DECONSTRUCTION: Portrait of a Quiet Masterpiece

In late-1992, not long after Jane’s Addiction broke up, Jane’s bassist Eric Avery and guitarist Dave Navarro formed the one-off musical project Deconstruction. In 1994, they released their only album, Deconstruction.

Musically, Deconstruction was so left-field that it felt fresh and out of step with the so-called ’90s Alternative Era. For many of us ’90s kids, Jane’s Addiction was our Velvet Underground. Jane’s fans would have been thrilled to hear anything that any Jane’s guys were doing back then, and Deconstruction’s song structures, and the interplay between Navarro’s and Avery’s instruments, made the album so unusual that they should have been the talk of the ’90s. Instead, there was little talk about them at all.

Before the album came out, the band broke up. They never performed the album live. They had next-to-no MTV coverage. They had no big profiles in music magazines, no late-night TV appearances on David Letterman or slots on Lollapalooza’s second stage. Despite one long review in Rolling Stone, the album arrived so quietly that it mainly existed through word-of-mouth, which made the CD in your hand seem a precious thing, something you would have missed had you turned your head at the wrong moment. The CD eventually fell out of print. It never got pressed to vinyl or put on streaming services. Un-hyped and unpromoted, the band was underground in a way that the popular, influential Jane’s Addiction could no longer be at that time. Maybe Deconstruction wanted it that way. In a world before the internet, news traveled differently, so Deconstruction became a secret rock ‘n’ roll handshake, a musical gift you gave to other adventurous listeners, and eventually, a mysterious artifact of its time that now only lives on YouTube, in CD collections, and in myth.

Many fans consider Deconstruction to be the best thing any member of Jane’s Addiction did after Jane’s. Many consider it proof of Avery’s genius. Many think it contains the most searing guitar Navarro ever played. 

Fans who love the album, love it deeply. It’s safe to call it a cult classic. 

Drummer Taylor Hawkins grew up as a huge Jane’s fan and watched Deconstruction grow into a mythic thing. “Deconstruction is making itself into the realm of the Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue,” Hawkins told me in 2021, “and Alex Chilton Big Star.” 

Where did it come from?

Deconstruction started as a jam. 

When Jane’s Addiction had some time off, Avery and Navarro took a week-long trip to San Francisco in 1988, and they composed an instrumental sketch at a stranger’s house on borrowed equipment. “That was just an accident,” Avery told me 33 years after the fact. The bassist couldn’t remember the time of year or if Jane’s was between tours or between shows. He only remembered that he and Navarro were there together. Back then, they were inseparable.

Jane’s toured for most of 1988. After releasing their independent debut record in 1987, Jane’s released their major label debut, Nothing’s Shocking, in 1988. But on tour, the band only graduated from a beat-up van to a beat-up Winnebago with a busted-out window, and they slept in cheap KOA campsites instead of costly hotels, crisscrossing the country and building a reputation as one of the country’s most explosive underground bands with one of rock’s most compelling lead singers. The time was a blur. The drugs blurred things further. “What were we doing up there? Heroin?” Avery laughed. “I think we were hangin’ out at somebody’s house who we didn’t really know—maybe a drug connection kind of thing. You know, the confabulatory nature of memory, I’m not certain about that. There’s a lot of San Francisco drug memories coming up in that neurological web that I’m not certain were all related to that [song].”

Navarro was certain. “I remember like it was yesterday,” the guitarist told me. “The origin story is that Eric and I were, again, loaded on heroin. We went to San Francisco. We were copping a lot of dope. We were walking around Haight-Ashbury, and we were kind of squatting with people we’d meet on the street and stay at their places—really just, like, an aimless trip. For no reason, we just went to San Francisco and fucked around for a week. So we met a couple of people that had a place on Haight. We stayed at their apartment for a couple of days. They had basses and guitars laying around. And one afternoon, I don’t know how or why, Eric and I picked up a bass and a guitar and just wrote that on the spot.” They didn’t plan on staying with strung-out strangers. They didn’t plan anything. “It just wound up that way. They were like, ‘You guys could stay here.’ And we were like, ‘Cool.’ And we did.” 

The two friends left the city with a song and resumed life on the road.

Navarro and Avery named their sketch “San Francisco.” The music didn’t evoke anything particular about the city’s character. It evoked its conception. “It’s still probably one of my favorite things Eric and I ever wrote,” Navarro said. The title was a placeholder. The song briefly became one, too, while Avery and Jane’s Addiction went through a profound transformation. 

Avery, Navarro, and drummer Stephen Perkins sometimes jammed “San Francisco” as an instrumental during soundchecks at Jane’s shows. A fan recorded them playing it in October 1988 in Florida, where they were opening for Iggy Pop. Singer Perry Farrell was backstage. “He’ll be here shortly,” the band told the crowd before they ripped into this song then into “Up the Beach.” Another fan recorded them playing “San Francisco” at Hollywood’s John Anson Ford Theater before one of a string of seven shows in April 1989, one of which got filmed, minus that song. When Perry ruined his voice and had to cancel a show in London in 1990, the trio even played “San Francisco” as part of a three-song instrumental apology set. The song also provided something to fill dead space if Perry’s mic went out during shows or when the crew needed time to fix malfunctioning equipment. “San Francisco” was fast, so it got peoples’ attention. It had one of those powerful cascading guitar riffs that put you in a trance the way “Up the Beach” did, except the guitar line was less aggressive, and Perry didn’t chant over it. Because soundcheck got everyone together in one place, soundcheck offered a convenient opportunity to flesh out this sketch. The band wrote most of their first two albums by jamming at rehearsal around Avery’s basslines. There was no reason to believe this wouldn’t become a Jane’s song, too.

By 1990, the band was still touring for Nothing’s Shocking and were preparing to record their third album. For an underground band, they got enormously popular. If “San Francisco” was the direction their music was going, then the future sounded bright. But Jane’s still broke up in 1991, at the peak of their fame. Drugs, success, and conflicting personalities had poisoned members’ relationships. Tensions ran so high they could no longer compose as a group. They filled their third album, Ritual de lo Habitual, with songs they’d already written and had perfected during years of playing. Only Perry and Perkins’ next band Porn for Pyros could flesh out the few old grooves Jane’s had laying around. Nearly two years after Jane’s dissolved, “San Francisco” remained unrecorded. 

“San Francisco” was different.

“It was definitely the first thing that was ours,” Avery told me. “It was untainted by any concern about whether or not it was Perry’s idea first or more or less. It felt like ours. It was a little thing that was ours that we knew was great. And that might’ve been the genesis of both of us seeing the possibility of it.”

While Jane’s was touring, Avery and Navarro never discussed starting a new band. What became Deconstruction wasn’t an attempt to leverage Jane’s success to further their musical careers. They simply recognized that when they made music like “San Francisco” together, it was cool, so they should do more of that. “We really liked what was happening with the bass and guitar weaving together,” Navarro told me. “We found it very easy to write opposing bass and guitar parts that would weave together. So the bass on its own was okay. And the guitar on its own was okay, but the two together made for something that neither of us expected.” The same could be said for their friendship.

