POP MUSIC : From Jane’s to New Addictions : When Perry Farrell dismantled Jane’s Addiction, he saw rock ‘n’ roll burnout in his future. But he’s recharged, guiding ‘Lollapalooza’ and a band, Porno for Pyros, in which he says ‘sparks are flying’ creatively

Perry Farrell has turned his back on the restaurant table and buried his nose in a rock fanzine as his two new band mates, guitarist Peter DiStefano and bassist Martyn Le Noble, sit beside him and try to describe the pressures that come with being the successors to Farrell’s old band, Jane’s Addiction.

“The expectations of the world, yeah, I feel it in my stomach,” says DiStefano, 26. “People have high expectations. Like our first show, it’s like everybody’s already there checking us out. We wanted to feel what it was like to party and have a good time and be a little loose.”

“Instead,” says Le Noble, 22, “we got reviewed by Rolling Stone.”

Farrell suddenly lowers his magazine and turns to the musicians.

“What you’ve got to do is, you just got to get oblivious. You guys aren’t gonna get a natural growth,” he says, in the tones of a firm but supportive father. “It’s not fair--Rolling Stone shouldn’t have been there reviewing you, but they were, so don’t read it. As far as you’re concerned, you did pretty good for being together for two months.”

Farrell sounds almost like a manager, which is no small shock since he and managers have a history roughly like that of the Balkan states. This paternal persona--and his recent fame as the entrepreneurial spearhead of the annual “Lollapalooza” tour--is something new for the singer, whose reputation was built not only on the exotic rock music of Jane’s Addiction, but also on his role as volatile rock rebel.

Though Jane’s Addiction released just two major-label albums and never quite made its commercial breakthrough, Farrell’s new band, Porno for Pyros, has quite a legacy to live up to.

Jane’s’ blend of metal, psychedelia and art rock was a challenging and invigorating hybrid--jarring and dreamy, intimate and majestic. Fronting it with a raspy wail and kamikaze recklessness, Farrell exhibited a naked emotionalism and a confrontational manner that made him a symbol of freedom and fearlessness.

Part shaman and part jester, he conducted tours of the extremes, and though his detractors saw him as a showboat with a knack for self-promotion, when all was said and done, he really did mean it.

“Most people would say they want to be in a great band or a famous band,” Farrell says. “To me, famous doesn’t mean (expletive). Being important is what counts. When I retire or die or get thrown out of this whole thing, I want to leave behind a great body of work. That’s all that matters. Reputation is bull----. So I want to get to work now.”

Sitting in slanting sunlight at a table the band has cluttered with full ashtrays, Pez candy dispensers and the remains of lunch during an afternoon of interviews, Farrell looks older than his 34 years and wears the signs of hard living in his drawn, lined features.

With his gangly frame, dark, soulful eyes and elongated face, he looks like a comical puppet, or maybe a piece of the Mexican folk art that intrigues him so much.

His manner reflects some of the intriguing contradictions that fuel his work. He’s alternately arrogant and self-deprecating, and his attention level ranges from distracted to intensely engaged.

When a subject comes up that interests him, he’ll dig in with such preambles as “OK, good point, I’ll help you on that one.” But when an unpleasant issue is pressed, he can turn petulant or wary. As in his music, Farrell’s emotions are always close to the surface, and he remains a restless figure, someone more afraid of being bored than being poor.

Farrell ran away from an unhappy home in Queens, N.Y., at 17 and arrived in Los Angeles, where he was drawn to the experimental edge of the city’s rock scene.

Farrell, drummer Stephen Perkins, guitarist Dave Navarro and bassist Eric Avery formed Jane’s Addiction in 1986 and quickly became a sensation on L.A.’s underground club scene. After an independently released album, their major-label debut, “Nothing’s Shocking,” came out in 1988 and established the band nationally.

Along the way, Farrell’s colorful antics and combative relationship with the music business fueled the legend, and the singer developed into something of a sage and a cultural spokesman.

He also became known for his erratic behavior, and has spoken in published interviews about his use of drugs. But drummer Perkins, who has made the transition to Porno for Pyros with Farrell, downplays that side of the Farrell mystique.

“He’s unpredictable,” Perkins says in a separate interview. “There’s a couple of incidents that are pretty outrageous and people think were uncalled for, but it’s really his personality.”

But the volatility wasn’t confined to the creative process. Internally, the band was cracking under the strain of personal tensions between Farrell and the Avery-Navarro axis. The 1991 tour supporting their second album, “Ritual de lo Habitual,” would be the band’s last.

“I just knew that I couldn’t conceive of playing indefinitely with people I don’t get along with,” says Farrell, sipping a glass of red wine. (Avery and Navarro, who are recording an album for Def American Records, declined to be interviewed.)

“We weren’t getting along to the point that nobody was listening to musical ideas,” Farrell continues. “If I said, ‘Hey, man, let’s try being adventurous here and putting, say, a flange on this instrument,’ if you’re not friends, you don’t listen to me. You tend to block out any suggestions. Suggestions grounded in love are always accepted. When they’re not grounded in love, everybody becomes cunning and wary of each other.

“I don’t hang around where I’m not wanted. I didn’t hang around my family life when I wasn’t wanted, I don’t hang around girlfriends when I’m not wanted, I just don’t hang around.”

The final Jane’s Addiction tour was also the first “Lollapalooza”--a carnival setting and power-packed musical lineup designed to fulfill one of Farrell’s passions: making the concert experience “special.”

These days, Farrell might be better known with young fans for his role with the annual festival than for the long-disbanded Jane’s Addiction.

