1. Have you ever wondered what being trapped in the nineties would feel like? Well, that was the scene at Williamsburg Park on Friday. Or, more accurately, those who stood out in the crowd seemed to wish they were trapped in the nineties. Kilts were invoked. As was way too much neon. And these were people who should have been old enough to know better. -Drew Millard
2. It is what is is with Jane's Addiction in 2012. There's always a sense with these guys that the only get back together every few years because no one cares about their reality TV shows or solo projects. Which...probably. Though Porno For Pyros' second album is much better than it gets credit for. But there's undoubtedly a chemistry that Perry Farrell, Dave Navarro and Stephen Perkins share that they just can't replicate or find anywhere else. Farrell makes Navarro push for something more interesting that the rock radio riffs you didn't bother to listen to on The Panic Channel, and Navarro burns away just enough of Farrell's balderdash mysticism to keep him tolerable. And Perkins is just a beast. And although you can roll your eyes at Lollapalooza CEO Perry Farrell talking about how he was glad the impending storm turned away from Brooklyn to bother the rich people in the Hamptons, when they straight up tore in to "Three Days" it sounded as majestic and chaotic as ever. These dudes earn their paychecks. -Michael Tedder
3. I ducked out of the show right before the rock show-mandated obligatory encore, and I was walking down Bedford Avenue to meet some friends, I walked past some people who just lookedweird. Like, weirder than most people in Williamsburg look. They were sporting white-out contacts and one of them had on a white hoodie, cut off at the belly, with lots of crudely-drawn anatomical nonsense on it. Sure enough, it was Yolandi Visser of Die Antwoord, who had opened the show. I did a double-take, and she stared me down with her whited-out eyes. It was sort of disconcerting, and completely awesome. -DM
4. At 53, Perry Farrell is not a young man. But he positively rocked it, sporting trousers and sinew and not much else, bantering until the cows came home. Halfway through, he brought out a bottle of wine that he pulled from liberally throughout the performance. This is alarming, because Perry Farrell is a former drug abuser and if you quit doing drugs, you're supposed to quit drinking too. The idea is if you get drunk, you might get tempted to do drugs again, and if you haven't done drugs in a really long time, your tolerance has gone down and you might take drugs and accidentally overdose. Farrell did not seem alarmed by this possibility. -DM
5. Jane's Addiction set lists generally pull from the most hard-hitting songs and popular songs from their widely acknowledges classics, Nothing's Shocking and Ritual de lo habitual, the single from their comeback album Strays (the first third of which is really good, for whatever it's worth) and these days a few new songs from their new album The Great Escape Artist, which is pretty decent but would have been better if the mixing and mastering wasn't so Rock Radio Ready and allowed a bit more mystery in. Of these new songs, "Irresistible Force" fared the best live, it's moody crawl to a slamming beat winning some head nods from fans that just wanted the old stuff. But the highlight of the set was "Classic Girl," a setlist rarity and Ritual deep-cut built atop a chiming, darn near dream pop guitar riff and the most beautiful vocal Farrell will ever cut in his entire life. Seriously, the "they may say, Those were the days/But in a way/You know for us these are the days" line has never failed to get me right there, and it certainly didn't on Friday. -MT