Where Navarro was a highly technical player who grew up on heavy metal, Avery was a kind of beach goth with what he considered simple punk bass skills. And where the confident, outgoing Navarro was comfortable being the center of attention, Avery was a reserved bookish subversive, and quietly self-critical. Yet in Jane’s, they became best friends.

Among their many shared loves, they bonded over the Velvet Underground and Joy Division. “And these are bands that have repetitive, rolling parts that suck you into an energy and a vibe, and that’s really all we were focused on,” Navarro said. “San Francisco” had a repetitive structure that broke standard rock convention and gave it a somnolent, mid-tempo, narcotic vibe. Instead of having verses and choruses, its two simple parts repeated themselves, and it went on long enough to induce a spell. “Because if you change too quick,” said Navarro, “then there’s no time for that to happen.” 

When they played it, they got lost in it. No one sang. They just played. They loved that about it. “When it came to what we loved on our instruments, we loved being in the hypnosis of the drone,” said Navarro. “The best way for me to describe it is a song like ‘Mountain Song,’ which is two parts back and forth. And ‘San Francisco’ is two parts back and forth, maybe with an extended bridge. There’s an A Part, a B Part, a bridge that’s really a breakdown, and then it just kind of goes back into itself. For us, that was the [song] ‘Heroin,’ you know what I mean? That’s the John Cale. That is ‘Venus in Furs,’ just hypnotic.” And that’s why “San Francisco” remains one of the best things the two ever wrote.

No one had a claim on “San Francisco” but them. 

Not long after Jane’s played their final show on September 26, 1991, Avery rented a house in Big Sur, California to recuperate.

Alone on California’s coast at age 26, Avery grappled with many questions. Who was he? What did he want to do next? Jane’s end provided an opportunity to drill into his core to find a more level, objective foundation to anchor himself to. “So when I went to Big Sur,” said Avery, “I wanted to sort of exercise and invigorate my human identity outside of the idea of being a ‘bass player in a band.’ It was really a spiritual decision, like, I want to go be an ape on a rocky cliff with an ocean and an earth and the universe, and not be the guy with the blue hair and the things and, hey—thumbs up—good job, and go to the hip event.” Rather than reckoning with his vocation, he reckoned with himself. “My headspace wasn’t like I had any sense of my career or any of that,” Avery told me. “I wasn’t really certain I was going to keep making music. And that, in the way that a young man can be a cocktail of entirely disparate things, on the one hand I think I was devastated and had my confidence shaken, but at the same time I also thought Maybe I’ll leave this music thing behind and become an artist. I’ve always been drawn to visual art as well.” Avery wondered if he would abandon music for something else. During Jane’s, a family friend once told him that many great artists leave their first form for another. It was natural. Another part of him wondered about going into film. His dad was an actor, his grandfather a recording engineer. Maybe my time as a musician is over, he wondered. Maybe I don’t like being in a band anymore.

After six years in Jane’s, Avery still didn’t see the band’s success as evidence of his destiny. Because of his roots in punk rock, he thought of music as something you could do without being a musician. To him, he had bumbled into success with minimal skills, and this youthful hobby had taken him to places he never imagined, for longer than he expected, so at age 26, he could still become something else. “If you’re open to something dying,” he said, “then you’re open to something new happening.” The ape on the cliff by the ocean in the universe had just quit the most popular alternative band in the world. What did he have to lose?

In Big Sur, he picked up his guitar—an instrument he didn’t play much anymore—and started tinkering. “It felt like things were over on one hand, and so it was sort of like, well, I’m not doing that thing anymore, but here’s this guitar sitting here.”

Avery had played acoustic guitar all the time at the beginning of Jane’s. In 1985 and ’86, the members would jam on the porch of the Wilton House where he, Perry, and Jane Bainter—the Jane—lived. They did acoustic jams in the living room and at backyard barbecues, using bongos for percussion. It was more hippie-dippie than Velvet Underground. In Big Sur, he brought it back to basics and wrote a little every day. Playing guitar helped rekindle the powerful feelings he once had about rock ‘n’ roll and fit what he called “that whole ‘starting over’ feeling.” 

The first new song he wrote there, named “Get At ’Em,” expressed the crossroads where he was in life. Even if he wasn’t plotting his post-Jane’s career, work was on his mind. “I’m my career, I’m radio static,” Avery sings in “Get At ’Em.” “Ambitions bloating / I’m busy noisy / Infidelities to the dream I had / Of who I might turn out to one day be.” So was the way his musical identity intersected with his civilian life. 

After drug addiction and fame, Avery valued being what Hollywood gossip rags call a ‘regular person.’ “Because of my sobriety,” he said, “at that point I was in my third or fourth year of getting clean and all that, and just the project of being a human being was really taking shape for me. So I had this faith that with that being the goal, what I did would take care of itself. That idea that I can change and grow as a human being, taking that approach that if you’re living your life and paying attention, it’s all your work, and your work is also a part of your life. It’s not like if you live the creative life, you’re like, Okay, now I’m being creative. And now I’m living. Now I’m being creative. It’s all interrelated.” 

“Get At ’Em” addressed that sense of transition, possibility, and Avery’s struggle to integrate these different sides of himself as he expanded his identity beyond band dynamics and music. The larger culture, and technological advances, expanded the range of possibility, too.

Avery had started tinkering with a four-track machine to record himself at home. As he experimented with “Get At ’Em,” he included a sample of boxing announcer Michael Buffer saying his famous catchphrase “Let’s get ready to rumble!” Avery had recently started boxing, watching fights, and using boxing technique to confront his fears. Now he had a song unlike others he’d written. “I don’t know that I had a sense that I was going anywhere with it,” he told me. “I certainly didn’t think, Oh, the Jane’s thing didn’t work out, I am going to now make a record and it will be called Deconstruction.” He was just following impulse. Deeply cerebral, curious by nature, he failed out of four high schools in three years, but he’d never stopped learning. Partially because of his high school experience, he valued education, so he kept reading, taking elective classes, and educating himself. “Sampling and that sort of technology was calling to me, but I didn’t know the first thing about any of that technology. I was technologically primordial when it comes to gadgets at that point. That piqued my interest.” The act of learning made the songwriting process an intellectual exercise, and the challenge of trying something new reinvigorated his interest in music. He couldn’t know it at the time, but this was the beginning of his life making electronic music as a solo musician.

The idea of sampling came from the hip-hop he’d been listening to since the mid-80s. The intersection of hip-hop and rock was an exciting frontier. Artists built masterpieces from sophisticated layers of beats, rhymes, and samples, most notably Public Enemy’s influential It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique in 1989. 1992 was a fertile time for hip-hop: The Pharcyde released Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde in September 1992, shortly after Ice Cube released The Predator, shortly after Pete Rock & CL Smooth released Mecca and the Soul Brother. Musicians inspired by hip-hop could hear that with samples and imagination, anything was possible. And back then, artists and record labels didn’t know enough to get litigious about publishing rights for sampled music. That meant artists had a heyday without many legal repercussions, and sampling cost nothing because no one paid for rights. You could never afford to make albums like Paul’s Boutique  now, let alone license both Prince and Michael Buffer’s famous catchphrase “Let’s get ready to rumble!” in one song. In 1992, they could get away with it the way hip-hop had for years. “What got me really excited was the idea of doing something that had more to do with hip-hop,” Avery said.

