out online.
DN: Oh yeah, it's horrible, it's horrible. But, one of my favorite go-to lines that I heard from someone else, and I kind of re-originated it, made it my own, is that any time somebody has something to say to me that is less than flattering or negative, I just look at them and go, "Hey man, anytime you want to compare lives and compare accomplishments, I'm ready to go." That usually shuts them up.
NP: I saw on Twitter that you just downloaded Angry Birds. How is that going for you?
DN: [deep breath] Not great.
NP: Is Angry Birds beating your ass?
DN: Well, I downloaded it last night. I just got an iPhone, I just stepped into the new millennium. I was holding off for a long time, but I couldn't resist when it went to Verizon.
NP: Were you a Crackberry before?
DN: Yes. Yes.
NP: So you're now a recovering Crackberry addict?
DN: I am a recovering Crackberry addict, and I'm still struggling with the iPhone transition. I went to the app store and, of course, it came up on the "Downloaded Top Apps" or whatever. So I get this Angry Birds thing which I had heard about, and I've got to tell you, I looked up and a few hours had gone by. I just discovered the new thing that's going to do me in and put my record on hold for the next six months. 'Cause Jane's Addiction is recording an album right now. We're about halfway through with it, and I'm going to miss going to the studio because I'm up late at night playing Angry Birds.
NP: Angry Birds is essentially going to put the next Jane's Addiction release back to 2012.
DN: It's very possible. And frankly, you know, it's two or three in the morning and you're on your iPhone playing Angry Birds, and then in comes the late night booty call texts, and I'm hitting ignore, ignore, ignore.
NP: Nooooo!! Angry Birds is getting in the way of your booty calls?
DN: It's destroying my sex life.
NP: Oh dear, oh dear. Well, if you ever get over your Angry Birds fascination, there are SuicideGirls iPhone apps too.
DN: What do the SuicideGirls iPhone apps do?
NP: Well one of ours actually got banned. It was called Flip Strip, and was inspired by those 1950s novelty pens. You could flip through images of various Suicide Girls and then, if you turned your iPhone upside down, the clothes would melt off. So that was kind of fun, but it got banned. We go a million downloads in a week, but it was too much fun for Apple. But there's another one, Seduce A Suicide Girl, where you get to go on a virtual date with an SG. It's an interactive game where, depending on what you do and what you say, there are different outcomes.
DN: The interesting thing about me, and a lot of people don't understand this, because I'm a porn director, I write for Penthouse magazine, [I'm] certainly no stranger to a free lifestyle per se, but when it comes to looking at pictures of naked girls or looking at pornography, I'm not necessarily a fan. I don't really do it. The reason is very simple; When you're hungry you don't just get a menu and look at what's on the menu, you want to order a sandwich.
NP: Right, you actually want to eat the sandwich.
DN: Exactly. I don't want to just get a menu and look at the pictures on the menu and see what kind of food they have. So that's the same kind of thinking. If I put on a porn film or if I look at naked pictures, it's the same kind of concept to me. I would rather just have sex than look at something that's going to get me all aroused. I'd rather experience something, or do something else. My other late night love, and a lot of the stuff we're talking about we're talking about late night stuff - because we're talking about broken girls, we're talking about sex, we're talking about Angry Birds and online stuff and Twitter - these are all things that kind of, for me, live between the hours of 11 and 4 AM. The rest of the day I actually have my life to live.
NP: Right.
DN: The other thing that comes to mind is horror films - horror, suspense, super dark documentary films. That's my other love, outside of music, of course....Have you seen any of the films by Gaspar No? Irreversible, Enter the Void, and I Stand Alone, those are three films that you need to see if you're interested. They're not horror films, but they're super dark suspense films. His directorial style is absolutely stunning. I've never seen anything like it.
NP: Given that you're doing all this between 11 and 4 AM, does that mean that you're an insomniac?
DN: Somewhat. I think what happens is that I'm a napper. I get up, go to the gym, go to work, do whatever I've got to do during the day, and then I kind of fall asleep again around 6 or 7, for a couple of hours. Then that takes me up until the wee hours of the night, which I prefer because I don't have as much incoming interaction with people. Because - as much as I work, and as many people as I know, and as out in the world as I appear to be - I'm really a loner, and I enjoy it. When the cell phone and the emails quiet down, and the workday is over, that's when I feel happiest.
