Dave Navarro on Trainwrecks, Rabbit Holes, and the “Navarro Smear”
Wong Notes
Premier Guitar
4.9 • 587 Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2024
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We know what you’re thinking: Dave Navarro is gonna talk about the onstage brawl. But Cory Wong starts this episode of Wong Notes with an important caveat. This show was recorded long before the awful breakdown and confrontation between Navarro and Jane’s Addiction vocalist Perry Farrell, so don’t expect any salacious gossip. But that just makes this episode all the more interesting.
Navarro talks Wong through his formative influences, from Hendrix, Zeppelin, and the Doors to Maiden, heavy metal, and goth. That melting pot, he says, became one of Jane’s Addiction’s calling cards: “Perry and Eric [Avery] ended up in a band that is influenced by bands they hate,” laughs Navarro, who geeks out on Rush and prog-rock.
Navarro discusses how Jane’s Addiction has a propensity for jamming live, a practice developed out of a mutual appreciation for nontraditional song structures. But the delineations can sometimes go wrong. “We do run into trainwrecks,” says Farrell. “Sometimes we’ll find ourselves in a part that we’re vibing on, and we’ll keep going, and Perry doesn’t know what we’re doing. He’ll come in and it’s in the wrong place, and we’re fucking him up.”
Tune in to hear Navarro talk his “rabbit hole de jour” practice style, how to exercise your fingers and your brain, and a lead technique he calls “the Navarro smear.” All this and more on this latest episode of Wong Notes.
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Produced by Jason Shadrick and Cory Wong
Additional Editing by Shawn Persinger
Presented by DistroKid
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What's happening? Welcome to Wong Notes podcast. I'm your host, Corey Wong. |
| 0:06.4 | Today on the show, we got a very special guest, Dave Navarro. I've been a huge fan of Navarro for years. |
| 0:13.8 | When I was a little kid, I had a guitar tab book of one hot minute. I learned the album top to bottom, every guitar part. |
| 0:20.7 | So I've studied Navarro's playing |
| 0:22.2 | intensely. I've learned a bunch of the Jane's Addiction music from when I was a little kid and |
| 0:27.0 | also some of the other songs that he's played on just for other artists. So I'm a huge fan. It was an |
| 0:32.6 | absolute honor to interview Dave for this interview and cool guy. Just a totally cool guy. Just an artist, |
| 0:40.7 | too. Man, this cat's got some concept, dude. Now, I know some people are here and they're |
| 0:49.7 | probably thinking, ooh, Wong's interviewing Navarro. We're going to get some tea. We're |
| 0:53.8 | going to get some action on whatever's going on. Now, I have a couple options here. I can, number one, just not tell you when this interview was done and let you wait and listen to the interview a long time and blah, blah, oh, is he going to talk about what happened? Like, there was a whole thing that happened i'm gonna let you know right now this |
| 1:10.9 | interview was done before the jane's addiction tour started okay i did this interview a couple months back |
| 1:16.2 | and that doesn't mean oh don't listen if you're not listening for tea what i'm saying is it's a very |
| 1:22.9 | interesting thing to get the perspective of him going into this tour and now finding out what just happened. |
| 1:30.0 | You know, a lot of us have seen there's some stuff that happened. The tour's off. There was some |
| 1:34.3 | quarrels that happened. I have no opinion on it because I don't know everything. I wasn't there. |
| 1:40.3 | I'm not going to speak on that. I'll let you do your own research, whatever. |
| 1:45.6 | But what I will say is it's very interesting to talk to Dave, |
| 1:48.9 | regardless of whatever happened with that tour. |
| 1:51.7 | Dave's an incredible musician, artist, |
| 1:54.1 | and I'm just such a huge fan. |
| 1:57.0 | And honestly, yeah, given everything that's happened in the last few weeks, |
| 2:00.4 | it is really interesting to get this perspective of his mindset going into the tour. |
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