Former Jane’s Addiction bassist Eric Avery has penned an op-ed piece for Thetalkhouse.com in which he shares his views on selling out, an excerpt from that can be read below:
“One of the enduring strengths of our diminishing legacy is that we were, during that first run many years ago, truly what people thought we were — free creative spirits. We could have made considerably more money if this had not been the case. We didn’t “play ball” with aspects of the industry that we would have been wise to court if we had been primarily concerned with making money. We were asked to do an MTV show called Unplugged and the rest of the band was OK with it. I wasn’t. At the time I saw MTV as an evil. I thought that it was one thing to create a music video and have them distribute it — much like how a radio station would play our music — but I saw going into the belly of the beast as something different.
The other guys didn’t feel this way about MTV, but, to their credit (especially our singer, Perry Farrell), when we sat down with our manager, the guys said, “Eric doesn’t want to do it, so we’re not doing it.” MTV was the big machine at the time. If you didn’t play nice with them, it meant you were risking a great deal. This is just one of many instances where we did what we believed in with a predictable cost to our career. That spirit is truly how a lot of Jane’s Addiction decisions got made — with some measure of young men’s hubris, yes, but that lack of fear set free our passion and daring.”
The full read can be found here.