NP: Well, especially with Twitter, it's a way of interacting with people while still being alone. You're interacting with people, but it's not in an invasive way because you can retreat from it.
DN: I basically use Twitter at night. During the day it's like band updates and funny little anecdotes and stuff for the majority of the followers, but once it's nighttime, I basically use it as a public global chat room. So I'm Tweeting stuff to people that only that person is going to get. A lot of people use it as a way to communicate with a vast amount of people at once. I do that the majority of the day, but then at night, it just becomes personal email that anybody can read basically. I think that's kind of interesting and fun and voyeuristic...I just think that, for me, to be able to eavesdrop on somebody's private conversations, so to speak, might be a little bit more interesting than [tweeting] "my band is playing out in Anaheim on the 17th." Anybody can find that out anywhere. You know what I mean?
NP: It's like a door that's slightly ajar into someone's private world.
DN: Exactly. But, like I said...
NP: And an ajar door is more intriguing than a wide open door.
DN: Exactly. The sense has been in the past that I'm this open book, and I let everybody into everything - believe me I don't. Nine times out of ten the women that I'm most flirtatious with on Twitter are the ones that I don't know. And the ones that I have actual friendships with are the ones I'm pretty tame about...At the same time, don't think I haven't direct messaged my cell number about 10,000 times to people, but you know. Always an interesting question is: How many times have you direct messaged your personal cell number? I've definitely been down that road, and I've definitely met really cool people on there.
NP: I have to ask...obviously you mentioned the Jane's album - how's that going?
DN: It's going really great. We're working with Dave Sitek, he's from the band TV on the Radio. He and Rich Costey are co-producing right now. We have all the material written, and actually today we're going to start tracking the actual album. It's an exciting day. It's going really, really well. It's totally different for us. It sounds like Jane's Addiction without sounding like any of our past records. I think a lot of that has to do with song structure, and the fact that we have Perry Farrell on vocals. I mean, he sings on something, it's certainly identifiable that it's him. But the music's really modern, and we're recording in a really new way...With this record, we're trying to sculpt a piece of art that's an entire album. I haven't been this excited about the band for many years.
NP: It is really hard to get people to see an album in terms of the whole when people are just downloading individual tracks.
DN: Yeah, and that's fine, they can do that, but I think as the artist you still want to create a body of work.
NP: And create a complete work of art.
DN: Exactly. I know a lot of bands focus on a couple of singles and then the rest of the record is filler, and a lot of bands really just focus on the album, and I think that we're the latter. We really want to make an epic album.
NP: So how are you making it feel complete? Is there a thread that's going to go all the way through it?
DN: Well, you can't help but have that thread with the same people writing and creating. That's going to be there. That's going to be inherent. I think when it comes down to the songs, we have a couple of hours worth of material, so obviously we're going to pick and choose the ones that are best suited. Some may be stronger than others, so we'll pick those, and then the way it's sequenced is an art form in itself. How the album unfolds. There's a lot of different ways that it can go, and we're hoping to make it something that provides a mood.
NP: When I spoke to Lincoln Park, they were talking about how they got to a point in production where they would actually work on the thing as a whole. If they made a change on one bit, they wouldn't just rewind to the start of that section and listen, they'd go right back to the start of the album and listen to how that change affected the whole album in terms of the journey.
DN: Yeah, that's a great point. A lot of people, I don't think today, take that kind of care when it comes to their music and their shows, and it's nice to see that others still do. We're definitely trying to exercise that kind of care on the album and certainly on the sequencing. I'm just really, really excited and motivated right now. This is a really cool time.
Catch the live stream of Dave Navarro's Dark Matter show on Wednesday Nights at 9 PM PST on Moheak.com.
* The original boobylicious blonde doll was based on an adult cartoon character called Lilli, who first appeared in the West German tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung in 1952. She had sex for money, spent her time seeking out the company of fatcat businessmen, and talked saucily to male authority figures. Mattel president Ruth Handler came across the Bild Lilli doll on a trip to Europe. Handler claimed she was unaware of the adult nature of the doll when she took her inspiration for Barbie from it. Mattel subsequently bought the rights to Bild Lilli and ceased production of the rival doll in 1964.