Hip-hop was as avant-garde as the Velvet Underground was in the ’60s and Joy Division and ’80s underground bands that got labeled as art rock, because hip-hop rejected convention and reimagined how music sounded and got made.

Along with “Get At ’Em,” he worked on new basslines, lyrical scraps, and musical ideas he had brewing in Big Sur, and that led back to the abandoned song “San Francisco.”

Back home in Los Angeles, Avery revisited the idea of making music with Dave Navarro.

The brilliant guitarist played with incredible imagination, combining a heavy guitar style with intense emotionality. His voice on his instrument was one-of-a-kind, but in 1992, he was struggling to crawl out from under his addiction. 

Avery disliked metal, but in Jane’s, he Navarro both liked rock and gothic sounds, like Souixsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Love and Rockets, and The Cure, and they bonded over a shared appreciation of the arts, poetry, and underground film. “If it had a recognizable name in it, we didn’t see it,” Navarro said about their taste in cinema. “We were at, like, the Nuart [in L.A]. We were at the Vista. We were checking out weird arthouse movies.” They also enjoyed each other’s company. “I think at the time, I was one of the few people that could really make him laugh. It was always fun to see Eric lose it, because it didn’t happen often. But when he did, he lit up the room.” 

In Jane’s early years, their heroin use had fused them in creative and dysfunctional ways. In 1989, when they tried to break that cycle, they’d listen to N.W.A. while driving from L.A. to the Valley to get their morning methadone dose. Sobriety was a long-term challenge. Jane’s ended more abruptly.

When the last Jane’s tour ended in 1991, the 24-year-old Navarro found himself in his quiet Westwood apartment with an empty schedule.

“That’s probably when I ended up getting clean, really,” Navarro told me, “is we came home from that and I probably—and I’m guessing here—I probably sat around for a couple of months and used drugs and alcohol and then finally said enough’s enough.”

Avery and Navarro respected each other’s musical abilities, and the things that bonded them during Jane’s remained points of connection: books, music, cinema, visual art, and now, in place of heroin, an embrace of sobriety. “And we had nothing to do,” Navarro said. “We wanted to create.”

So in late-92, they started jamming at Navarro’s apartment, building from what Avery had written in Big Sur, and from ideas Navarro had. They’d set up Navarro’s TASCAM eight-track recorder in his home office, drink coffee, and jam in a cloud of cigarette smoke until they came up with new melodies and snippets they could fuse together into what counted for songs.

“Eric would come over,” Navarro told me, “and we would fire up a drum machine and make what we thought was kind of a cool groove. Then we would just start throwing ideas at it. And usually, before too long, we would have a part, or we’d have a song, or we’d have a structure. It enabled us to be able to really hear what each other was doing. There’s a big difference, playing in a rehearsal space, with the amps loud and the drums going and all this stuff going on—and the room tone—versus hearing things coming out of the speakers at you, with a mix, so you can really hear what’s coming back. That was the first time we’d ever written like that, because everything that Jane’s ever did was either fleshed out in the rehearsal room and then we went to the studio, whereas this, most of the stuff was written in the studio. Or, I guess, in my house.” He described Deconstruction’s creative process as “cramming” things together on eight tracks.

This transitional period in life was the ideal time to make experimental music. “I was not only saying goodbye to my band, but I was saying goodbye to my drug addiction,” said Navarro, “so the temperature was completely perfect, in terms of having tons of time and space to explore. Because being a drug addict is a full-time job, and being in Jane’s Addiction is a full-time job. And now I was free of all those things.” With no demands on their time, they could hunker down to explore their musical ideas. And Navarro could keep pushing his guitar playing into new territories. Even though they knew hardcore Jane’s fans were out there watching whatever the band members were doing, they were relieved to be able to experiment at home without the eyes of the world on them. “It really felt like a safe place for experimentation and growth.”

They agreed to split the vocal duties. Neither of them were singers, but they hoped that working without a lead singer would free them of hierarchical dynamics and give them creative freedom. Jane’s had been a democracy at the beginning, after all. “Deconstruction organically grew out of that,” Avery told me, “but it was really more, like I said, a reaction against where we had come from, rather than a real desire for both of us to make a thing.”

Not having any long-term expectations about the music they were making having to lead anywhere beyond those apartment walls proved to be a rewarding point of departure. “Well,” Navarro said, “when you’re making a record that you know doesn’t have the chance for commercial success, it’s very easy to come to that place, you know, because: Am I having fun? Yes. Am I enjoying what we’re making? Yes. Am I inspired by what I’m hearing? Yes, then, okay, cool.”

Soon the duo had recorded five songs on eight-track, using a drum machine: “San Francisco,” “One,” “America,” “Jealous Song,” and an untitled track. Navarro sang lead on two of them.

On the finished album, Navarro plays the kind of imaginative guitar lines that earned him his reputation as one of rock’s best guitarists. Some riffs hit hard and fast, slicing as they had on Jane’s songs like “Stop!” and “Ocean Size.” Some cascaded like waterfalls over Avery’s basslines, sprinkling sonic stardust the way they did in “Then She Did” and the bridge on “Trip Away”—delicate, lacey, celestial tones that induced a kind of euphoria without any narcotics. On the demos, you can hear the beginning of that, him mapping ideas, developing riffs and his twinkling guitar lines, laying the first brush strokes on which he would layer on magic in the studio with producer Ronnie Champagne’s technical assistance and equipment.

Even though his guitar sounded undeniably like his guitar on Jane’s, Deconstruction songs were more unconventional than even Jane’s most unconventional music. That was intentional. “We didn’t want to do anything that we were hearing,” Navarro told me.

By 1992, the airwaves were Soundgarden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains mixing with Whitney Houston, Arrested Development, and Kriss Kross. Stores like Target sold “Grungewear.” Once-cool stuff was now a commodity. Avery and Navarro wanted to create something anti-pop, less radio friendly, and that resisted commodification.

“I loved the abandon and the energy [of Nirvana],” Navarro said, “and I loved what they were doing, but we were also very conscious of the fact that they were pop songs at the end of the day—brilliant pop songs, but pop songs all the same. Since that was what was happening right then, and everybody ran out to pick up a guitar and have a, you know, one-take guitar take and a thrashy song, with that verse-chorus, loud-quiet-loud-bridge-out [style]—that was becoming the new sound de jour. We were painstaking about not doing that. For me, it wasn’t so much that I thought we would stand out and shine among all this sea of similarity. It was just like we felt there was plenty of that. Like, the world doesn’t need another band that does that right now. And we don’t need to be that band.”

