I remember the winter of 1991-1992, driving around in cars with my friends. Shawn had the treacherous old Chevette with no floorboards he'd gotten for $35, and Tom had the tiny Toyota truck and then the boat-sized wood-paneled station wagon. We'd be tooling around the barren back roads of northeastern Ohio, tuning the radio obsessively, searching for another dose of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

No fooling, when alternative rock hit my part of Ohio, it was like the dawn breaking through a permanent midnight. Sure, we already had what we in my area called "progressive music," our Information Society, Depeche Mode, Cure, Violent Femmes, and so on. But as good as that stuff was (and is), the incurable Britishness of most of these bands failed to really connect with something primal inside me. As a red-blooded briarhopper (that's 'flatland hillbilly'), my need for rock just can't be satisfied for long with synthesizers and doggerel 'bout blisters in the sun. Me, personally, I would drive around with my friends, ravenous for another dose of "Teen Spirit," and then go home and put the amazing art-metal crush of Jane's Addiction on auto-repeat for hours and hours. Briarhopper's gotta feed his jones, after all.

Rising out of the same trashy, glammy El Lay scene that gave us Motley Crue, Black Flag, X, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and even The Eagles, Jane's Addiction combined parts that just should never have worked together into one messy machine. Stephen Perkins was a clattery, sticky drummer who played like he'd be as much at home in some tweaked-up bebop band, Eric Avery's thick-toned bass was just a little too metal to be merely funky, Dave Navarro was a metal guitarist with an amazing head for dissonant rhythm parts and bluesy leads, and Perry Farrell was... well, what the hell was he? An androgynous little walking id with a thin whine of a voice who keened and snarled and bled lyrics that, in anybody else's hands, would have been painfully earnest, high-school jottings somehow given dignity through sheer force of will and questionable sanity. They were like Guns 'n' Roses' weird little brothers, hanging out smoking pot in the high school art room while their big bro' lurked behind the school beating up nerds.

Together, they made two absolutely classic albums, 1988's Nothing's Shocking and 1990's Ritual de lo Habitual that threw together art school pretension, metal, funk, a few nods to prog-rock, and a heavy dose of drugged-out mysticism to boot. The music and the lyrics bled sex and oil paint, the songs were like nothing ever before, and Perry Farrell stood over it all like a deranged emcee at the greatest drag queen prom ever thrown.