Having an affinity with the character myself, when I noticed the various Hello Kitty items on the counter, I asked SG Radio's engineer and co-host Jessica Sattelberger (who also manned the boards for Dark Matter and several other Indie shows) what they were doing there. She explained that people had left them for Dave. My first reaction was "Huh?" Then, after she explained that Dave was into Hello Kitty, my next was to track him down to find out why.
I called Dave up on what turned out to be his new Verizon iPhone. He was having new phone issues when I initially called for this interview, but, after a couple of false starts, we settled in for a chat that began with Hello Kitty, and moved on to his affection for his somewhat modified "Bondage Barbie" and his latest love - Angry Birds. We also talked Twitter, booty calls - and Jane's Addiction's new album, which he is currently in the process of recording.
NP: So I understand you're into Hello Kitty. Why?
DN: There's a multitude of reasons. I first became aware of Hello Kitty when I was about 7 years old. You know, it's been around for a long, long time. When I was in grade school, my first crush was a girl by the name of Rina Yasuda...Her family was from Japan, so she would go to Japan for the summers and come back to school. She would always have all this Hello Kitty paraphernalia - little rulers and pencils and stickers - and I always associated that image with my first crush. It always brought me back to this age of innocence in a strange way.
So, that's the number one reason. The number two reason is - I'm a weird motherfucker - what do you want me to say? I think in adulthood when the image is used, especially in the way that it's been used in terms of some of these young alt girls, it's transcended being for kids. A lot of young adult females have started really embracing the product. I've always found that - and I don't want to get in trouble for saying this because it doesn't stand for all of them - but for many of them the sweet little girly exterior that loves Hello Kitty and unicorns and rainbows and My Little Pony and Barbie, more times than not there's a dark hidden underside of these women's lives.
NP: I would agree with that. I mean, we do have a Sanrio Fan Club group on the SuicideGirls website.
DN: Right. So, being that there was this young experience with it as a kid, I wasn't really into it as a kid of course, but I associated it with this Japanese girl. And then now as an adult, seeing it kind of come back into the forefront of culture even more so then it did back then, with young, adult women, generally speaking a lot of them have very secretive dark pasts that force them to embrace something unique and pure and girly, if you will. There's a duality that's inherent in that which is interesting and fascinating to me.
The image itself is more of a symbol of darkness to me than anything else. Because you can take one person who's really dark and they're into really dark things, but it's the person who gravitates toward the light to hide away from the darkness that's actually more intriguing. A good example of that would be the serial killer John Wayne Gacy doing paintings of Bambi or doing paintings of himself as a clown or the Seven Dwarfs. There's such a severe contrast between the dark and the light, that's the type of intellect that I find incredibly fascinating.
NP: So it's almost like a Freemason handshake. Hello Kitty is a way of finding kindred souls.
DN: Yeah...And also for me personally, my mother was murdered when I was 15 and I'm a recovering drug addict, and so I am no stranger to the darkness. And again, I don't want to make a blanket statement and upset anybody, but I would say in about 75% of cases, adult fans of Barbie and Hello Kitty and things of that nature, there's usually a past of either abuse or divorce or maybe sexual abuse, eating disorders, something that can easily be looked up in the DSM IV, which is basically the psychiatric diagnostic manual of disorders.
I'm incredibly disordered myself. I've got plenty of them, you know what I mean? ...So when I meet adult women that are into the Hello Kitty product and the frilly, little girl stuff, I find that I ultimately identify with them better as people because of that duality of mankind.
NP: There's a level of understanding.
DN: Yeah. That's probably a way more heavy-handed answer then you wanted...But actually, it makes a lot of sense. It's the same reason why I have a collection of Barbies and I have a ballerina box. I went through a unicorn phase back in the '90s. There's always some little symbol that's supposed to represent life that I have always found is a much darker symbol than coffins and skulls and crosses and bats.
NP: I hear that you have a rare bondage Barbie.
DN: I do.
NP: I'm told that that was something that Mattel came out with and then rapidly stop producing.