The verse-chorus-verse structure had remained the basic pop formula since the mid-20th century. But thanks to once underground bands like the Pixies, Nirvana, and Smashing Pumpkins, a new formula had provided songwriters with a template during the Alternative Era: the quiet-loud-quiet structure. In it, bands play a quieter part of the song, or start softly, setting a somnolent mood before blowing it apart with a sudden shift in volume and dynamics, with little more warning than some transitional guitar feedback. Boom! Electric guitars rip. Singers scream. Drums pound. Feedback, distortion, fuzz—the music reaches a crescendo. Then as quickly as it raged, the music softens again. 

“And I love those bands,” said Navarro. “I’m not in any way talking shit about how someone structures a song. I’m just saying that for this record, that was the approach. I think that we also enjoyed the challenge of it, whereas you write Part A, Part B, and maybe a part C, and then you put them together, once you have your parts, that’s not much of a challenge.”

Navarro and Avery wanted surprises while writing, so they tried to create something that didn’t follow convention. 

“It was art and music to us,” Navarro said, “and it wasn’t songs. If you really look back at the Jane’s Addiction catalog, there’s not a whole lot of songs there either. We would have songs that have two parts. ‘Mountain Song’ has two parts, back and forth, back and forth. ‘Ain’t No Right’ has two parts, back and forth, back and forth. ‘Stop’ doesn’t really have a chorus. ‘Been Caught Stealing’ really doesn’t have a chorus. ‘Jane Says’ is two chords—doesn’t really have a chorus, except maybe when he says ‘Jane says.’ ‘Three Days’ certainly does not follow any structure. ‘Then She Did’ follows no structure. So we already were very conditioned to doing what we wanted anyway, because we had come from a band that loosely followed guidelines in that we would at least come back around to a part that’s familiar. Whereas when we got to Deconstruction, one of the things Eric and I both really loved and bonded on was our love of the Velvet Underground. So as a result of that, we loved droney, hypnotic, seemingly never-ending parts. So if you listen to a song like ‘America,’ it’s legitimately the same part all the way through. It’s just—and to me, that song is one of my favorite examples of how Eric’s bass playing and my guitar playing work together, because very rarely did we play the same parts. Whereas you have a lot of bass players playing the root of the guitar chord, and that’s your song, [here] I’m playing one line, he’s playing a contradictory line, and it creates this cacophony. So that would be found on a song like ‘America,’ but we also kept it—even though it was very heavy—we kept it hypnotic and moving forward and not looking back. If I think about some of the musical structures of those songs on that [Deconstruction] record, they could have been turned into rock songs, that song in particular. It’s a great verse. If you had a big chorus, and you had a bridge? Song. Done. No questions asked by any label. That may be evident, but we didn’t care.” He laughed at the idea. “We just didn’t care. And we liked real extreme shifts and dynamics, like going from massive freight train coming at you about to hit you in the middle of the eyes, then into just like nothingness. And we felt that that was that was almost symbolic of the unpredictability of life. You know? Life doesn’t come back around at an easy, memorable, fun way, and when it does, that’s usually when we get tired a life because it feels monotonous. You know? Yeah, I get up and go to work and then come home at this time, yah-tah. Monotony. People have enough monotony. So we were just like, no, this thing starts here, and it goes here. And it’s not comin’ back to this thing. It was a pretty intentional move on our part.”

Deconstruction chose sharp turns, unidirectional movements, and disjointed connections, because in place of music, the visual arts and film provided important frameworks for songwriting.

“We were more interested in cinematic, thematic music rather than songs, if that makes sense,” Navarro said. “Eric and I are both huge film buffs, so film for us is a great escape. I think that that’s how we wrote parts and went into other parts, because we saw them as scene changes. If you see a film, halfway through the film, they don’t go back and show you the first scene of the film again. It just keeps going, right? Like a chorus: In our minds, it was like, why would you repeat that? You just said that three minutes ago. If you look at a movie, you wouldn’t ever repeat a scene 20 minutes later to remind you you’re in this chorus-structured film, and it was kind of like that with music.” Creating music that worked like film meant that their soundscapes moved in one direction, not in a loop. So Deconstruction songs don’t end where they begin. “Why would you see the opening scene again? Or the car chase again?”

Having smooth scene changes would have meant they had to fuse parts together in unique ways to keep the changes from being jarring, but jarring changes were often part of the point. They liked abrupt.

“Everything was fair game as far as we were concerned,” said Navarro. “That was the whole point—to take elements of different types of sound and music, and put them all together, even if they didn’t necessarily fit in.” Their shared interests gave them lots to choose from. “You’re talking about two junkies that would walk around Europe with headphones, listening to Brahms,” Navarro told me. “And, you know, [composer] Samuel Barber. That’s who we were, man. Those were influences. I mean, they really were. It was like: The Cure, Bauhaus, Iggy Pop, punk rock, some heavy metal for me, and classical music—just like the weirdest combination of shit that you would ever throw against the wall and hope for anything to stick. But it did.”

This organically turned into a band.

When telling friends about the kind of music they were making, they kept referencing Deconstructivism as an art movement, so they eventually figured they should just call the band Deconstruction. “I think that we were both a little concerned about it sounding a little bit too snooty and arty,” Navarro said. “But the reality is that 90% of the public didn’t know what Deconstructivism was anyway, and the other 10% of the public didn’t know we made a record to begin with!” He laughed. “Didn’t matter.”

After their turbulent success, Jane’s had played with both constructive and destructive forces, the darkness and the light. Now Avery and Navarro were deconstructing their musical identities, deconstructing old habits, and deconstructing fans’ expectations of them. In the process, they reconstructed themselves.

“That’s interesting that you say that, but I certainly didn’t put that together in the naming of the band,” said Avery. “The naming of the band was simply the postmodern theoretical definition of deconstruction. My thinking was: In the same way that the architects would take a pastiche of different things and slam it together in a building, like make an arch no longer a structural thing and instead make it a decorative thing or something. It was basically responsible for all the really shitty buildings we had in the ’80s and ’90s. But I thought, That’s an interesting idea. I wonder what it would look like to apply that to music? Like really try to create different feelings and different styles within a song, and just purposely have them collide instead of it be musical in the usual ways, like use a drum machine and then not a drum machine—just have these different moments collide.” He’d read about Derrida’s post-modernist theory of deconstruction somewhere and decided to see what happened if he applied the French philosopher’s idea to music. How do songs’ components—guitar parts, vocals, found audio—change when you place them next to other surprising things, instead of by themselves? 

The sampling was new for them both. 

In 1993, the internet was still niche. Personal computers were a novelty, and people had cordless mobile phones, not cell phones. The underground and gothic music Avery loved in his youth had always included electronic elements, but for him, music and computers didn’t have anything to do with each other yet. While they were still writing at Navarro’s place, Avery was reading Nicholas Negroponte’s technology column in the back of Wired magazine. Negroponte was an early internet advocate and researcher. He co-founded MIT’s Media Lab, and gave his first of 14 TED talks in 1984, way before TED talks were cool. MIT’s Media Lab is a research facility whose range of inquiry spans science, art, media, technology, and design, to understand their intersection in the digital age. Between 1993 and 1998, Negroponte wrote a series of think pieces for Wired, which he later collected in his best-selling book Being Digital. Reading one of his columns, Avery had a question about the internet. Wired writers used to include their email addresses in their byline. When Avery saw Negroponte’s email, he wondered: Can someone who’d failed out of four high schools in three years just contact a high-ranking specialist inside an ivy league school and ask a question? That itself was a question. His many fields of interest ended up in the music.

