While i did not abandon the week of perry in my mind, it came and went with only two sets of lyrics posted. One can only hope that anyone listening to "nothing's shocking" will see the beautiful & obvi connection between "Pigs in Zen" and Animal Farm. Either way, Perry makes a nice segue into the topic on everyone's mind. Well, mine.
The Rabbi & the Rock Star
Perry Farrell & Rabbi Langer 'I felt the devil was inside of me,' Perry Farrell says. 'And I came to find out that the devil's in everybody.'
Chabad Rabbi Yosef Langer gave up acid for orthodox Judaism in the '70s. His new friend, Perry Farrell, was a poster boy for '90s debauchery. They're dancing together now in the temple of rock & roll
Words by Michelle Goldberg
Photos by Tom Pitts
As a rain-soaked crowd shivers before a Golden Gate Park stage, one of rock & roll's most notorious bad-boy shamans locks arms with a Chassidic rabbi and the two sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." The audience, in the park to celebrate Israel's 50th anniversary, seems to recognize Rabbi Yosef Langer, who sports a "Grateful Yid" baseball cap over his yarmulke. Fewer realize that the skinny man in shiny maroon-and-gold robes, curly hair covered by a turban, is rock legend Perry Farrell. When the song is through, Farrell reads a speech that founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion gave when Israel became a nation, accompanied by a wash of wah-wah ambient noise. Then, Farrell performs live for the first time with his new band, Gobbelee. They do two songs, one of them, "Happy Birthday Jubilee," about the messianic age that some Orthodox Jews believe is only a generation away. As Farrell sings, the Rabbi sways near one of the speakers, hands in the air, his fingers making peace signs. Farrell cavorts gracefully around the stage, arms pinwheeling. Drug-free since Chanukah, he's sober except for a bit of pot while he was getting dressed. Nearly 40 years old and three months from fatherhood, he's not tripping on anything but Torah. Perry Farrell has found God.
That's right, Perry Farrell, ex-junkie frontman of Jane's Addiction, mastermind of the archtypical '90s bacchanalian summer music festival Lollapalooza with all its piercings and nudity, leader of the transgressively named Porno for Pyros, now reads the Torah every day, puts on tfillen (leather straps that are ritually wrapped around the arms and head of an observant Jew while praying), celebrates the Sabbath and peppers his speech with so much Hebrew that I had to go to Rabbi Langer days after the interview for translations. There's a mezuzah on the door of his home in Venice Beach. The trailer for an upcoming documentary about Gobbelee (a band featuring a rotating cast of musicians that includes Rage Against Machine's Tom Morello, ex-Red Hot Chili Pepper John Frusciante, dub DJ Mad Professor and Porno for Pyros drummer Stephen Perkins) opens with Farrell blowing a shofar. Scenes of the band rehearsing are intercut with aerial shots of Jerusalem, and Hebrew readings.
A few hours before the Golden Gate Park concert, Farrell is sitting next to Langer in his manager's room at the Maxwell Hotel on Geary Street. Farrell wears a blue-and-green Adidas track suit, while the Rabbi is dressed in conservative black. But they talk like close friends, calling each other chaver, a Hebrew word that means both friend and study partner, and finishing each other's sentences. Physically, they're opposites. Langer, 52, is big and bear-like with a lulling, easy voice. Farrell is wiry with sunken, flashing eyes, and he speaks in hyper sing-song bursts with drawn out So-Cal vowels. The two were introduced right before Chanukah last year by Farrell's co-manager, Adam Schneider, who knew the Rabbi through the late music promoter Bill Graham. Now they talk nearly every other day and travel back and forth between Farrell's house in Venice and the Rabbi's home in San Francisco. This September, they plan to go to Israel together to celebrate Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the Jewish new year and day of atonement. The Rabbi calls Farrell by his Hebrew name, "Peretz."
"This is purely a soul search," Farrell says. "I have found by going through other religions that this religion of Judaism happens to be the most intelligent. And when you get through the intelligence, you are on your way up the ladder. Because they don't just take care of this world, and they're not talking about the next, either. They're talking about simultaneously being in this world and the other world. We can do that. Heaven on earth."
He continues, "It's easy to become involved with the Rabbi because we're working on the same project. We're working to bring about the jubilee, the Messiah, Israel being the most wonderful center of our globe for peace and goodwill and learning. So anyone who happens to be interested in that, it seems that we sort of gravitate toward each other."