DN: Well, you know the origin or Barbie right?
NP: No. Do tell.
DN: Barbie was a knock off of a German doll called Lilli, and Lilli was a novelty item for adult men. It was a little figurine of a hooker. So the original Barbie was based on a hooker doll. That's absolutely true.
NP: Wow, I had no idea.
DN: Yeah, you can Google it*. It was a novelty hooker doll for adult men and it came with little outfits. That is what it was intended for. The creator of Barbie saw that doll and decided to make a PG version, or a G-rated version for children in America and it took off like wild fire. So, again, if you take Barbie for what she stands for in today's culture, it's a pretty benign symbol of modern society. But if you do the research, you're talking about a doll that was based on a hooker in Germany, and there's all kinds of taboo that goes along with that. And then just for me to use it on stage and for me to have it on my amplifiers, there's a whole other element of that just being really fuckin' twisted.
The bondage Barbie...I ordered it online and I think it eventually got discontinued. We ended up getting out the black tape and made her a little more bondage-like than she came in the package. Let's just say we modified her. Since then I received another one that came as a result of friendships that I made on Twitter. There was a girl on Twitter who's kind of like an alt model, and, in a round about way just through Tweets and what not, I became friends with her and her husband, who live in Florida. Her husband thought it was kind of amusing that she and I had this online flirtation having never met. He created a Barbie doll made in her likeness, and they sent it to me as a gift for Christmas. So, I wasn't able to actually connect with the girl, but I was able to have my own Barbie version of her as a gift from them with their blessing. So now I got two.
NP: Nice. Two Barbie's can have a lot more fun than one. I hope we're going to see some interesting Twitpics.
DN: Oh, I've already Tweeted them out, they're all over the place. I've taken one of them to a movie. When I drive around with one I always buckle her in in the passenger seat.
NP: I saw that Twitpic.
DN: Yeah, there's lots of things like that. My appreciation for these modern day icons is a lot deeper and more twisted than one might think. Also, just being a sufferer from a few disorders myself, I certainly identify with the types of adult females that tend to gravitate towards them.
NP: Listening to your Dark Matter show, you're very honest about your life and your past. I know you don't always like doing interviews because by nature they're invasive...but the show is very much an open door into the mind of Dave Navarro.
DN: Well, it is in the sense that it's an open door into the aspects of the mind that I allow it to be opened into. A lot of people are struck by the honesty on the radio and my honesty online, and they think that I'm this open book. But, believe me, there's a few doors that are slammed shut. I'm aware that what I'm saying is being heard, and I'm aware that what I'm writing or Tweeting or posting is being seen, so it doesn't paint the whole picture. But yeah, when it comes to sex and drugs and you know, things that I may have done in the past that I learned from, I have no problem sharing those things. Frankly, I have found that the more open we are, the more confident one is about who they are, the less anybody has to hold over you. If I'm sitting here talking about all this stuff, what's anybody else going to say? There's nothing to dig up. So in a lot of ways it's freeing and it's empowering, and it helps a lot of people who are listening that may or may not have gone down some of the roads that I have.
NP: In your recent Twitter posts I noticed that you've been having fun pointing out the irony of posting seemingly private messages in a public forum.
DN: Well, sometimes I'll get negative responses from people. That's just the way the internet is. Instead of going to war with those people, I just create a JPEG of their message to me and post it and let everybody else go to war for me. Because that way the sender gets inundated with the multitude of the negativity they threw my way, and all I'm doing is saying, "Hey, this is what somebody said to me." A perfect example is this one guy sent me some kind of nasty message and his avatar was of, I think, a newborn child that he had. I pointed out, basically, what kind of a father is going to print those kinds of things next to a photo of his newborn infant child. I just took a screen shot of it and just Tweeted it back.
You know, it's fun. I can't really pay a whole lot of attention to the stuff that people say online. But if I have a moment where I can use technology in an advantageous way without mixing it up personally, I'm by all means going to do that. I think that's just the smarter way to go about it, because at the end of the day, I didn't really say anything back to this guy.
NP: It does annoy me when people say things online that they would never have the balls to say to someone in person. There's a weird amount of hate spewed out online.
