The Alternative Number Ones: Jane’s Addiction’s “Been Caught Stealing”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

I been caught stealing once when I was nine. I had enough money for one comic book, but I wanted three, so I bought the one (Ghost Rider Meets Doctor Strange, I think) and then stuffed the other two into the shopping bag. First attempt. Didn't get far. The people at the bookstore grabbed both me and my little brother, separated us, and ushered us into back rooms. They told me that my brother told them that I did this all the time, which was a lie on their part. At some point, my mom showed up, and everyone, my mom included, seemed convinced that I made a regular habit of shoplifting. Maybe they were hunting some elusive cat burglar who regularly depleted their comic book supply, or maybe they just wanted to scare me.

Joke's on them. The only thing those ding-dongs taught me was that I should look around next time before shoving something in my pocket. It might've taken a year or two for me to build up the nerve again, but after that, I kept shoplifting for years. Sometimes, it was comics or candy or cigarettes, in the rare and beautiful moments that Royal Farms had cigarettes out on display in the store instead of behind the counter. (It was always Monclairs, which were gross, but still.)

Most of the time, though, it was cassette tapes. Sam Goody had the plastic protector things on their tapes, so I usually couldn't steal those, but the ones in the discount section didn't have those plastic things, and those were easy to grab. If I happened to find a mall record store that didn't have the plastic protectors on its tapes? Hoo, baby. It was Christmas. There was one mall in Towson -- not Towson Town Center, the other one -- where they never had the plastic things on their tapes, and I would walk out of there with like six of those things in my pockets. That's how I got Cure For Pain and Punk In Drublic and Stranger Than Fiction and I forget what else. God bless that place.

I got caught a couple more times, but I never got arrested; it was always just a short and uncomfortable conversation with whatever hapless mall worker happened to catch me. I'm sure plenty more saw me and didn't do shit. I'm sure plenty of them were stealing, too. One time, a suspicious store detective in a Border's detained me and patted me down in front of the whole store, but I wasn't stealing anything that time. I'd pretty much grown out of shoplifting by then. So fuck Borders, and fuck Greetings & Readings in Towson for trying to scare me off of shoplifting. You guys weren't willing to take a two-dollar and fifty-cent hit, and you attempted to fuck my life up over it. Nice try, dummies. I'm glad you don't exist anymore. I'm glad Borders doesn't exist anymore, either.

All of which is to say that the Jane's Addiction song "Been Caught Stealing," which topped the Billboard Modern Rock chart around the same time I first got caught stealing, does a nice job capturing the rush that you get from shoplifting. It's called "Been Caught Stealing," but it's about not getting caught stealing -- just unapologetically delighting in the feeling that you get when you walk right through the door. That's a fairly unlikely subject for a hit song on any Billboard chart at any moment in history, but most things about Jane's Addiction are unlikely.

If you look at their chart fortunes, Jane's Addiction's first two #1 Modern Rock hits appear fairly similar. "Stop!," the first single from the band's 1990 album Ritual De Lo Habitual, spent a week at #1 in September 1990 and then didn't cross over to any other charts. "Been Caught Stealing" was at #1 for longer, and it crossed over to mainstream rock radio, but only enough to reach #29 on that chart. Neither song made it onto the Hot 100. If you look at the statistics, those two songs look like the work of a cult band who resonated on college radio and basically nowhere else. But the statistics don't tell the whole story there. They don't tell you that "Been Caught Stealing" was a big song.

There are a few reasons that "Been Caught Stealing" was a big song, and one of them is that it's great, fun track. Ritual De Lo Habitual has all these mystic grand-scale classic rock libertine reveries like the 11-minute shaman-dance trance-out "Three Days," but it's also got a few euphoric bursts of nonsense. "Stop!" is euphoric nonsense, but it's anthemic euphoric nonsense, and it's made with a sense of purpose. "Been Caught Stealing" is just a goofy song about how it feels good to steal stuff. In SPIN's 2003 oral history of the band, producer Dave Jerden says, "I hate to classify it as a novelty song, but we just considered it a fun track." That's exactly right. That's why it's good.