When Avery went home, he turned on his Macintosh IIvx computer, created his first email account, typed his first email, and pushed send. “This was my first foray into computers,” Avery remembered. He sent it thinking that it wouldn’t go through for some reason or that it would get ignored. But Negroponte replied. “And that was that a mind-blown moment, like, Oh my God, this really is gonna change everything. Not ‘gonna’ change everything. It did change everything for me in that moment, like, I am connected to all these resources out in the world that I would never have access to unless I was able to make it into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you know?”

That MIT email—the act of emailing itself, and the sense of access and connection it forged—started to connect rock to electronics, hip-hop and computers and sampling all together, and those novel connections revolutionized his conception of what his own music could be. “And so the idea of the internet and the promise of it were so compelling to me that I got on board,” he said. “At that time, I really didn’t know anybody, like any friends of mine, that were on the net. I just considered it an extension of the nerdy part of me that’s always been interested in science and things like that. Eventually, these gadgets led me toward being more interested in the mechanics of music-making. Sampling and all that stuff started to come from this interest in computers. And I only recently realized this, how I didn’t, at the time, see it as a progression.” It marked a whole new era.

For Avery, transitions in life demanded small gestures. After every Jane’s tour, he would shave off his hair, whether he had green dreadlocks or blue, and start fresh. “It was amazing how attached people were to your hairdo,” he told me with a smirk. His bright dyed dreadlocks were one of the most iconic images of the ’90s. If he changed his hairstyle, he could go anywhere in the world without being recognized. A new do also changed his frame of reference, centering him as he descended holy rock ‘n’ roll mountain to resume civilian life. “So I would come home from a Jane’s leg and be like, I’m going to put away the Jane’s thing and be a human being again. And all it takes is a fucking dramatic haircut,” he said. “I was always aware of the potential corrosion of my soul from the whole experience of fame and all that.”

Big moments require secular markers or ceremonial acts—light a candle, wave goodbye. “I remember at the time that I cut off all my dreadlocks,” Avery told me, “and Dave saved them and made a mobile out of them and hung them.” While the two recorded new songs in Navarro’s apartment, Avery’s dreads hung in the window, absorbing the southern California sun. “In a way, it’s sort of emblematic of the change, like cutting off all the Jane’s Addiction, but then it hanging there in the window as a reminder of times past and renewal.”

Everything was art, even Avery’s hair.

“Man,” said Navarro, “I wish I had that thing.”

Navarro eventually shaved his dreads, too.

Of course, major record labels were interested in whatever the ex-Jane’s members were doing at the peak of their fame. In 1992, Perry and Perkins’ new band Porno for Pyros secured a deal with Warner Bros, the label Jane’s had signed to, and they started playing shows. Deconstruction had a strong connection to Warner Bros, too, through Jane’s booking agent Marc Geiger. 

Geiger was a massive Jane’s fan. Since he worked for Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, he helped get Deconstruction a good deal. At that time, Rubin was one of the most exciting, talked-about figures in the music business, so Deconstruction found themselves in the heat of his orbit, which couldn’t hurt. Avery had issues with Rubin’s approach, but he liked the label’s connection to hip-hop, liked its aesthetic and pedigree. 

“It was a record company that had a really cool bad attitude,” Avery said. “Like, they wound up putting out records like Flipper’s record, which would forever endear them to my heart. They were just doing a lot of things that were like a real fuck you to the industry. And it was really an exciting place to be at that time when it was starting.” American’s logo was an upside-down American flag—both an SOS signal of distress and a statement of opposition, depending on who’s using it. “They checked a lot of boxes.”

As Deconstruction’s songscapes developed, they needed a drummer. Even though their Jane’s bandmate Stephen Perkins was interested, he’d already accepted Perry’s offer to drum in Porn for Pyros, and Warner thought it would look confusing if he played in Deconstruction, too. 

Circumstance delivered another talent: Navarro and Avery’s old acquaintance Michael Murphy.

Pronounced ‘my-keel,’ not Michael, the drummer had been around L.A. for years. He’d played in the Paisley Underground band Rain Parade in the early 1980s and in a poppy, obscure L.A. band called Lions & Ghosts with the future husband of Lisa Marie Presley. Lions & Ghosts’ singer, Rick Parker, even lived with Avery and Perry at the Wilton House where Jane’s wrote most of their early material, and he celebrated the place in the song “Wilton House.” L.A.’s musical underground used to be a small place.

Murphy proved a fantastic choice. He has a whole different rhythmic sensibility than Perkins’ propulsive tribalism. He gave the instruments space, and his different energy helped hold the disparate, cut up parts together and frame the guitar parts more sparingly.

With record label money and songs under their belt, Deconstruction moved their project from Navarro’s apartment to a rehearsal space in January 1993, where they kept writing. 

For an experimental project that eschewed commercialism and grew in the studio, American’s backing proved pivotal, because the label provided the time and money to make whatever music Deconstruction wanted to make, which wasn’t a privilege most bands got. Other labels would have interfered. Just as Warner Bros had given Jane’s true creative freedom, from their recording sessions to making their own videos, American facilitated and protected Deconstruction’s art. What musician wouldn’t want that?

And yet, despite it all, the label ultimately failed to sufficiently publicize their album. In fact, to the band members, American just let the album disappear. Navarro didn’t remember any band interviews, any photo sessions, any marketing at all. 

Deconstruction refined most of their songs in that rehearsal space, and Avery kept writing lyrics. “A lot of times we would record stuff, and Eric would go home, write the lyrics, and come back and put them in,” Navarro said, “so there were pieces of music that didn’t have finalized lyrical structure until we were in the room.”

“We really just came up with shit and were tinkering in the studio and then assumed we would go tour afterwards.” Avery remembers thinking: Let’s just approach the record, get it done, and then figure out how we’ll do it live later. “But at the same time, we were in a rehearsal studio, putting these ideas together,” he said, “always thinking of how to recreate it at the same time writing it at the same time trying to figure out if it was possible to do this.”

They needed a producer to make it possible.

“I got a phone call from my son’s mom,” producer Ronnie Champagne told me. “Alright, Dave’s on the phone. He wants to you to produce a record, and I’m thinking: Dave? I know three Dave’s: David Bowie, Dave Jerden, and Dave Navarro. Which one could it be? So I’m like, ‘Dave, yeah, okay. We don’t even have to talk about it. Let’s get down to business. Before I even say anything, I gotta hear what you guys are up to.’ I knew it’d be cool, obviously.”

Ronnie had engineered Jane’s albums Ritual de lo Habitual and Nothing’s Shocking with his mentor, producer Dave Jerden, so he knew Avery and Navarro and had collaborated heavily with Navarro on his guitar sounds. “I don’t know if this was after the first tour or second Jane’s tour,” Ronnie said, “but Eric came up to me one day and goes ‘We had this thing going on onstage during soundchecks. Every time there was a problem, we’d all shout ‘Ronnie!’” With their history, chances were good that the 33-year-old would understand what Deconstruction was going for and get them there better than they could on their own.