In Jewish law, the jubilee is a celebratory period that comes every 50 years, and some Messianic Jews believe the coming jubilee is a ripe time for the return of the messiah. "In the Torah, the prophets refer to the jubilee as a time when slaves will be freed, there won't be any greed or murder, there will only be love and peace and harmony in the world," explains the Rabbi. "One auspicious time for the Moshiach to be revealed is during a jubilee year," he says, using the Yiddish word for "messiah,"
"We're at the brink, we're so close--we're knocking on heaven's door, in a sense."
As improbable as a debauched rock icon embracing Messianic Judaism is the not-uncommon sight of an Orthodox rabbi boogeying in the front rows of San Francisco rock shows or riding a motorcycle with a rolled leather seat down city streets. He converses easily with a woman with spiked orange hair, and when Farrell is handed a mezuzah, Langer demonstrates the correct way to prepare and insert the parchment scroll. "You roll it like a doobie," he advises Farrell.
Langer himself is a product of the counterculture and isn't rattled by modern lifestyles. "We're living in a jungle here, in exile," he says. "The wise ones observe the chaos and are not threatened by it."
Despite his open approach, he is still very much an Orthodox Jew. He can't shake my hand when we meet, he tells me, because it's against his religious beliefs to touch any woman besides his wife. Women in Chabad can't become rabbis or read the Torah, and though Langer says Chabad women are very much involved in the world, he does believe that women's true calling is the home.
Like other boomers who were in their 20s during the late '60s and early '70s, the pre-rabbinical Langer pursued enlightenment through Eastern traditions and chemical mind expanders. He flunked out of college, where he majored in business, got stoned every day and dropped acid five or 10 times, then turned to yoga and metaphysics.
"I was just pretty empty," he says. "I'd been searching, trying to pick up some pieces that I had broken during the '60s. The emptiness got to a point where I wanted to find some truth in this whole thing, so I started looking in everyone else's backyard."
At a Unity Church in Oakland, someone asked Langer about "the infinity of the Jewish alphabet," the supposition that since every passage in the Bible contains infinite understanding, then each letter must itself be infinite. Langer was embarrassed to admit that he didn't know the Jewish alphabet, let alone its infiniteness. But he was intrigued by the idea, so he began studying Hebrew and Judaism. In 1970 he quit smoking pot and enrolled in rabbinical school. He spent three months in Brooklyn, learning the ways of the Chassidim amid followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He went on to start the first Chabad house in San Francisco in 1983.
Rabbi Langer 'One auspicious time for the Moshiach to be revealed is during a jubilee year,' says Rabbi Langer, using the Yiddish word for 'messiah. We're at the brink, we're so close--we're knocking on heaven's door, in a sense.'
Unlike other strains of Judaism, which generally frown on evangelism, Chabad members hit the streets and proselytize. "Chabad is not like other Chassidic groups, which are very closed," Langer says. "The Chabad house is like a home away from home. It's an entry to the unaffiliated. It has a warm quality, to learning, to experience."
After embracing Orthodox Judaism, though, Langer didn't give up his love of rock & roll--he just incorporated it into his work.
"I would go to rock concerts and we'd set up a table. The last time I saw Bill [Graham], he allowed us to set up at the Grateful Dead concert at Shoreline. Every time the Dead came to San Francisco, I would make a Grateful Yid Shabbas [the Jewish Sabbath dinner]. I thought, you know, there's a lot of Jewish kids that trek after the Grateful Dead all over the country. Wouldn't it be nice to give them a spiritual alternative, get them more in touch with their roots? I never told them, 'Don't go to the Dead.' But at least check out a Shabbas. When the Dead would come to town I'd put a tie dye over the head table and offer two tickets for one--tickets for the Sunday-night concert in exchange for them coming to the Shabbas on Friday night. You have to give them something back, right?"
When he met the former Perry Bernstein from Queens, he saw someone, who, like himself at an earlier age, was hungry for spiritual meaning. Farrell's legendary bad habits didn't faze the rabbi, who quotes Chassidism's founder, the 18th-century Rabbi Baal Shem Tov, as saying that Jews return to their roots "like a slingshot," and that even the misbehaving rise above the perfectly pious if they are on the path of return, baal teshuva. "Not even the righteous can stand in the shoes of someone who's returning," Langer says.