But the real reason that "Been Caught Stealing" took off was the video, and we might as well get into it now. Casey Niccoli, Perry Farrell's girlfriend who basically served as the uncredited creative director for Jane's Addiction's entire run, directed the "Been Caught Stealing" clip. (She directed most of the band's videos.) The clip is a ridiculous parade of absurdity and a beautiful reflection of the song's freewheeling silliness. Much of the time, we're watching a guy in a bad wig and fake pregnant belly running through a supermarket and shoving stuff under his dress. (In my shoplifting days, I would've never attempted to boost a pineapple. The risk/reward ratio seems way off there.) Our hero never gets caught, and surreal spectacles pile on top of each other.

In the opening seconds of the "Been Caught Stealing" clip, we see the members of Jane's Addiction -- all stonefaced, all looking like absolute freaks -- riding the toy horses outside a supermarket. It's truly one of the greatest establishing shots in the history of alternative rock on film. We know that we're dealing with some real out-there fuckers here. But then the unnamed shoplifter walks into the store just as the riff and the barking dogs erupt onto the track, and it hits like an adrenalized headrush.

Everything that follows -- the catwoman-masked stripper in the produce section, the security footage of Jane's members sneakily grabbling milk, Perry Farrell with pantyhose over his head -- is an absolute blast. It all leads to the bridge, where all the video's characters -- Perry Farrell, the Catwoman stripper, the security guard, the shocked onlookers, the one guy who can kick his leg over his head -- have a Soul Train line in the soup aisle. This stuff is magical. It's a textbook example of what made MTV so much fun to watch for so many years. Nobody's got a budget, and nothing has to make linear sense, but everything has a loopy, cartoonish anti-glamor thing working for it.

I grew up without cable, but "Been Caught Stealing" is one of the few videos from its era that I can remember catching on TV in real time. It was a family trip to San Francisco, and they had MTV in the hotel room. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It seemed so transgressive -- the fake butt, the cross-dressing, the simple celebration of people getting away with petty crimes. I knew I wasn't supposed to be seeing any of this, and that made it better. Later on, when the DJ would drop "Been Caught Stealing" at middle-school dances and no teachers ran over to turn it off, I felt like I was in on a sordidly happy secret.

Jane's Addiction had a demo of "Been Caught Stealing" before they even signed with Warner Bros. or released their first studio album, 1988's Nothing's Shocking. Perry Farrell co-wrote "Been Caught Stealing" with bassist Eric Avery. In a fun 2019 YouTube interview, Dave Jerden says that almost all of the band's songs started with Avery's basslines. (Jerden looks kind of like Dog The Bounty Hunter, which is exactly the way that you'd hope Jane's Addiction's producer would've looked in 2019.) In the case of "Been Caught Stealing," that bassline is a funky fuzz-rumble that sounds like a muscle car revving. It makes perfect sense that everything proceeded from there.

Apparently, Perry Farrell really did get caught stealing once when he was five. In 2015, Farrell told Rolling Stone that he used to swipe rubber balls from a candy store near his house in Queens. He used them to play stickball, and he got caught once: "I guess I got in trouble, but that was the only time I ever got caught stealing." Farrell says he kept stealing after that, just for fun, and then started to notice how upset he'd get when people stole from him. But there's no poetic regret on "Been Caught Stealing." Instead, we just get Perry Farrell telling us that he and his girlfriend both love stealing. That's it. That's the whole message.

We also get the barking dog. The woofs on the "Been Caught Stealing" intro are not samples or sound effects. Instead, that's Perry Farrell's dog Annie, who he adopted from an LA shelter. She was in the studio when Farrell recorded his vocals, and apparently he had one of her toys in the booth or something. Jane's Addiction and Dave Jerden didn't mean to capture Annie's barking on tape, but when they had it, they left it on the song.

That happy-accident magic is important to "Been Caught Stealing." The song's sound is the right kind of loose and chaotic. There are layers upon layers of guitars and drums and percussion on the track, but the things that people remember -- the barking, the engine-revving sound, the "let's go!" -- seem to exist fully within the moment. "Been Caught Stealing" isn't a rigorously structured track, but it has energy.

