Janes Addiction chained my life. I'm serious. I was three-quarters of the way into 60's blues-Freedom rock musical calcification when I first heard them. Even worse, I was well on my way to maybe, possibly becoming a- gasp- Dead Head, complete with the requisite bootlegs.

Then a friend turned me onto Jane's and everything changed. He made a tape for me with "Nothing's Shocking" on one side and "Ritual del Habitual" on the other. Day after day, night after night, I'd come home from wherever I was and put the tape on my walkman, doing nothing but lying in my bed in the dark listening to the music over and over again. When I listened to the tape, I could literally feel my brain being blown away and rearranged again. It gave me that feeling that everything I knew musically was wrong and everything was, from here-on in, different. And it wasn't just because of what we so lovingly called in college "the Andrew."

They were the band I'd been waiting for for years, all throughout the 80's. They were the new Zeppelin- trippy and smart, psychadelic and mysterious, and most importantly, fucking rocked. This was a big deal in the '80's. If you remember, most rock music then was either meat-head hair-metal, harmless AOR drivel, wussy R.E.M wanna-be's, and fey English bands. Jane's wasn't. Months after getting the tape, I put the Dead bootlegs aside, stopped listening to Clapton's "Crossroad's" CD's and joined Alternative Nation.

Now they have a new album out and I'm not quite sure how I feel. The one song I've heard off of it, "Because" isn't half-bad and has a wicked riff but I'm still, how should I put it, dubious.

I couldn't quite put my finger on why I was so dubious until this morning. See, as I was lying in bed, flipping through the channels I caught the start of "VH-1's Top 20 Countdown." The first song they played, #20, was a video for a Mariah Carey cover of Def Leppard's "Bringing on the Heartbreak." The video featured Dave Navarro, Jane's Addiction guitar-God and the soon-to-be-husband of ex-Baywatch star Carmen Electra, on guitar.

And that about sums it all up, because I never thought I'd ever have to write Jane's Addiction, Baywatch, and Mariah Carey all in the same sentence.