By Alex Moore
Photos by Emily Shur
In the early 90s, Eric Avery helped reshape youth culture with Jane’s Addiction, and inspired a generation of young bass players to copy his signature style. Later that decade he won big accolades from appreciators of good taste everywhere by being the only member not to participate in the dubious Jane’s reunion.
Always one to push forward into un-tempered terrain rather than cling to the past, Avery began singing and writing his own songs, an experiment that led most recently to a new release on Dangerbird Records, Help Wanted.
Avery now lives by the beach and spends a lot of time reading, surfing and thinking. For a guy who spent a decade bleaching his dreads all colors of the rainbow in one of the most famously drug-addled bands ever, he seems almost preternaturally well adjusted. Speaking from his home near L.A., Avery reflected on the past, his new record, and why he’s one of the luckiest people he knows.
Being a bass player is such a specific role in a band. What was it like trying to transition to being a solo songwriter?
Well, to use a sports analogy, it’s the bit players that often become the students of the game, because the stars—or the lead guitarists—just do what they do from day one, and they do it the same way many years into their career. And I think that if you play bass for a long time, while your first love will always be the low end, it’s sort of limiting. There’s only so much you can do as a bass player. So I found myself getting restless and I started to branch out.
What keeps you making music year after year?
That’s really been the defining aspect of the past few years in my personal and creative life—what kind of adult musician do I want to be? Because I don’t want to be that guy who just hangs on too long. Eventually, I was willing to try just being a hired gun, which I never would have considered before. So that led to a couple of things, most recently with Garbage.
You’ve said that Jane’s was about capturing a specific time and vibe. Was letting go of the band like trying to let go of a family? Was that a tough emotional transition for you?
I guess it was just a surprising one. It’s like when you hear people talk about being in a long marriage, having married from high school, and then having it fall apart and thinking that was the only way that one could be in a relationship because it was the only one they had ever known. That happened. Initially, right after Jane’s, I got a lot of really cool offers to jump in and be a bass player. At that point I was still thinking, No, those are already established bands, so that’s not my thing. So I went off on my own and did the [Deconstruction] record with Dave [Navarro] and continued doing my own thing. I did it because of that mentality that dictates, It’s gotta be your baby or nothing. And like any hard-and-fast rule in life, it was really limiting, but I couldn’t see it that way yet.
On your blog, you can make a posting and 40 people will comment. People are still paying attention to what you’re doing, in part because of those past experiences. Is it gratifying or frustrating for your past to follow you like that?
Well, the honest answer is that it’s complicated. I never for a second am bothered by it. I often hear my peers get tired of talking about old bands. That doesn’t happen for me, I think, because I’ve done a lot of the defining of my life personally other than being the guy from Jane’s Addiction. So I’m not burnt out. Dave [Navarro] was always someone who, if I hung out with Dave, we went places that Dave went. And everywhere we went, people knew him. I was always like, I don’t want to go to the same places all the time so that everyone knows that I used to be in this band. My relationship with it has been a little distant, so it’s been able to carry on all these years without become bothersome. That being said, it might sound corny but I’m also well aware—both intellectually and emotionally—of the fact that if you are an ordinary guy from West Los Angeles, and you wind up in a situation where you are part of something that Jane’s became, that that’s an extraordinary thing. And if nothing else of that import happens in the rest of my life, that’s still an astonishing thing to have happened. So if I go to my grave having done absolutely nothing else but that, I’m still going to feel aware of the fact that I got fucking crazily lucky in life.
A lot of things had to come together in order for that to happen. One last aspect is that it puts me in a weird position wherein if I were to never put out another record, it would almost be better. My concern is that I can only disappoint people, because their expectations of me are based on something that I was a part of so long ago. I feel a pressure. I don’t think my bandmates have done a great job since Jane’s, and I feel like people have pinned some sort of hope on me that I’m going to be able to carry the ball somehow.
And I imagine that the feeling of being in Jane’s must have been something bigger than the sum of its parts, which is always mysterious and beyond anyone’s power to repeat.
Exactly. You hit the nail on the head. And if you truly assess most successes in life, they have that element. Anything that comes together and defines a time like Jane’s and Lollapalooza did—it’s nobody’s force of will that makes that happen.
What do you picture that the next decade might have in store for you as a musician?
The bottom line for me is that I just figure that being a musician affords me the opportunity to have the most interesting conversation I can have with the world. I just decided to consciously embrace the idea of being a musician. I’ve always considered myself creative, or artistic, but not specifically a musician. I was making creative decisions in creating bass lines that would have applied to any art—the creative idea that less is more. The good news is that once I cleared the cobwebs of my past, and my preconceptions of what I should or shouldn’t be in my life, I found that I enjoy being a musician, and that I love music. And as long as someplace like Dangerbird wants me to make records, I will continue to make them.