“I’m the guy who goes: ‘Here’s how that could sound,’” Ronnie told me. “It’s so quick for me to go ‘This is what it could sound like, and let’s choose. Let’s see what works and then come to a consensus of yeah, that works best for the thing we’re working on.’” The creative aspect of music production involves presenting opportunities to build on what the band has and what they can’t yet hear.

“We chose Ronnie because we were comfortable having worked with him,” Avery said, “he was amazing at getting things to sound great, and as the hands-on, plugger-inner-of things-and-application-of-mics guy, he was dedicated.”

“So I went to their practice space, checked it out,” Ronnie said, “got back on board with them emotionally—on the same level of acceptance, like, ‘Hey, you’re not going to fuck this up, are you?’ That’s probably the artist’s worst fear: ‘Here, take my project and turn it into something I don’t want and make a million dollars, and I’m gonna hate it the rest of my life.’ I would never do that. I can’t do that.”

The band explained their ideas about deconstructionism, soundscapes instead of songs. “And my brain thinks like that, too,” Ronnie said. “Because we had worked together before, it became so effortless, and intuitively, I knew what they wanted.”

Deconstruction recorded at Hollywood’s venerated Cherokee Studios, which the Beatles’ producer George Martin called “The best studio in America.”   

“Ronnie was the real driving force in the Deconstruction project,” Cherokee Studio’s Chief Engineer, Matthew Ellard told me. “He’s the one who should really get all the credit for the way this record sounds. I was just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.”

“Recording—Any clown can do that,” Ronnie said. “You just have to have good stuff: good performances, good bands, good songs. You could fucking record genius with one mic and it’s gonna sound like genius. But you can use 100 mics on a piece of shit, and it’s gonna sound like a piece shit. What’s 100 times 100? Shit in, shit out. …I try very hard to avoid getting involved in making people look good. They are or they aren’t. I want to add great ideas to great ideas. Polishing turds is very hard work, and the money is even worse.”

The resulting album is a masterpiece. 

Ritual de lo Habitual has nine songs and changed rock music forever. Deconstruction has 15 songs and is equally dynamic, effecting, unique, and some listeners argue that it has even more powerful guitar.

Deconstruction begins with “L.A. Song,” one of the greatest songs written about a city that’s been written about a lot. It begins with a sample from the film adaptation of Nathanael West’s book Day of the Locust and juxtaposes live drumming with a drum machine. 

Along with samples, Avery’s lyrical collage for “L.A. Song” reaches deep into the L.A.’s past, embodying the city’s breadth by incorporating bits of text and audio from some canonical L.A. works, including: John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust, the film Blade Runner, Hunt Jackson’s popular 1884 novel Ramona, and the work of L.A. urban theorist Mike Davis. It’s a collage, a memorial, a celebration whose form reflects the urban complexity it represents.

“I love it, but it never returns to anything,” Navarro said. “So the song, in my mind, is just a 24-hour period of life in Los Angeles.”

“The first and second parts of ‘L.A. Song’ have no real connection,” said Avery, “but the fact we put them together does make sense because we allow them to exist side by side.”

The band brilliantly stitches those pieces together with the guitar in The Chantay’s 1962 surf song “Pipeline.” Avery narrates live in the city with brilliant poetic lines and found items, including a quote from the free Spanish-language paper La Opinión, then wraps up with a line borrowed from John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust: “You pretty little town / You sad flower in the sand / Give me, give me, give me some of you!”

It’s no surprise that books informed Avery’s Deconstruction lyrics. “I was a Lord of the Rings nerd,” he said. “I lived in books. That was my escape. I used to refer to books as my first drug, because I was so consistently disappointed with the world, and books offered solace from that.”

“L.A. Song” sets the tone for the whole album. They sample Prince and Michael Buffer in the song “Get At ’Em.” In “Hope” they sample an album of traditional Bulgarian folk songs called Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, meaning, The Mystery of The Bulgarian Voices, sung by the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir. In “Big Sur,” a scratched-up record creates static over the sound of someone slurping a beverage overlaid by the guys playing a version of another song’s melody, while whistling. In “Iris” they tried to create the sound of amniotic fluid whooshing around your ears in the womb. Several songs have random phone-ringing samples hidden away in them. A high pitch drill sound squeals at the start of “Dirge,” and in the song’s breakdown, while you hear someone singing “blessed be the name of the lord” sampled from Wim Wender’s 1987 romantic fantasy film Wings of Desire, Navarro plays a creepy piano melody from “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.” “What I’m playing is the first thing I ever learned on the piano when I was like seven years old,” Navarro said, “my first experience on any instrument.”

In “Wait for History,” they fill an instrumental interlude with a scientist discussing the origin of the universe played under Erik Satie’s famous “Lent et douloureux,” which is the first of three piano pieces that the French impressionist composed in the 19th century in a set called Gymnopédies. People might not know Satie’s name, but his simple, spare, piano compositions—what he called “furniture music”—appear in enough contemporary films and TV that listeners will recognize the melody even if they can’t name the composer. “There was Debussy, Ravel, and Satie, all around the same time,” said Avery. Rather than sampling an existing piano version, they performed it themselves.

“We did it on bass and guitar,” Navarro said. “So Eric was doing the left hand on the bass, and I was doing the right hand on guitar. So he’d go, boom, boom, boom, boom, and I’m playing.”

“The idea was to use a chunk of other music but it not to be a sample,” Avery explained, “for it to be a recreation in amongst the mix of played, original, sampled, referenced, written lyric, cut lyric from some other source—Fante, whatever—it all being part of the mix, the salad of stuff.”

In the second song “Single,” Navarro plays a twinkling guitar pattern that bobs like the surface of the ocean, while Avery created a composite poem from real L.A. Weekly singles ads: “Abracadabra / Industry slave / Artist, very good looking / Single white female / Nonfat / Sculptured, very fit / Photography / Culturally literate.”

“San Francisco,” the song that started Deconstruction, remains a highlight of the album. Renamed “Iris” once drummer Michael Murphy’s daughter Iris was born, the song became more refined in the studio than Jane’s original wild live jam from 1988. Apparently, Perry had improvised lyrics over the song at one point but never committed to them. In the studio, Avery and Navarro had even considered adding lyrics.

“We always went back and forth on whether or not we should put a vocal on it,” Navarro said, “because it was undoubtedly our most popular. People would go: ‘Oh, I really like this.’ That was the one that people responded to when we would play it or when we were recording it. …And I think we just decided to abandon it because we weren’t gonna tarnish what was one of our favorite emotional reprises with trying to make a song, like: “This one’s really catchy, let’s…” You know what I mean? We were like, fuck it, leave it, it’s good enough as it is.” 

Keeping “Iris” instrumental also kept the focus on the tranquilizing feeling the music evoked—what Navarro called “the hypnosis of the drone.” “It gave us an opportunity to get lost in the hypnosis,” he said. “Because now that Eric was on the mic—and from time to time, I would be—the ability to get lost in the music was lessened, because now he had two jobs to do. But when it came to what we loved on our instruments, we loved being in the hypnosis of the drone. And when you get up on the mic, it’s very hard to maintain that hypnosis in the drone when you have two opposing things to do at the same time. So I think that that song stayed the way it was, because we could get lost in the hypnosis of it.”

