Pearl Jam appear set to announce a North American tour this week, Wolverine Kills reports.
Jack Irons is a name that music fans have heard on record more-so than saw in person. This legendary drummer has been on almost every influential record that has integral to shaping the lives of so many. In the formative years of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jack Irons was clad on the throne of the smooth, yet, booming drum set of the band that would end up shaking turning the world upside down.
The group with Jack Irons were prominent. In fact, The Red Hot Chili Peppers were already being recognized as one of the most promising bands of their generation with their brand new sound that took bits and pieces from classic funk music all while throwing in rock and punk rock dabs and dribbles. This created something extremely catchy and attention grabbing.
Tragedy struck the band as the album, “The Uplift Mofo Party Plan” would also be the last album to feature the original lineup of Jack Irons, Hillel Slovak, Flea, and Anthony Kiedis. Anthony Kiedis and Hillel Slovak had developed serious addictions as the album was ready to be played on tour, and on June 25, 1988, Hillel Slovak tragically died from a heroin overdose.
The death of Hillel Slovak would be the first time that the band was ready to end it all. Anthony Kiedis had fled LA, and Jack Irons was hanging up his hat. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Irons looked back on how the death of his friend made him leave and seriously reconsider his career of a professional musician.
Jack Irons stated (as transcribed by Ultimate Guitar): “I was really blown up. That became the most difficult period of my life. It defined, honestly, the rest of my life. We had toured so much. I was so tired. The road … doing 200 shows in a year in a van … I just became real tired. I didn’t adapt to all that very easily.”
Jack Irons continued: “There was a certain level of exhaustion and personal difficulty I was experiencing leading up to Hillel’s death. When that happened, that was really the breaking point for me. And I went on a much different journey at that point that was all about getting my life back and my feet back on the ground and figuring out what I wanted to do. Music just couldn’t be part of it.”
Irons closed with: “If anything, I was blaming music in a lot of ways, since the life was so un-grounding. ‘Maybe if we’d worked less, the worst wouldn’t have happened.’ I don’t know. Who knows where my mind was at at the time? But it was a very difficult event that sent me down … Life became much bigger at that point. ‘What is really happening here? What is life all about?’ It became really deep and consuming. I knew I wasn’t going to do music for a long time. That’s why I left. Ultimately, I just couldn’t see myself doing it. I just wasn’t … I couldn’t.”
The career of Jack Irons would eventually come on the rise again as he would go on to work with the likes of Pearl Jam and countless other acts.
