During his new interview with Guitar World, former Porno for Pyros bassist Martyn LeNoble discussed his time with Jane’s Addiction. Recruited by frontman Perry Farrell to play bass on Jane’s third studio album “Strays,” LeNoble didn’t last long in the band and was quickly replaced by Chris Chaney.
While speaking with Guitar World, LeNoble describes how his short tenure with Jane’s came to an end following a confrontation with Farrell. Similar to Farrell and guitarist Dave Navarro’s recent on stage fight, things came to a head after a gig when the frontman took issue with LeNoble’s playing and the two had a verbal confrontation.
“We ended up going to Korea and then one show in Japan,” LeNoble recalls. “After that show, Perry was really upset. He was upset during the show, and he said he was gonna kill someone – and it wasn’t me.
“I tried to talk him down a little bit, and he suddenly turned on me. He goes, ‘Everything you play sounds like shit. There’s nothing but feedback coming from your amp.’ I was like, ‘Hold on one second, there’s no feedback. I play bass; there’s no feedback.’
“The only time there was feedback was when he put his microphone at arm’s length and held it out like he was Whitney Houston. His microphone would pick up the bass, and then it would go through his delay, so that was the feedback.
“He was trying to blame that on me, and I was not having it. That’s when I found myself after the show in Japan the next morning, flying back with a band that I was no longer in.”
Ironically, Farrell’s wife Etty Lau Farrell claims the frontman’s recent altercation with Navarro was due to his guitar playing being “too loud.” “Perry’s frustration had been mounting, night after night, he felt that the stage volume had been extremely loud and his voice was being drowned out by the band,” she wrote on Instagram shortly after the onstage incident this past September. “Perry had been suffering from tinnitus and a sore throat every night. But when the audience in the first row started complaining up to Perry, cussing at him that the band was [playing] too loud and that they couldn’t hear him, Perry lost it.”
Elsewhere in his interview, LeNoble also recalled working with Farrell in their other band Porno for Pyros: “I just don’t enjoy working with him. It was tough. Music, to me, is always a time capsule. For example, if I listen to records now that maybe I didn’t like when I was a teenager when I hear certain recordings, it brings back some kind of feeling. It becomes this sentimental thing. But with Porno for Pyros, I don’t have that feeling. It never brings me good memories.”
