Last week, Jane’s Addiction officially announced their disbandment. This decision comes over a year after frontman Perry Farrell and guitarist Dave Navarro got into an onstage altercation during a September 2024 show in Boston.
In a statement shared to Instagram, Farrell apologized to “our patrons and my bandmates for losing my temper and for disrupting the show.” In a separate statement, the band explained that while they “have come together one last time to resolve our differences,” they have chosen not to continue on. “We now look forward to the future as we embark on our separate musical and creative endeavors. Jane’s Addiction will forever live in our hearts.”
Now, in a new interview with Appetite for Distortion, Jane’s Addiction’s longtime guitar and bass tech Dan Cleary is speaking out about the now-infamous 2024 Boston show that ultimately resulted in the band calling it quits.
That night, Cleary was not just a witness to the chaos, but actually jumped on stage to break up the confrontation between Farrell and Navarro. When asked if it was a traumatic experience for him, Cleary agreed.
“I’m glad you asked because no one has actually asked if it was traumatic yet, but the answer is yeah,” he said. “I was with that band for 17 years. That was more my family than my real-life family. I’ve been all over the world with those guys. We’ve been through everything. I love them. They’ve given me a life that I couldn’t have otherwise.”
Cleary went on to say that the incident was particularly shocking given how close the band and crew were.
“We had the best crew. Like the number one best crew in the business. There were no big egos. Everybody was pulling in the same direction every day. We supported each other. We went to bat for each other,” he explained. “So when that happened, when Perry kind of went after Dave on stage in Boston, it was traumatic. I tell people it felt like losing somebody in a car accident because it was so abrupt and out of nowhere. None of us still know exactly what happened.”
Recalling the moment the fight broke out, Cleary admitted that he immediately knew the band was finished.
“As soon as it happened, as soon as the kind of punch and the scuffle happened, in my mind, I knew this is over. This is done,” he said. “I know a lot of the fan base was like, you know, they’ll work it out. They’re grown men. This stuff happens. But I was like, ‘No, this is—we’re going home, and we’re not going to do this again.’ It was really sad. It really was really, really sad.”