His approach was inspired by the underground concerts presented in L.A.’s art and music scene by the promoters called Theoretical and by Desolation Center’s ambitious stagings of such assault bands as Einsturzende Neubauten and Sonic Youth in remote desert locations.

“They were really different and interesting,” Farrell says. “Those guys really mixed and matched. The spirit of ‘Lollapalooza’ came from those days way back when, when the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets played on some ship that cruised in the San Pedro Harbor. Those shows, that’s where I cut my teeth. When I got into this business on a major level, I thought it’d be exciting. Every kid wants to do that, but I was bored.”

It’s ironic then that in its third year, “Lollapalooza,” with its lineup of Alice in Chains, Arrested Development and other major-label “alternative-rock” and rap acts, is drawing criticism for being too big and too Establishment.

Farrell, who has cast himself as a champion of pure freedom, is used to being targeted for his excesses. It’s a new experience for him to hear charges of conservatism--that “Lollapalooza” now caters to mass popularity at the expense of its original, cutting-edge purpose.

“I’ll answer that,” Farrell says quickly. “You can’t move mountains overnight. In order to get 30,000 people together, you have to be realistic and realize you have to give some names that people know and like.

“You have to have a certain amount of familiarity and then you can introduce Mutabaruka into the second stage, or bands like Sebadoh that people might not have heard of that are amazing new bands.

“I have to admit, I don’t like every band that goes on there, but I’m also willing to collaborate and I’m willing to listen. . . . If I put every band on there that I liked, I couldn’t put on a 30,000-capacity show.”

You might ask if it’s necessary to mount it on a scale that requires making things so safe. In which case Farrell will go on the offensive.

“Well, what else would you do on that Sunday?” he says, straightening in his chair. “Has there ever been in the history of music a tour that’s been a better tour than that? So how come nobody else gets judged so harshly?

“I take it very personally, because for $28 I give you 14 bands, a whole concourse where you can go and do other things, gamble, check out dance, eat really great food, pick up books that you might never get anywhere else. I don’t think there’s ever been a better tour, and we’ve done it two years in a row and we’re about to do a third. So you can pick on it, but I defy you to find something that’s better.”

Farrell eases up and considers his future with “Lollapalooza”--he can even picture the day when he’s through with performing, and his full-time job will be shaping the mobile music and culture festival.

That sounds like a different perspective from the one he offered in the final days of Jane’s Addiction, when he figured that his flamboyance fated him to burn out early.

“Yeah, I have changed my thinking a little bit,” he says. “I don’t think it’s necessary to burn out, even though you are passionate about living. I just think you have to have poise and grace always and know where you belong and where you fit in and age gracefully. I think then you can’t lose.”

After dismantling Jane’s Addiction, Farrell’s next move was to form Porno for Pyros, hanging on to drummer Perkins and enlisting DiStefano, whom he met on a surfing trip to Mexico, and Le Noble, a snaggletoothed Dutchman who had played with L.A. band Thelonious Monster for two years.

Farrell knew just what he was after.

“Rock ‘n’ roll has a problem these days where the players overplay because they have something to prove,” he says. “They’re trying to outdo each other like it’s a physical thing, like it’s an Olympic event.

“Think about a great Bob Marley song. The simplicity of it, but it’s a complete song, and you feel complete afterward. You don’t go, ‘Wow, the guitar player ripped,’ or ‘The drummer was rad.’ It’s a song. To me, that’s timeless. And that’s what I’m after, working with Porno. I’ve been after that for a long time. I feel like I’m getting closer all the time.”

“He’s definitely a much happier person,” drummer Perkins, 25, says of his longtime partner. “I think he’s happiest when he can concentrate only on music. We’re making more music right now than we ever did with Jane’s. I’ve never seen him this happy, because songs are coming out of us.”

When Jane’s Addiction’s end came, the battle-scarred band might have been poised for its long-expected commercial breakthrough--”Ritual” had sold half a million copies in its first few months of release. How much of a commercial risk was Farrell’s decision?

“He’s certainly not starting from the ground up,” says Rick Van Santen of the L.A.-based Goldenvoice concert promotion firm. “We did 4,000 people at their Castaic Lake show. Nobody had ever played there and nobody had heard them.

“Perry’s pretty creative,” adds Van Santen, who plans to stage a local Porno for Pyros show at an 8,000-capacity site in June. “He’s pretty good at keeping it going. He likes challenges, I guess.”

In any case, Farrell was driven by other priorities.

“You can sell out right away and make $10 million. You can be a fool like myself and believe integrity means something and you can burn out before you make any money, or you can never make any money at all and have your integrity intact and try to never be known.

“My angle is obviously I want a certain amount of people to know me. I would be a liar if I looked you in the eye and said I don’t care about being famous. It was fun; it’s still exciting.” He adopts a scoffing tone. “It gets you in clubs for free. Next. . . .”

Porno for Pyros releases its debut album on Tuesday (see review, below), and Farrell is so focused on the music that he has scaled back the ambitious art pieces and video projects that used to attend each Jane’s Addiction record.

“The essence of what we do is we’re musicians,” he says. “In the ‘60s there were musicians and that’s all that there was. And now there’s dancers and there’s video and there’s lip-syncers and there’s all this other (expletive). It doesn’t necessarily mean music’s getting any better. I have a feeling that it’s really hurting it. We’re all aware of that.

“We’re staying really busy creatively. Sparks are flying everywhere. That’s what my life is all about. I don’t give a (expletive) about the record cycle, the record business. I want to be outside the gravitational pull of the record cycle.”