DN: Oh yeah, it's horrible, it's horrible. But, one of my favorite go-to lines that I heard from someone else, and I kind of re-originated it, made it my own, is that any time somebody has something to say to me that is less than flattering or negative, I just look at them and go, "Hey man, anytime you want to compare lives and compare accomplishments, I'm ready to go." That usually shuts them up.
NP: I saw on Twitter that you just downloaded Angry Birds. How is that going for you?
DN: [deep breath] Not great.
NP: Is Angry Birds beating your ass?
DN: Well, I downloaded it last night. I just got an iPhone, I just stepped into the new millennium. I was holding off for a long time, but I couldn't resist when it went to Verizon.
NP: Were you a Crackberry before?
DN: Yes. Yes.
NP: So you're now a recovering Crackberry addict?
DN: I am a recovering Crackberry addict, and I'm still struggling with the iPhone transition. I went to the app store and, of course, it came up on the "Downloaded Top Apps" or whatever. So I get this Angry Birds thing which I had heard about, and I've got to tell you, I looked up and a few hours had gone by. I just discovered the new thing that's going to do me in and put my record on hold for the next six months. 'Cause Jane's Addiction is recording an album right now. We're about halfway through with it, and I'm going to miss going to the studio because I'm up late at night playing Angry Birds.
NP: Angry Birds is essentially going to put the next Jane's Addiction release back to 2012.
DN: It's very possible. And frankly, you know, it's two or three in the morning and you're on your iPhone playing Angry Birds, and then in comes the late night booty call texts, and I'm hitting ignore, ignore, ignore.
NP: Nooooo!! Angry Birds is getting in the way of your booty calls?
DN: It's destroying my sex life.
NP: Oh dear, oh dear. Well, if you ever get over your Angry Birds fascination, there are SuicideGirls iPhone apps too.
DN: What do the SuicideGirls iPhone apps do?
NP: Well one of ours actually got banned. It was called Flip Strip, and was inspired by those 1950s novelty pens. You could flip through images of various Suicide Girls and then, if you turned your iPhone upside down, the clothes would melt off. So that was kind of fun, but it got banned. We go a million downloads in a week, but it was too much fun for Apple. But there's another one, Seduce A Suicide Girl, where you get to go on a virtual date with an SG. It's an interactive game where, depending on what you do and what you say, there are different outcomes.
DN: The interesting thing about me, and a lot of people don't understand this, because I'm a porn director, I write for Penthouse magazine, [I'm] certainly no stranger to a free lifestyle per se, but when it comes to looking at pictures of naked girls or looking at pornography, I'm not necessarily a fan. I don't really do it. The reason is very simple; When you're hungry you don't just get a menu and look at what's on the menu, you want to order a sandwich.
NP: Right, you actually want to eat the sandwich.
DN: Exactly. I don't want to just get a menu and look at the pictures on the menu and see what kind of food they have. So that's the same kind of thinking. If I put on a porn film or if I look at naked pictures, it's the same kind of concept to me. I would rather just have sex than look at something that's going to get me all aroused. I'd rather experience something, or do something else. My other late night love, and a lot of the stuff we're talking about we're talking about late night stuff - because we're talking about broken girls, we're talking about sex, we're talking about Angry Birds and online stuff and Twitter - these are all things that kind of, for me, live between the hours of 11 and 4 AM. The rest of the day I actually have my life to live.
NP: Right.
DN: The other thing that comes to mind is horror films - horror, suspense, super dark documentary films. That's my other love, outside of music, of course....Have you seen any of the films by Gaspar No? Irreversible, Enter the Void, and I Stand Alone, those are three films that you need to see if you're interested. They're not horror films, but they're super dark suspense films. His directorial style is absolutely stunning. I've never seen anything like it.
NP: Given that you're doing all this between 11 and 4 AM, does that mean that you're an insomniac?
DN: Somewhat. I think what happens is that I'm a napper. I get up, go to the gym, go to work, do whatever I've got to do during the day, and then I kind of fall asleep again around 6 or 7, for a couple of hours. Then that takes me up until the wee hours of the night, which I prefer because I don't have as much incoming interaction with people. Because - as much as I work, and as many people as I know, and as out in the world as I appear to be - I'm really a loner, and I enjoy it. When the cell phone and the emails quiet down, and the workday is over, that's when I feel happiest.