To this day, I don't know whether Jane's Addiction were listening to British acid house and Madchester stuff when they recorded "Been Caught Stealing," but the song does work in conversation with stuff like the Happy Mondays, a band that'll be in this column pretty soon. The gigantic drum-shuffle, the vaguely Stones-y strut of the guitars, and Perry Farrell's multitracked nasal yammer all have baggy-shorts rave-kid energy working for them. My guess is that it's a coincidence -- just a few different groups of young people, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, taking some of the same drugs and trying out similar studio experiments at the same time. Timing is everything.

"Been Caught Stealing" was not supposed to be the first Jane's Addiction song that most people heard. It was a lark, a fun thing that wasn't representative of their overall sound. But the band needed something. They were out touring and finding a national audience that way, but other than "Stop!" on alt-rock radio, none of their singles were connecting. The band's members were either strung out or getting sober, which made for an uneasy mix. They'd blown a lot of their marketing budget in Mexico, where they shot The Gift, a near-unwatchable short film that wouldn't even come out on VHS until a few years after the band broke up. But Perry Farrell decided that "Been Caught Stealing" should get a video, and the video landed at just the right moment.

In Whores, the 2005 book that came out of that 2003 SPIN oral history, various sources say that the other members of Jane's Addiction, Eric Avery in particular, were not happy at the idea of "Been Caught Stealing" becoming a single. The rock radio-promotion team at Warner Bros. didn't want to push the song, either, since they thought it encouraged shoplifting. (They were probably right about this, but they were probably wrong to worry too much about a shoplifting-induced moral panic.) But largely because of the video, "Been Caught Stealing" took off, and album sales picked up along with it. Shortly after "Been Caught Stealing" reached #1 on the Modern Rock chart, the album went gold. It's now double platinum.

After "Been Caught Stealing," Jane's Addiction -- this incarnation of the band, anyway -- didn't do especially well on the Modern Rock charts. "Classic Girl," the closing track from Ritual De Lo Habitual, peaked at #15 in 1991. That's Perry Farrell's song for Casey Niccoli, and she's in the video. Later in 1991, Jane's made it to #13 with a cover of the Grateful Dead's "Ripple," recorded for the tribute compilation Deadicated.

It wasn't easy for American bands to top the Modern Rock chart in 1990, but apparently it helped if they were total self-destructive trainwrecks that were in the process of falling apart. Somehow, the Replacements and Jane's Addiction ended up with back-to-back #1 hits at the very moment that both bands were preparing to break up. But at least Jane's Addiction stuck around for long enough to will Lollapalooza into being first.

Lollapalooza was not an original idea. The tour was very much based on the idea of UK festivals like Reading, and Jane's were not the first band to bring that idea to America. In October 1990, the Cult's Ian Astbury worked with Bay Area concert-promotion legend Bill Graham to stage a couple of all-day shows in the Bay Area, calling them a Gathering Of The Tribes. The shows had bands from across the spectrum of what would eventually be known as alternative music. Soundgarden, Ice-T, Iggy Pop, Queen Latifah, the Indigo Girls, and the Cramps all played. Public Enemy were booked, but they didn't play because authorities thought they might induce a crowd riot. Astbury did not book the Cult to play, since he didn't want people thinking that the shows were all about him. Lots of people came to those shows, but they were a financial disaster, and Astbury lost a ton of his own money. (The Cult's highest-charting Modern Rock hit, 1989's "Fire Woman," peaked at #2. It's a 9.)

Perry Farrell probably didn't steal the Lollapalooza idea from Ian Astbury, but Astbury did get there first. Perry Farrell and some management types came up with the Lollapalooza concept in 1990, and they had a few extra innovations of their own. For one thing, they took the whole circus on the road. For another, there was the attention-grabbing addition of political booths everywhere, which helped reinforce the idea that this was less of a money-making venture and more of a community-minded thing. Farrell, hoping to foster conversation, did things that would seem very strange today, like putting NRA and gun-control booths right next to each other. The whole thing made for a fun story and an instant myth, and it probably helped that Farrell and his colleagues picked a solid-gold lineup for that first tour.

