Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell told Yahoo in a new interview that he doesn’t see himself writing an autobiography. “I’m a little reserved to tell you everything about my life,” he explained (see video below). “Some of it’s downright embarrassing. And I’ve got kids now. Even though I’m not exactly ashamed, but I don’t wanna set my children on a wrong course, because they think, ‘Well, you did it…’ They don’t need to know it all about me.
They can go out and live their life. My son already ran away from home twice. He just got back. And I was mad at him a little bit, but then I’d think to myself, ‘Damn, I ran away from home too.’ I understand why he did it, but I just don’t need to encourage him by telling him some of the wild shit I did.”
He continued: “It’s scary out there. I don’t want my kid getting into the wrong situation, hanging out with the wrong people, but at the same time… I don’t know how to say this. I do want him to go out there and experience a wild life, because he’s a musician. And musicians — I think that there’s different boundaries. Musicians have to have the right to experience wild things like absinthe or LSD or mushrooms.
I think that for a musician, it is more permissible to experience those kinds of things — mind expansive. The best songs are written about the wild times and living through the wild times. Again, I say, as musicians, you have a different license. In fact, I truly believe that there oughta be a license that you get that, if you are a musician, you have to take a certain course. That gives you a license to experience things. I mean, think what the art world would be without absinthe. What would Salvador Dali — what would his paintings look like? What would music sound like if THE GRATEFUL DEAD hadn’t dropped acid?”
Perry said his sons are “really good kids” who “really love music. “And, like I said, I am the last guy in line to tell ’em that they can’t do something. But I find that the most screwed up people aren’t the guys that are experimenting; it’s the ones that are told by their parents that they can’t experiment and are held back from experiencing life. Those are the kids that usually end up the most screwed up, I think.”