Navarro still loves that song.

Speaking of a jam: The twelfth song, “Sleepyhead,” is such a repetitive one that it gets stuck in your head and won’t let go. It feels like the embodiment of Avery’s early approach to bass: deep cyclical grooves that he keeps grooving so you can enjoy getting lost in it. Avery’s voice emerges from inside the music, layers of him singing “Sleepyhead” and “get all tired out” over and over, among other things you can’t understand. The vocals are ghastly, like poltergeists speaking from the beyond, trying to convey some hazy message the mortals can’t decipher. Ellard created those vocal effects with old school analog wizardry.

“The main vocal is more effected than the weird ones in the background,” Ellard said. “The main vocal has backwards reverb on it, so you can hear it sucking into the words. You hear the words start before they actually start. That’s a cool old trick. You flip the tape over and record it backwards with reverb on it, then flip it back the other way. …[W]hen you flip the tape around the right way, the reverb is then before the voice, so it sucks into the voice. That gives you that kind of ghostly, poltergeist vibe.”

Avery’s buoyant baseline is one of the most inventive and dynamic on the album, way more propulsive than you’d expect for a song about lethargy.

Contrary to the band’s avant-garde approach, there was a sense of excitement in the studio that this album could be huge. “Because we were doing something different and new,” Ellard said. “Nobody was doing samples and stuff like that. The music was just unlike anything else. This was 1993, you know: Grunge. This definitely wasn’t Grunge. I used to call it ‘art damaged.’ It was artsy and weird, which was what you would expect of Eric if you knew Eric. He’s not interested in commerciality. He just wanted to make something that was really interesting, and he had this concept that he wanted to fulfill.” As examples, Ellard points to the song’s structures. “There were interesting time signatures and uneven bar counts which, if you are used to counting bars, aren’t nice and linear like most songs. Go listen and count the bars. Nothing Eric does is done without a great deal of thought.”

Geiger not only expected that, he welcomed it. “It wasn’t a commercial endeavor,” he said.

Although initially Avery and Navarro agreed to split vocal duties, Avery ended up taking lead on every song except “Fire in the Hole.” For that, they got their friend Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers.

“It was always obviously Eric’s baby,” Ellard told me. “He was the one in charge, it seemed, with any real decisions that were made. Although, you know, technically it was a democracy. Every band thinks they’re a democracy, but they never really are. Because I think Eric wrote most of the songs and the lyrics.”

“Eric’s a great lyricist,” Navarro said. “And some of the ideas that he wrote about were super profound and interesting. So the fact that we were able to marry that music with those lyrics and ideas and just leave it, I think, might lend some mystique to the album.”

That mystique also comes from his guitar work.

Navarro is one of the greatest rock guitarists, and Deconstruction is a guitar record.

“You can’t think of early Jane’s without thinking of a bassline,” Avery said. “Whereas on Deconstruction, I can’t myself, right now, really think of a bassline. No bassline comes to mind. I don’t go ‘Oh, Deconstruction, right: Dah dah dah dah dah.” Bass often blended into the background here. Guitar remains front and center, and Navarro layered it on thick.

First, Navarro would play the main guitar part. Then he’d double, triple, and quadruple it, creating a wall that sounded like one dense guitar. “Some of those songs have over 40 guitar parts on them,” Ellard said. “And it’s 48-track tape, but sometimes there’s two or three parts on each track. The drums and bass only took up 15 tracks max!” Put on headphones and listen. Then listen again. So many sounds emerge, subtle things: drills, squealing, buzzing, vocal loops, along with guitar solos, shimmering guitar melodies, riffs, accents, and additional, complimentary guitar lines draped on top of each other. You can never miss this forest for the trees. Details always remain secondary to the larger songs. But upon close listening, it’s easy to get lost in each song’s wall of guitar.

“The way I like to work,” Navarro told me, “I almost like to throw too many ideas and too many parts on tape and then remove, take away, strip back. Not much got stripped back on that record. It is very much a guitar record. I don’t even think that we set out to do that. I know I didn’t. It’s just when we had what we looked at as blank canvases, we kept thinking, What about this here? What about that there? And it was fun to get our basic track into shape and then just throw ideas at it. It’s like, How is this? This is terrible. Let’s get rid of that. How about this? That’s weird. That’s cool. Leave that in there. This thing, too obvious. You know? And just kind of throw paint on the canvas and see what works, because the structure was already intact, and the rhythm track was already down, so it really didn’t matter.”

Navarro often played sitting down in the control room, his feet resting on the mixing console, creating the most complicated licks seem from that leisurely position.

Ronnie is the other reason this is a guitar album. He and Navarro had a relationship. At Cherokee, he brought Navarro tons of gear to experiment with, and he guided the guitarist enough to expand his range from a single guitar and amp setup into a sophisticated “guitar-chestra.”

“Ronnie is a very, very accomplished guitar player,” said Ellard, “so that’s why the guitar sounds on that album are so amazing, because between Ronnie and Dave, they were getting it. That’s one of the things that blew me away. I’d never seen a ‘guitar-chestra’ like that before. It was very orchestrated in the sense of the huge presentation of guitars and the thought gone into that, and then also all the extra layers that we added, the noises, random sounds, and samples.”

Ronnie had the gear.

“Oh man,” Ronnie said. “It was all about guitars—guitars and samplers, because I created a lot of unusual guitar parts using the sampler, creating them like King Crimson would out of Dave’s brilliant guitar work. So it was like, okay, we have one or two of everything, let’s get some more. Haha!”

“I was personally very lucky to work with Ronnie,” said Navarro. “He really helped me fall in love with the studio process. Because I loved going in not knowing exactly what was going to happen and leaving with something that I did not expect. So that was always a fun thing to drive home with the cassette of the day and go, Wow, this didn’t exist this morning.”

Decades later, nothing sounds like that album they made.

American Recordings released Deconstruction on July 12, 1994 and launched “L.A. Song” as the lead single—and the only single.

Deconstruction received very little marketing support. It wasn’t for lack of demand.

“Well, people were paying attention, like hardcore Jane’s fans,” Navarro told me, “but we really did not have any help whatsoever from the record label. Like as far as I know, the record came out and that was it.” He doesn’t remember doing an interview, doesn’t remember doing a photo shoot, doesn’t remember seeing any marketing assets like posters or advertisements. “There certainly was no airplay,” he said. “So, you know, it kind of came out. I’m still not quite sure where, because I don’t know if I ever saw it in a record store. But it came out, and it was really a lackluster release.” Whatever physical marketing assets were floating around American’s office at the time were never shown to him. “You know, I’m sure maybe somewhere in some record store in some part of the country, there might have been something, but I never saw it personally. So I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure. …So there was nothing to put up to tell anybody that oh, this is half of Jane’s Addiction. There was just no capitalizing on any value that we had. Because the record label, American, just legit didn’t believe in it.”