NP: Well, especially with Twitter, it's a way of interacting with people while still being alone. You're interacting with people, but it's not in an invasive way because you can retreat from it.
DN: I basically use Twitter at night. During the day it's like band updates and funny little anecdotes and stuff for the majority of the followers, but once it's nighttime, I basically use it as a public global chat room. So I'm Tweeting stuff to people that only that person is going to get. A lot of people use it as a way to communicate with a vast amount of people at once. I do that the majority of the day, but then at night, it just becomes personal email that anybody can read basically. I think that's kind of interesting and fun and voyeuristic...I just think that, for me, to be able to eavesdrop on somebody's private conversations, so to speak, might be a little bit more interesting than [tweeting] "my band is playing out in Anaheim on the 17th." Anybody can find that out anywhere. You know what I mean?
NP: It's like a door that's slightly ajar into someone's private world.
DN: Exactly. But, like I said...
NP: And an ajar door is more intriguing than a wide open door.
DN: Exactly. The sense has been in the past that I'm this open book, and I let everybody into everything - believe me I don't. Nine times out of ten the women that I'm most flirtatious with on Twitter are the ones that I don't know. And the ones that I have actual friendships with are the ones I'm pretty tame about...At the same time, don't think I haven't direct messaged my cell number about 10,000 times to people, but you know. Always an interesting question is: How many times have you direct messaged your personal cell number? I've definitely been down that road, and I've definitely met really cool people on there.
NP: I have to ask...obviously you mentioned the Jane's album - how's that going?
DN: It's going really great. We're working with Dave Sitek, he's from the band TV on the Radio. He and Rich Costey are co-producing right now. We have all the material written, and actually today we're going to start tracking the actual album. It's an exciting day. It's going really, really well. It's totally different for us. It sounds like Jane's Addiction without sounding like any of our past records. I think a lot of that has to do with song structure, and the fact that we have Perry Farrell on vocals. I mean, he sings on something, it's certainly identifiable that it's him. But the music's really modern, and we're recording in a really new way...With this record, we're trying to sculpt a piece of art that's an entire album. I haven't been this excited about the band for many years.
NP: It is really hard to get people to see an album in terms of the whole when people are just downloading individual tracks.
DN: Yeah, and that's fine, they can do that, but I think as the artist you still want to create a body of work.
NP: And create a complete work of art.
DN: Exactly. I know a lot of bands focus on a couple of singles and then the rest of the record is filler, and a lot of bands really just focus on the album, and I think that we're the latter. We really want to make an epic album.
NP: So how are you making it feel complete? Is there a thread that's going to go all the way through it?
DN: Well, you can't help but have that thread with the same people writing and creating. That's going to be there. That's going to be inherent. I think when it comes down to the songs, we have a couple of hours worth of material, so obviously we're going to pick and choose the ones that are best suited. Some may be stronger than others, so we'll pick those, and then the way it's sequenced is an art form in itself. How the album unfolds. There's a lot of different ways that it can go, and we're hoping to make it something that provides a mood.
NP: When I spoke to Lincoln Park, they were talking about how they got to a point in production where they would actually work on the thing as a whole. If they made a change on one bit, they wouldn't just rewind to the start of that section and listen, they'd go right back to the start of the album and listen to how that change affected the whole album in terms of the journey.
DN: Yeah, that's a great point. A lot of people, I don't think today, take that kind of care when it comes to their music and their shows, and it's nice to see that others still do. We're definitely trying to exercise that kind of care on the album and certainly on the sequencing. I'm just really, really excited and motivated right now. This is a really cool time.
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* The original boobylicious blonde doll was based on an adult cartoon character called Lilli, who first appeared in the West German tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung in 1952. She had sex for money, spent her time seeking out the company of fatcat businessmen, and talked saucily to male authority figures. Mattel president Ruth Handler came across the Bild Lilli doll on a trip to Europe. Handler claimed she was unaware of the adult nature of the doll when she took her inspiration for Barbie from it. Mattel subsequently bought the rights to Bild Lilli and ceased production of the rival doll in 1964.