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Jane's Addiction: Hammerstein Ballroom, New York NY

Eric Weisbard, Spin, February 1998

I'M SITTING in a second-story box on the opening night of the Jane's Addiction reunion tour, and suddenly Perry Farrell is floating overhead, lying face down on top of an enormous cell-like riser built in the middle of the club. He's writhing to the music, and below him a stripper dressed in a thin veil of mesh dances in a cage of her own. But the glazed smile on Farrell's face as he throws his arms down to bless the sold-out throng isn't caged at all; in fact, it's as apt an embodiment of mass-cultivated psychedelia as I'd ever want to see close-up again. What is Farreil now: some combination of Hugh Hefner, Iggy Pop, and a burned-up veteran of the pharmaceutical trenches? Or just a sardonic diaspora Jew, still amazed at all the sleaze a little bit of hippy-dippy staging lets you get away with?

Total word count of piece: 773

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