Jane's Addiction headlined the first Lollapalooza in 1991, and their immediate support was Siouxsie And The Banshees, the first group that appeared in this column. The rest of the bill: Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T with Body Count, the Butthole Surfers, the Rollins Band. Pretty fucking good! (Siouxsie will be back in this column before too long. Some of those other acts will eventually appear in this space, too.) I was too young to go to that first Lollapalooza, but I was very aware of it, and it soon took on a totemic generational importance. The success of that first tour had a whole lot to do with the alt-rock boom in this country, and later Lollapalooza tours capitalized on that boom and helped drive it.

The first Lollapalooza show happened in Tempe, Arizona in July 1991, and it was apparently a total fucking disaster. It was well over a hundred degrees outside that day. Dave Navarro was fresh out of rehab and out scoring heroin before the show, and the set ended when he and Perry Farrell got into an onstage fistfight. But Jane's got it together for the later shows on that tour, and Farrell acted as the ringleader for the extravaganza. The members of Jane's Addiction weren't getting along or even talking to each other, but they were still capable of playing shows that blew people away. The tour made a whole lot of money.

"Been Caught Stealing" was nominated for a couple of Grammys in the rock category, and it won the first-ever VMA for Best Alternative Video, beating out a few songs that'll eventually appear in this column. The VMAs happened a few weeks after the Lollapalooza tour ended, and Perry Farrell skipped the ceremony. Depending on you ask, he wanted to smoke crack, or to hang out with a girl who he met at a 7-Eleven, or possibly both. Casey Niccoli, still Farrell's girlfriend at the time, went to the VMAs to accept the award, and so did Dave Navarro.

Billy Idol, in full cartoonish regalia, announced "Been Caught Stealing" as the winner, pulling the envelope out of his fly and calling the song "Been Caught Wanking." Casey Niccoli and Dave Navarro were both high out of their minds, and a heartbroken Niccoli gave an incoherent and rambling speech while Navarro attempted to make out with her. That's how people describe it, anyway. I can't find footage of that acceptance speech online, though happily we can see Billy Idol doing his whole award-presentation ridiculous act. (Idol's highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1990's "Cradle Of Love," peaked at #7. It's a 7.)

Needless to say, this whole incident did not spell good things for the long-term viability of Jane's Addiction. At this point, Jane's were pretty much done anyway. The band played their final show in Honolulu later that month, and Perry Farrell got ass-naked onstage that night. After Jane's ended, Perry Farrell shaved off his dreadlocks, and he and drummer Stephen Perkins started Porno For Pyros, a band that'll eventually appear in this column. Dave Navarro and Eric Avery formed their own band Deconstruction, which released one 1994 album that disappeared without a trace. Eric Avery, it turned out, was not a terribly compelling frontman.

When Deconstruction failed, Dave Navarro briefly joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band that'll appear in this column many times. In 1997, Jane's Addiction reunited to tour, but Eric Avery refused to take part. Instead, Flea, who was Navarro's bandmate in the Chili Peppers at the time, filled in. Jane's released Kettle Whistle, an odds-and-ends album with a few re-recorded tracks, and then broke up again. Over the years, Jane's Addiction kept breaking up and reuniting. Down the road, in a very different age for both the band and the world at large, we'll see them return to this column.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: Naturally, "Been Caught Stealing" soundtracks a scene in the 2000 car-theft caper Gone In 60 Seconds. It's the bit where Vinnie Jones' Sphinx character, who's been silent for the entire film, suddenly pipes up with a flowery speech. Here it is:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: At a 2014 show in Los Angeles, Arcade Fire covered "Been Caught Stealing," mixing it in with a bit of Guns N' Roses' "Welcome To The Jungle" and their own song "Here Comes The Night Time." While playing it, they stole a few phones from front-row fans. Here's fan footage:

(Arcade Fire's highest-charting single on what would become the Alternative Airplay chart, 2017's "Everything Now," peaked at #12.)

BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: A few days before the death of their drummer Taylor Hawkins, the Foo Fighters, a band that will appear in this column many times, brought out Perry Farrell and covered "Been Caught Stealing" at Lollapalooza Chile. Here's that performance:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=05tT3BsF5KU&ab_channel=Mystoria