Adherents of Chabad believe that the generation now alive is the last one to be born before the Messiah's return, before God reveals himself to the world and resurrects the dead. It's this Messianic strain that seems to jibe the most with Farrell. His son, who's due in September, will be named Yovel, the Hebrew word for jubilee. Farrell believes utopia is coming, and he constantly uses the word "party" to describe it, as if the Messianic Age will be one giant cosmic Lollapalooza. As the Rabbi says, "Perry's always been about bringing it all together." As for the more restrictive aspects of Chassidism, well, Farrell just ignores them.
I ask him: Doesn't Orthodox Judaism conflict with the hedonistic music industry? "No," Farrell replies, "because what doesn't work about our business has no business in this world. Greed, envy, lust. Things that aren't rooted in love. Now love is way, way heavier. You can't stand in the way of love. You can get in the way of lust, you can get in the way of greed and envy and war. But you can't get in the way of love. Eventually love will conquer. Think of it--let's make believe that I'm your girlfriend now, and we're talking about your loooovvve ... that's the stuff, right? It's wonderful stuff and it's good news. The stuff it happens to get in the way of, I couldn't care less about it. I don't want to be an envious person, I don't want to be a liar, I don't want to be a thief, because it's short-lived, and what we're looking for is eternity."
Yeah, but what about the Jewish laws requiring marriage and monogamy, to which Farrell doesn't subscribe? "Because there's a way that this man operates and he happens to be a wonderful man," says Farrell, gesturing toward the Rabbi, "what does that have to do with me other than hey, I met another loving fella?"
The Rabbi adds, "We're chavers, we talk about this stuff. Farrell wants to conduct his life the way he's conducted it ..."
"Yeah, it's up to me," Farrell continues. "All it means is my chaver might say, hey man, you might get hurt if you do that, or hey man, are you sure you want to do that, and then I'll say, you know, you've got a point."
"That's what chavering is all about," the Rabbi says. "You respect each other's space, and you learn from each other. Like the honkers ... you don't mess around with honkers anymore, right?"
"What are honkers?" Farrell asks innocently.
"In Hebrew school, the honkers," says the Rabbi, smiling.
Now it's my turn to ask, "What are honkers?"
"That's private," the Rabbi says.
"I'll tell her," says Farrell. "I went to Hebrew school when I was young, and I got kicked out of school because, besides fighting, I would run up to the girls and I'd grab their breasts. It was fun, they were sexy. So they told on me, 'Oh my God, this kid, he's snapping our bras.' It was a funny thing, I thought. To go up and snap a girl's bra or grab her boobs. I wouldn't ever do that now."
Rabbi Langer Mitzvah Mobile: Rabbi Langer on his three-wheeled motorcycle, which in a former life was used to enforce parking regulations.
Why, I ask, because you're older or because of Judaism? "Well, I was doing it in Judaism. I was whatever, 10 years old. I thought I was actually doing it because I liked them and was trying to get their attention, you know, like pulling on a pigtail. It wasn't like I was being disrespectful as much as being playful. But nonetheless, the teacher said, 'This kid's a bad kid.' But my parents said, 'Please, just let the kid get bar mitzvahed and we won't ask you for any other favors.' So that was the last time I actually was in Hebrew school. I got bar mitzvahed and I never went back to shul after that.
"And now I'm on my 40th year," he continues. "All this time I've studied all forms of religion, white, black, and what happens is I start learning for myself, rather than anyone telling me as a child, 'Do this.' There is a time in life for testing, and it's called youth. It's not a bad thing--you test-pilot the chaos. Some of it doesn't work. Too much of the chaos you can't handle, so you have to be very careful when you're experimenting. Your great experimental years are your youthful years because you have the ability to heal yourself from the mistakes. Then nature says, all right, now you're not going to heal, now what you're going to do is preserve. You're going to work on preserving and fortifying. So I've been working on fortifying, fortifying, fortifying."
Now, he says, "I don't even need Rabbi Langer and I still am tied to Hashem [a Hebrew expression for God]. That's the way it should be. Fear no man and love the Lord. And fear the Lord. And play with your chaver. We help each other like brothers, but should Rabbi Langer turn his back on me one day, because I smacked his kid behind his back, or went for the honkers, should that happen, or should another man come up to me and say, 'You're not doing it right,' I can say to him, 'Like me or not, because I don't depend on you for my strength. I depend on myself to learn about God and I depend definitely on Hashem. That's the only thing I depend on.' When I see Hashem, I see the all-inclusive manifestations of the globe. So when I say 'Hashem' I could be talking about a plant or a cat or you or me. Or a rock. He, she, them, that's my little game in my head. Hashem means all of us."
