Rockers certainly do have some bloody good tales, and Dave Navarro is no exception. The Jane’s Addiction guitarist recalls a few of them in Drew Fortune’s upcoming book, No Encore!: Musicians Reveal Their Weirdest, Wildest, Most Embarrassing Gigs, and Consequence of Sound published an exclusive excerpt that includes the Ink Master host discussing how he horrified friends and strangers alike by spraying his blood all over their bathrooms or dressing room via syringe.
Navarro pointed out that all of this happened during his “drug days” and that “it’s certainly not a version of myself” that he is eager to revisit since getting sober in the early 2000’s. With that in mind, he set the scene by describing how he used to shoot up between songs and while waiting around to play gigs.
“I developed a system where I would extract blood without anything in the syringe. I’d spike the vein,” Navarro revealed in Fortune’s tome, “and pull out a syringe full of blood, which led to loads of fun over the years.” Part of that “fun” included emptying a syringe full of blood all over his buddy Marilyn Manson‘s bathroom:
Around that same time, I was hanging out at Marilyn Manson’s house a lot. I would shoot up in his bathroom, and I would do the same thing. I would spray the bathroom mirror with blood. He was so freaked out by it that he called his housekeepers and assistants to clean it off. I remember thinking that this guy was the king of scary-rock-horror-goths. Why is he so freaked out by a little blood? His reaction was so funny that naturally, I did it again. [Laughs] This time around, I thought, “C’mon, Mr. Scary! You can’t handle a little blood?” I really painted his mirror that time, and he did not appreciate it. My thinking was that if the first two times didn’t go over well, the third time would work. After the third time, I began to realize: People don’t dig this.
Someone else who probably didn’t “dig this” was Fiona Apple. Navarro says she was the recipient of a love note written in his blood back in 1997 when both Apple and Jane’s Addiction were on the bill for the KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas show.
In the midst of my insanity, I thought it would be a very romantic gesture to go into Fiona Apple’s dressing room, and write a message on her wall in my own blood. In my deranged head, I viewed it as sending her a message with the blood that pumps through my heart to her,” Navarro said. “It was my life blood that I was symbolically sharing. I thought we would relate on multiple levels, because we’re both passionate musicians and artists. In my head, it was a grand, romantic statement, that she would find very touching.
Mind you, Navarro and Apple hadn’t met.
Navarro revealed that he wrote “Dear Fiona, I hope you have a great time tonight. Love Dave” in blood on her dressing room wall. He added, “In my coke-addled brain, it was a very subtle, kind, romantic gesture. I saw us riding off into the sunset, with this gesture being the basis for our romance.”
Had he been sober, Navarro probably would have understood that being confronted with a note from a stranger written in blood is legitimately terrifying, doubly so if the note is from a secret admirer. The rocker apparently learned as much, as he went on to explain that he was pulled into “a meeting with staff and management” right before “a team of crime scene cleanup people in hazmat suits began disinfecting her room.”
You can read the entire excerpt here.
