Three Days: The Myth of Xiola Blue
The mysterious muse that inspired Jane's Addiction's classic album Ritual De Lo Habitual
The drugged-out proto-grunge of L.A. band Jane’s Addiction provided the soundtrack to my early adolescence.
In those days, album concepts were often designed with the vinyl record in mind. Take David Bowie’s Heroes and Low – both featured the more accessible songs with vocals on their A-sides, and instrumental ambient experiments on their B-sides.
Another example is Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love, which had “Running Up That Hill” and “Cloudbusting” on the A, and a seven-track concept piece on the flip.
In the case of Jane’s Addiction’s second album Ritual De Lo Habitual, the A-side contains the hits “Stop“ and “Been Caught Stealing”, songs in a L.A. hard rock/funk rock style – like a mix of early Guns N’ Roses and early Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The experimental B-side is filled with an epic 30-minute art-rock suite, consisting of four long songs and bearing echoes of Led Zeppelin, The Velvet Underground, even Joy Division. It opened with a ten-minute prog anthem (“Three Days”), featured a string section (“Then She Did …”) and a klezmer-style violin (“Of Course”), and closed with a love ballad (“Classic Girl”).
This is the side I always return to – and it never fails to carry me away.
The original album cover showed a sculpture of a male character resembling singer Perry Farrell, naked on a bedspring with two female characters.
In anticipation of stores refusing to sell the album with that artwork, a second, ‘clean’ version was created, featuring a white sleeve with nothing but the band name and album title on it, plus the text of the First Amendment.
That first cover was supposed to illustrate a scene from a real-life event in late 1986 or early 1987, when Farrell had a 72-hour orgy of sex and drugs with his then-girlfriend, the photographer Casey Niccoli, and a mysterious woman named Xiola.
Farrell wrote about the experience in the sprawling “Three Days”.
The song starts with a spoken-word poem:
At this moment
you should be with us
feeling like we do
like you love to
but never will again
I miss you my dear Xiola
From here on, Farrell’s voice gets layered so it becomes increasingly hard to understand, but he seems to be saying “no one made friends as easily as Xiola”.
An inner sleeve showed a black-and-photo of a dark-haired woman behind a veil. The dedication below the image reads: “For our beloved Xiola Blue.”
The song after “Three Days” is about Farrell’s mother, who committed suicide when he was four. According to the band’s drummer Stephen Perkins, it was written in the wake of Xiola’s death and originally called “Then She Died”. Farrell later decided to rename it “Then She Did …”.
In the song’s last verse, the singer seemed to be addressing someone:
And will you say hello to my mom?
Will you pay a visit to her?
She was an artist, just as you were
I'd have introduced you to her
Was he asking Xiola to visit his mother in the afterlife?
She was all over that album. But who was she, and what was her relation to Perry Farrell? Was that her actual name? And how did she die?
I couldn’t find any answers back then. This was pre-internet. Jane’s Addiction disbanded just a year after the album release. In interviews, Farrell spoke frequently about former band members Dave Navarro, Eric Avery and Stephen Perkins, but never about Xiola.
Only much later, I learned about her story.
Xiola Blue – sometimes spelt Bleu – was an alias of Lisa Doran Chester.
Lisa grew up in Michigan, in the Detroit and Ann Arbor area. Farrell met her in Los Angeles, in the early 1980s. She might have temporarily lived in California at that time. Her father was a lawyer from New York who had moved to Orange County. Farrell recounts she’d frequently drive up to L.A. in her parents’ Cadillac.
A bohemian teenager, she was into art and music, while Farrell was an aspiring singer and songwriter. He’d just joined the goth rock band Psi Com, which made some waves on the Hollywood club scene.
In Brendan Mullen’s 2005 book Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction, Farrell is quoted:
“When I first met her, [Lisa] was wearing a chartreuse and yellow dress and her hair was green – in dreadlocks. And I think she was wearing yellow lipstick, yellow tights, and she had very light freckles and a very pale face. She was was the kind of girl who looked like a 1920s cigarette ad, except in vivid ultra color.”
It seems like they quickly became close friends, and she is often referred to as Farrell’s ‘muse’ during that time. He even wrote a song about her, “Xiola”, which he recorded with Psi Com in 1985 for their single, self-titled EP.
In late 1985, Psi Com disbanded, and Farrell founded Jane’s Addiction.
He’d also met Casey Niccoli, a visual artist and photographer who went on to become his girlfriend and a music video director for his band.
In Whores, Casey recounts that Perry wanted her to meet Lisa.
“He said, ‘She's a friend, I went out with her, but she's too young for me. I'm in love with you, but I really want you to meet her. She's fun, she's really cool. She's coming to town.’ So I met her and we became friends, although she ended up moving to New York to go to art school so we didn't see her a lot.”
Maybe there were other reasons for Lisa to leave L.A. behind.
In that time, the local music scene was infested with hard drugs.
“[Lisa] was the first girl that I gotten high with on heroin,” Farrell recounts in a 2020 interview. “Like, she basically asked me if I could get her heroin, and I said yeah, and we did it together.”
Lisa’s father passed away in June 1986. Inheriting a large sum of money through a trust fund, she was reportedly spending it to support her heroin addiction.
In October, Lisa turned 18. Around that time, she visited Perry and Casey in L.A. for a long weekend, allegedly around her father’s funeral. (Though the timeline doesn’t really add up here.)
For three days, they took heroin together and had sex. It was the last time Perry and Casey would see Lisa.
On 6 June 1987, she was found dead from an overdose in her Manhattan apartment.
Lisa was buried in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where her mother still lived.
“Three Days” had been written prior to her death, right after that one long weekend. Jane’s Addiction played it live for several years, before recording the song for Ritual De Lo Habitual in 1990.
In this 2020 interview, Perry Farrell also says that many years later, he learned that Lisa was his cousin, but that he didn’t know it at the time they were together.
Whatever the case, it surely doesn’t make the story less unsettling. It leaves many questions unanswered.
Lisa alias Xiola wanted to be an artist, and former friends say she had talent, but she never got the chance to show it to the world. Still, she inspired one of the greatest alt-rock albums of all time.
"When you have something like that happen", Farrell is quoted in an interview with Classic Rock, "the better thing to do is to try to make some flowers grow out of it."
Media Diet
Listening: The Caretaker, An empty bliss beyond this world (2011)
Leyland Kirby’s hauntology masterpiece. Slowed + reverb edits of 1930s ballroom jazz ripped from a stack of cheap 78s, buried under layers of surface noise and vinyl crackle. I’ve just bought this again and I’m using it as what Basinski once called ‘room perfume’. In other words, it’s basically playing 24/7 right now.
Reading: Jay Caspian Kang, Arguing Ourselves To Death (2024)
In his new essay column for The New Yorker, Kang goes from observations at his favourite weekend surf spot to depictions of online political discourse, elegantly referencing Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan along the way. (First seen in First Floor.)
Watching: Éric Rohmer, The Green Ray (original title: Le Rayon Vert, 1986)
Classic Rohmer from his post-Nouvelle Vague period. Following a single woman restlessly traveling around in her summer vacation, the film shows the protagonist’s growing disconnect and depression. But oh, what a gorgeous ending!
One more thing
For Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, I wrote about the 60th anniversary of Tony Scott’s masterpiece “Music for Zen Meditation and Other Joys”.
Sampled by the likes of Four Tet, Blockhead and DJ Premier, the 1964 album is one of my favourite ambient jazz records of all time.
Read now
© 2024 Stephan Kunze