The Tragic Real-Life Story Of Jane's Addiction

Jane's Addiction came storming out of the Los Angeles music scene in the late 1980s. Bridging the gap between sleazy, debauched hair metal and the boundary-pushing alternative rock that would define the '90s, Jane's Addiction offered a visceral and enchanting brand of rock music, influenced in equal parts by punk, hard rock, and psychedelia as it wove party-ready tales of lust, drugs, and the dark side of humanity. Led by lead singer and provocative showman Perry Farrell, the intricate bass work of Eric Avery, and the haunting guitar of Dave Navarro, Jane's Addiction took weird rock into the mainstream with the likes of "Jane Says," "Mountain Song," "Been Caught Stealing," and "Stop!"

Through numerous breakups and make-ups, the members of Jane's Addiction have been important figures in pop culture for more than 35 years. And as public figures who have embraced the rock 'n' roll lifestyle to its fullest, they've been beset by more than their fair share of tragic, traumatic, and just plain terrible happenings. Here's a look at the truly awful moments in the lives of the guys forever linked to one another via Jane's Addiction.

Future Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro was raised by divorced parents, primarily living with his mother, model Connie Navarro. In 1983, the elder Navarro split up with a boyfriend, John Riccardi, and he responded with extreme violence. "There was a point where he had broken into the house and held me up and handcuffed me and basically got pretty violent and then let me go," Dave Navarro told "The Howard Stern Show" in 2001. A week later, Riccardi returned to the Navarro home in West Los Angeles and killed Connie Navarro. "And my aunt who happened to be there," Dave Navarro explained. The musician was 15 years old at the time, and he went to live with his father, who resided nearby.

Riccardi was the main suspect in the murder case, and he avoided capture by police for nearly eight years, finally apprehended in 1991 after his case was featured on "America's Most Wanted." Riccardi was convicted for the double murder and received the death penalty. In 2012, the death sentence was overturned, then converted into life in prison with no possibility of parole — a sentence that was upheld by an appeals court two years later. 

After the split of Jane's Addiction, Perry Farrell formed Porno for Pyros, where Martyn LeNoble played bass. When Eric Avery didn't want to reunite Jane's Addiction in the 2000s, LeNoble took his spot in that band. A few years later, LeNoble began dating actor Christina Applegate. They got engaged in 2010 and married in 2013. For most of their relationship, Applegate has coped with medical challenges, and so, by extension, has LeNoble. In 2008, Applegate's doctor diagnosed her with breast cancer, a disease to which she was genetically predisposed. To reduce the chance of the cancer spreading, or developing into ovarian cancer, Applegate elected to undergo a double mastectomy as well as have her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed.

"I'm very grateful to Martyn for coming along at a time that he did because he's been my rock through all of this," Applegate told People in 2009. "He gave me something to really want to live for and something to smile about."

After experiencing tremors and lack of feeling in her appendages and then losing her balance on the set of "Dead to Me," Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a neurological disease that can slowly take away a person's ability to walk, see, and speak. Having already suffered a significantly diminished capacity for movement, balance, and strength, Applegate retired from on-screen acting with the conclusion of "Dead to Me." 

The "Jane" name-checked in Jane's Addiction, and the central character of the band's 1988 breakthrough hit "Jane Says," are actually the same Jane, and she's a real person. In 1985, singer Perry Farrell and bassist Eric Avery lived in a home and rehearsal space in Los Angeles with several other people, including a woman named Jane Bainter, with whom Farrell became fast friends. She was heavily dependent on heroin, which inspired Farrell to name his group Jane's Addiction. "I found her to be very strange and special," Farrell told Billboard.

"Jane Says" consists primarily of phrases uttered by a woman addicted to drugs, who doesn't want to be ("I'm gonna kick tomorrow") and who feels trapped in a controlling and abusive relationship with a man ("Jane says 'I'm done with Sergio.'") "Sergio was a drug dealer who lived nearby," Bainter told Spin. "I was strung out, and he was using that to manipulate me." The line about Jane hoping to move to Spain is painfully true, too. "My parents divorced, and my mother and her new husband bought this house in the south of Spain," Bainter said. "I had the opportunity to go over there, but I couldn't because I was strung out."

Two well-liked and well-respected celebrities died by suicide in June 2018: designer Kate Spade and food documentarian Anthony Bourdain. The public was largely unaware of the pervasive depression from which both Spade and Bourdain tragically suffered, and with those thoughts in the collective consciousness in the days after those deaths, Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro shared his personal history with suicidal ideation.

"I can't speak to anyone else's thoughts or actions but I can speak from my own experience. I have been there, written 'the note,' had the plan, the stockpile of meds, how to disperse my property among my family," Navarro wrote in an Instagram post (via Billboard) that he later deleted. "I was ready to go. Luckily, as a last ditched [sic] effort, I reached out. I spoke to my closest friends and loved ones. I sought therapy and at times, psychiatry, alternative medicines, even hospitalization. Whatever it took."

On a 2021 episode of the podcast "Appetite for Distortion," Navarro discussed his mental health, and how getting a handle on it is an ongoing process. "I've suffered from depression my whole life. I lost my mother to murder at 15, so I have a deeply rooted history of trauma and PTSD," Navarro said (via Ultimate Guitar). "And I'm here to tell you that there's no external thing that is going to fix the deep-rooted problem of trauma."

From before Jane's Addiction found major success to after the group's split and when he fronted Porno for Pyros, Perry Farrell's drug use was such an open secret that in 1993, Rolling Stone's readers named him "Rock Star Most Likely to Die in the Next Year." Heroin and cocaine were the musician's substances of choice, dating back to when Jane's Addiction formed in the mid-1980s. "When Perry and I first started dating, we did heroin together a few times, long before it became a problem," Farrell's partner and band associate Casey Niccoli told Spin. "We thought of it as a way of opening up our creativity."

Every member of Jane's Addiction in its first era found themselves addicted to heroin (all but drummer Stephen Perkins), while Farrell told the music industry trade magazine Hits (via Rolling Stone) at the time that unlike the other guys in his band, he had no plans to get clean. He proclaimed heroin to be "great," and, when asked to weigh in on its dangers, quipped, "So's driving. You take your chances."

The group's 1990 album "Ritual de lo Habitual" — referring to the ritualistic nature of habits — got its name from Farrell's substance abuse. "In those days, we were hitting speedballs really hard," Farrell told Guitar World. "Our daily life would consist of waking up, going to a spoon, drawing back heroin-cocaine admixtures, slamming them, and getting your day going. So that was our daily ritual."