The Jane's Addiction song "Had a Dad" begins, "Had a dad/ Big and strong /Turned around found my daddy gone/ He was the one/ Made me what I am today/ It's up to me now/ My daddy has gone away." Perhaps, I think, now that Farrell's going to be a father himself, his return to Judaism is a way for him to make peace with his family. He doesn't buy this. "My familial roots was being kicked out of school, chasing girls around and clobbering kids on the head. My education was not there," he says. "No. I have the right to look at my father and say, 'I do or do not like the way my father lived, and I won't live or I will live like him.' My father, although he was a charging guy, was not an Orthodox or even an observant Jew, so I did not come to this by any kind of peer pressure; I did not come to this by any kind of social pressure."
At the same time, he's thinking about his son in Jewish terms. "The principles are based in children and parents. The whole system of yud hay vov hay [the Hebrew letters that represent God's name, which religious Jews never pronounce] is the cycle of creation, and that includes childhood, learning how to raise a child, bringing a child to love, having a bar mitzvah and becoming an adult, then becoming a grandparent and keeping the vow together with love. Yud hay vov hay. My child is going to know everything that I know. The most important thing, if I couldn't find a temple and I didn't have a book, is I would tell him to learn to love God and all God's creation, because God's inside everything and we're all his creation and he's inside of us.
Yovel's birth will coincide with the Jewish High Holy Days in September. Perhaps only a rock celebrity or a lunatic would conflate the coming of their son with the coming of the Messiah, and perhaps it's only a coincidence that Farrell suddenly believes we're on the brink of paradise. Standing outside the Maxwell Hotel, someone asks him, "Is the jubilee really coming in September?" "Well, my child's coming in September," he replies. "Whether it's the messiah, well, I think you're the messiah."
But just as Farrell has cleaned up and found religion, the ghost of his old, drugged-out and slightly satanic self has snuck out of the grave via a porn Web site called Spy7.com. Until a recent temporary restraining order, Spy7 was marketing a tape of Farrell having sex in the back of a limousine while shooting up and babbling about the devil. His lawyers are trying to suppress the tape and are suing Spy7 for $40 million. Farrell says that although it's no secret he was a drug addict, he's still deeply ashamed to have a video of himself at his most smacked-out and depraved floating around the world, available to anyone willing to fork over $19.
"The tape is a shame to me," he says. "If there's anything in this world I wouldn't want you to see, it's that tape. I'm not kidding you. But you're gonna see the tape. I have to figure out how I'm going to live the rest of my life feeling so ashamed and embarrassed about this tape. It's different when I tell you a story about me, like, oh, you know, I used to be a waste. It's another thing when that waste is constantly in your face. So even though I appear before you here, that appears before you there. That's why I'm ashamed about it. I don't mind talking about what I used to do. I could tell you things that about myself and you because of it, deep, deep, deep things. I could tell you about your animal nature. But if you don't know me and they throw this tape up and they go, this is him, I'm going to have to feel ashamed."
He continues, "It wasn't even the drugs, although I don't do the drugs anymore. It's more the stupidity of my words. They're stupid. I'm speaking as an idiot. I say, 'Coke is the devil' and 'I can play the devil.' I felt the devil was inside of me. And I came to find out that the devil's in everybody. I could look at it like it's a curse, which it is, so I'm going to turn it into a blessing. It's funny how it works. Just when you crush the serpent's head with your heel, he bites you in the heel. So the good news is I think I've crushed the serpent."
Farrell talks about teshuva, the return to observant Judaism by a non-practicing Jew. "People go off on their godless journey. It might be because they don't know who God is, they don't even know where to begin to look," Farrell says. "In my case I wasn't even looking for God. I didn't understand the concept at all. I was living for myself alone. Even though I was a singer, I was working for myself. I didn't know. I might one day come to say I'm really glad that tape is there, because you can see how far a person can go, and you can see how a person can come back from going away that far. That's what teshuva is all about. If you say, I think you're a scumbag, I'll say to you it doesn't stop me from loving Hashem and reading Torah. If I can't be up there singing when the jubilee occurs, I'll be in the back applauding. I'll be the last guy. I'm still gonna be there."
