How do rock stars spend their downtime on the road?
If you're Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell, you hit the antique stores.
"I'm really excited about touring America because America has some amazing antiques," Farrell said during a phone interview in April.
Let's get this straight: The man who created the traveling, conscience-raising expo of Lollapalooza has become the doting antique collector?
Indeed, he says without apologies.
But if you think he's checked his rock 'n' roll senses at the door, slip into Tucson Music Hall tonight when Farrell and his Jane's Addiction band mates bring their Theatre of the Escapists Tour for the final show of the spring tour.
Farrell described the show as an immersive theatrical experience punctuated by the band's trademark raunch and raucousness. If a recent show in Toronto proves to be the standard, expect to see 25-foot-tall naked-lady statues, women in long white gowns being hoisted to the rafters on wires and a man decked out in a bizarre black crow costume rocking out on stage.
People are also reading…
"When fans leave the show, they will remember the evening as something they will never forget," he said. "The audience is flipping out. We just got to figure out a way to make money. This is what we're doing for a living."
And therein lies the biggest challenge for Farrell, 53, a man renowned for his tireless pursuit of bigger and better. The fact that the band is not making money, he said, has caused a bit of a rift in his relationship with band mates Dave Navarro, Stephen Perkins and Chris Chaney, who replaced founding bassist Eric Avery. Avery, who departed when the band first split in 1991, left for good in 2010.
"We wish it was all smooth and rainbows. Not at all. They hate me," Farrell said. "They think I'm keeping them from the fame they so richly deserve. ... Those guys think that I don't love them or I don't think about them or I don't care about them or want them to make money. They're really, really, really wrong."
Farrell said the band can sell out and start churning out pop-infused rock.
"Or you can be a person that plays with people's minds and stimulates their minds and causes them to think," he said. "That's what I get off on; that's what I love."
And that's what Farrell and the band have done since they got together in 1985 and what they continued doing through the tumultuous 27 years since that saw the band break up and make up three times.
Farrell thinks fans can tell the difference between singing for the love of it and singing for the profit.
"I feel that the world recognizes when they see a genuine guy, a genuine group and a bunch of genuine performers," he added.
Theatre of the Escapists has taken Jane's Addiction back to places the band members haven't visited in years, reintroducing them to old fans and connecting them with new ones.
"I love going back to see these places where I haven't been for years and years and years," Farrell said. "I like looking into the eyes of people. I want to see them; I want to know them. I want to feel their vibe. And I want to party them out; I want to entertain them."
If you go
• What: Jane's Addiction with The Duke Spirit.
• When: 8:30 p.m. today.
• Where: Tucson Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave.
• Tickets: $40.50 to $75.50 through ticketmaster.com or at the Tucson Convention Center box office.
