The Meaning Behind “Mountain Song” by Jane’s Addiction and the Tragedy that Shaped It

Coming down the mountain! That’s how Perry Farrell begins “Mountain Song,” Jane’s Addiction’s alternative national anthem.

When Jane’s Addiction released their debut studio album Nothing’s Shocking in 1988, it kicked open the door for guitar-based alternative rock bands to enter the mainstream.

Eric Avery opens the track with a stirring bass riff, an announcement, responded to by his bandmate’s hazy, stabbing chords. What exactly is this? In hindsight, it was a sea change. The seedy side of Hollywood’s after-dark mischief oozing toward suburban malls across the country.

“Mountain Song” sounds like an acid trip proclamation via Marshall full stack. But a profound childhood tragedy also shaped the song.

Ocean Size

In 1985, Avery and Farrell wrote “Mountain Song” before Jane’s Addiction was Jane’s Addiction. Farrell said the song is about drugs—both the getting high and the coming down from drugs. The comedown is what he’s singing about.

Coming down the mountain
One of many children
Everybody has their own opinion
Everybody has their own opinion
Holding it back, it hurts so bad
Jumping out of my flesh and I said, “Cash in!”

Even in his pre-Jane’s Addiction days, Farrell had big ideas. He thought if you could write a song about things everyone loves—like mountains and oceans—the whole world might fall in love with it. He liked the idea of writing about “big, natural environments.”

Then She Did

The echoing hallucinations of “Mountain Song” are also bracketed by tragedy. Farrell’s mother took her life when he was 3 years old. He lived in New York City at the time and told The Guardian, “I remember it, yeah. There are some things that have deep-seated emotions for me, but you can’t change it and you move on. I think it has a huge part in my appreciation for life, for sure.”

Though it gave him a lust for life, Farrell lived self-destructively. And you can’t separate the drug addiction from Jane’s Addiction. The band, after all, is named after Farrell’s former housemate, Jane Bainter, whose heroin use and abusive boyfriend Sergio disrupted the Wilton house they shared with a group of fellow bohemians. Bainter is also the Jane in “Jane Says.”

There’s a line in “Mountain Song” where Farrell sings, “Cash in, Miss Smith.” Smith is Farrell’s mother, who, as he put it, “Cashed in her life.” He explained how his father’s infidelity broke his mother’s heart. “She did something that I know she regrets. Nonetheless, that was her choice,” he said.

Lollapalooza

Farrell, Avery, guitarist Dave Navarro, and drummer Stephen Perkins built their band on a mash-up of classic rock and alternative music. In the mid-1980s, alternative still meant “different,” “unusual,” an existence outside the mainstream.

The classic rock bands they borrowed from—Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and The Rolling Stones—gave accessibility to their gloomy post-punk goth rock.

But they also emerged from the same Los Angeles music scene as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone, combining elements of funk and metal while existing outside the hairspray glam of Mötley Crüe and Poison.

Jane’s Addiction is the threshold. The sound of a decade-to-decade calendar flip. There’s a reason Farrell is called the Godfather of Alternative Music. He didn’t do it alone, but his bondage aesthetic, the X-rated artwork, and “Jane Says,” a song as ubiquitous as “Stairway to Heaven,” led misfit culture into the gilded Lollapalooza age. (Farrell co-founded Lollapalooza in 1990.)

Thank You Boys

But a band built on addiction cannot last. Jane’s Addiction split after only two studio albums and the first Lollapalooza festival was to be their farewell. They released Ritual de lo Habitual in 1990 and on the eve of alternative rock’s dominance, they were gone.

Farrell talked about the bummer of coming down from drugs, coming down the mountain, hurling toward the crash. It was inevitable that his band would crash, too. Still, they’d eventually reform, the feeling of playing those songs too good to stay away. Another trip up the mountainside.

Pitchfork called “Mountain Song” alt-rock’s first mission statement—“a vision of a promised land where the iconoclasts and idealists would reshape culture after years of toiling in obscurity.”

The “cash in” hook references Farrell’s late mother. But read it again under the lights of endless rotation on MTV. Read it against reunion tours and anniversary reissues of albums. And think about that line the next time an outsider artist like Chappell Roan draws enormous crowds to Lollapalooza.

Farrell couldn’t have predicted the cultural landscape he’d unwittingly shape. But he led a band of weirdos in bondage clothing down a mountain, carrying guitars, narcotics, a nude sculpture, and a declaration. He also acknowledged they are “one of many children.”

That’s why the music resonated. The trippy dispatch was this: You’re not alone.

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