“I’m sure there were posters and flats, because those were the days you would do that for a record, and lots of promo servicing,” Marc Geiger told me. Geiger wanted this album to be heard by other Jane’s fans. They spent a good amount of money on promotion, but formal marketing can only do so much. “If they were out there touring, it would be different,” said Geiger.

Navarro doesn’t think American believed in the album. “I mean, I’m only assuming,” Navarro said. “That’s what I think. Because they didn’t hear a single. They didn’t hear songs. They didn’t hear choruses. None of what they had expected from us was on the recording. And I think that, at the time, nobody was doing anything like that. And if they were, they were super indie underground records, but I believe—and these are all assumptions—I believe they signed us as half of Jane’s Addiction, hoping for half of Jane’s Addiction. So this isn’t the voice of Jane’s Addiction, but it’s the music of Jane’s Addiction. So that’s what I assume their thought process was. But as far as getting behind the record and supporting it once it was done: I mean, to be fair, you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to about this time or this record in my life. Which is crazy! I was like, Fuck! I had to listen to the album. I was like, I haven’t heard this thing in, like, 25 years if not more, and I gotta do an interview about it! But it’s cool. Thank you. I really believe that they didn’t know what to do with what we felt was art and music to us, you know, and it wasn’t songs.”

“I really didn’t think American knew how to handle its artiness,” Ronnie told me. “I don’t think they were expecting that record.” 

“Also, they weren’t trying to be a group,” Geiger said. “It was a project. So when something’s a project, and you put it out, and there’s not a following, it is what it is: It’s a single piece of art.” Supergroups and one-off collaborations are new and fleeting, so it’s hard to get listeners to invest time in them.

Many listeners fell in love with the album, though, as they gradually found it. One of them was young drummer Taylor Hawkins.

* * *

Hawkins grew up in southern California on a diet of classic rock like Rush and Queen.

When he discovered Jane’s Addiction, their music reshaped his world, and drummer Stephen Perkins became a huge influence.

Enthralled by Jane’s, Hawkins saw them play one of the seven John Anson Ford Theater shows in 1989. At age 18, he sat behind drummer Stephen Perkins for part of Jane’s 1990, invitation-only show on Mt. Baldy, the first show of their grueling 13-month Ritual tour. “He didn’t know me of course. I wasn’t doing anything yet,” the 49-year-old Hawkins told me in 2021. “But I sat behind him and we talked. He had this red drum set, and when I finally got a free set, I got a red one just like Perk, because he had it.” The band used their Mt. Baldy concert footage to make the video for “Stop!” Though you can’t see Hawkins in it, he’s out there in the crowd. He saw Jane’s play at the Hollywood Palladium in 1990, that show where a fan famously hit Perry with a Birkenstock during the live recording. And he saw two of their three Irvine Meadows shows on their farewell, 1991 Lollapalooza tour.

As a young musician, Hawkins found the address to Jane’s old Wilton House at 369 N. Wilton Place and drove by it all the time, making pilgrimages while driving around L.A. He wanted to see where this powerful music came from. Hawkins was so enchanted that he moved to Venice Beach to try to find scrappy garage bands like Jane’s to play with. “Because Jane’s was a garage band,” he said. “They literally converted their Wilton House garage into a practice space.” When his Sass Jordan band mate gave Hawkins the Deconstruction cassette in 1994, the 20-something flipped.

“There wasn’t one second where I didn’t love it,” Hawkins told me. “I listened to that album as if it was going to be a band that would tour, and I was like, This is fucking amazing.” He envisioned the show being something like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, the musicians’ silhouettes outlined by colorful lights, the wall of guitars filling the venue, a sense of foreboding, of distance and play. “Eric could have definitely had a Roger Waters vibe about him. I was seeing a backlit crazy stage, very psychedelic, but telling the story on this sort of concept record about this kid from L.A., basically, or about L.A. in itself. I was just so excited. I loved it. And I still love that record.” He described Deconstruction as King Crimson meets Killing Joke meets Joy Division. So Hawkins waited for news of some Deconstruction shows to materialize. And he waited and waited, checking the local weeklies for concert listings that never came. When someone in the music industry told him that Deconstruction had already broken up, the news deeply bummed him out.

Decades later, he ended up working with, and becoming good friends with, Navarro and Avery. “My friend Taylor is amazing,” said Avery. “I love the guy. He’s just a real dude. And Taylor is the biggest, literally, the most vociferous, passionate Deconstruction fan there is.” Being the intrepid, enthusiastic connector of people that he was, Hawkins tried to get them to finally perform Deconstruction live. In 2021 and 2022, Hawkins had big plans.

Besides getting the album rereleased and available for streaming, Hawkins wanted the band to finally perform the music live. If no one could find drummer Michael Murphy, Hawkins was happy to step in. “My mission right now is to get the band back together and take it on the road,” Hawkins said. “Or maybe in some kind of residency in Los Angeles.” 

“I know that people feel really passionately about it, but I think that it’s 10 people who feel really passionately about it,” Avery said. “With a sort of sonic update, you could probably do some interesting things, approaching it more musically now. Then we might be able to pull it off.” Avery was still wrestling with Hawkins’ vision for a Deconstruction stage presence, though: One version involved Avery sitting on a throne in the center of the stage, while the other musicians played around him, and then the whole thing about Avery being Roger Waters and the show channeling The Dark Side of the Moon. Avery laughed. “I don’t know. But maybe?”

What did Avery think of a Deconstruction reunion? “It’s a toughy,” he said. “I know that people feel really passionately about it, but I think that it’s 10 people who feel really passionately about it.” 

“I think that it would be fun,” Navarro said of live Deconstruction. “I just don’t think people would know what it is. It would require a lot of explaining in 2021. If you’re like ‘Deconstruction is playing at this club down the street.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s this record that you’ve never heard of that came out 30 years ago that they made.’ I mean, it is what it is. But I think that would be kind of fun, because the early days of Jane’s Addiction were very similar. We would drive to Orange County and play a club, and there’d be 11 people standing there. I mean, it was cool.”

And tragically, Taylor Hawkins passed away on March 25, 2022 at age 50, a month after I published an ebook about this album.

When I finally finished a draft of that book, in January 2022, I immediately emailed it to Hawkins. Apparently, he sat down and read the whole manuscript—or as much as his short attention span would allow him. He was thrilled, though. 

“So great,” he wrote back that night. He explained how he wanted to create a formal plan to get the music on streaming services and do a couple shows. He wanted to use my Deconstruction story to help make it happen.

“I’m down let’s see if we can get the other boys good to go,” he emailed, with little punctuation, “me him and Eric should do a couple jams just to make sure I’m the right drummer.” 

That was the last time we spoke.

Maybe the dream of live Deconstruction went with him. But if he had lived long enough to see his friend Eric Avery finally tour with Jane’s Addiction again in 2023, he would have seen proof that nearly anything was possible with the right approach and right advocates involved, namely him. 

As Avery sings in “Wait for History,” “When our dirty sidewalk becomes sheet rock / And history becomes geology. / History. / History.”

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