Jane's Addiction Reunion Gig (With Eric Avery) Confirmed

When Rock Daily brought you news that Jane's Addiction would reunite to receive the NME's Godlike Genius Award at the magazine's April 23rd ceremony in Los Angeles, whether or not the group would perform was still up on the air. Tonight, though, comes confirmation that the band will indeed take the stage — with original bassist Eric Avery. "I've chosen to reject the prospects of reuniting in the past for personal and philosophical reasons," Avery says in a statement. "I have always considered reunions to be a way to make a quick buck, and it sells short my own experience of it the first time around. The reason I started to even consider this is because it's honoring the past instead of trying to recreate it." It'll be Avery's first performance with Perry Farrell, Dave Navarro and Stephen Perkins since 1991. As of now, the gig is being billed as "one night only" so don't expect to see the original Jane's at Lollapalooza this summer — yet.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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