Recently a friend told the story of how, in what was essentially a fit of disenchantment caused by Metallica’s stance on file sharing, she actually invaded some kind of monstrous chain store and physically stole …And Justice for All on CD. It was an inspiring story, not for the file-sharing politics or the love/hate Metallica fuck’em/fandom, but for her sheer, simple, and senseless bawlz. Forget Metallica, forget Napster and the whole bizarrely intangible world we half-live in these days—her story immediately dropped my memory’s needle down onto one of my own, and raised yet another interesting question. Cue the Jane’s Addiction…

I was swept into a grainy, sepia-toned recollection of a time when the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 had hardly been invented, let alone wreaked havoc on the Information Superhighway. A time when it was impossible to commit (let alone react to) any act that wasn’t “IRL” (“in real life”). Forget about Bit Torrent; I’m talking about the swashbuckling five-finger discount. It was barely the ’90s, I was barely a teen, and for me it all started with the cheap, nasty smokes displayed on open racks within easy reach on checkout counters. (I was too young to buy them. How else could I get them?) Soon enough my targets snowballed and there was no longer any real justification beyond selfish, rebellious impulse. Fancy lighters, junk food, household explosives—I was a kid in a candy store, in any store. Eventually I mustered the cajones to start tearing off security stickers in chain stores, and so marked my entry into the primordial era of music larceny. I reveled in my acts of “fuck you, Chain Store!” and even “fuck you, Major Label!,” although frankly, at that age, it was mostly a very general “fuck you” to “society.” I was only 12 or 13; my reckless, pubescent depression unleashed a rage more like buckshot than sniper fire.

My greatest trophy was the shiny, elaborately packaged three-disc Led Zeppelin Remasters box set, not for its content, but for its physical size, price, and the Tower Records security I bested to pilfer it. By ’91, with that notch on my belt, I was no longer greedy; I was just cocky. One day a buddy and I took a train into the city and in no time had blown what little money we had. We’d already scored some music, maybe a magazine or two, and I specifically remember I purchased a t-shirt that day—a Jane’s Addiction t-shirt, as it happens. We dropped the stuff off at my friend’s dad’s apartment and, with a bit more time to kill, headed out to the HMV that has since vanished from its throne on 86th and Lex, just to see what we could see.

I honestly did not intend to acquire anything, legally or otherwise. I only intended to browse, that is, until my friend picked up a cassette, held it surreptitiously out and eyeballed me while scratching lightly at the security sticker—a gesture of request. I shrugged, picked up a copy of the same, and wandered into a corner somewhere. I wish I could remember what album that was. Try as I have over the years, that detail is gone, most likely because the more harrowing moments were yet to occur. I do remember that sticker as being fairly tenacious; it took a good, nervous jerk to tear it off, but once it gave I shoved the tape into a pocket of my ample winter jacket and returned to the aisle by my friend to continue browsing. So far, so good. Why worry?

My friend then pulled another item from the rack, and this one I remember clear as day. It was Smashing Pumpkins, Gish, also on cassette (cassettes were much easier to stuff into pockets). “What the hay?,” I figured, in all my criminally devious brilliance (self- and ill-perceived, of course). I took the tape and slunk back over to the barren little corner where there was nothing but a couple doors my intuition decided were closets or otherwise rarely used. It was the security sticker from heaven; there had never been one so easy. I’d hardly breathed upon it before the sticker, like an autumn leaf trembling in anticipation of that one inevitable breeze, flaked free of the plastic, and floated gently to the floor. In slow motion disbelief, I watched it descend and land squarely between a pair of large black shoes. My eyes shot upward and crashed into the plummeting glare of an intense gorilla of a man, whose beefy arm flattened me instantly up against a wall. He snatched the cassette from my hand. “What the fuck is this?!” he snapped.

“I don’t know! The sticker just fell off! I swear!”

That much was almost true, funnily enough. He yanked the jacket out of my other petrified 13-year-old hand, felt around and found the other tape inside. “What the fuck is this, then, eh?!” He rapped the cassette over my head. By the back of my shirt the HMV goon dragged me into a backroom full of security monitor screens and office crap and sat me down next to a couple other presumed offenders, all gazing down at themselves with a mix of worry and frustration. The cops eventually came and led me out of the store in actual handcuffs, which was both ridiculous and wholly counterproductive to any goal of stifling my already proud self-image of adolescent notoriety. They took me downtown and wrote me up a JD card; I was officially a juvenile delinquent. That was my punishment? That didn’t seem so bad. No, the penalty didn’t really hit home until I did—that is, until the cops released me into the custody of my dad.

So, I got in a heap of trouble over Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish. Was it worth it? Hell no. Nowadays I hardly like that album, and tend to skip it when it pops up on shuffle mode. It was a solid album for the day, especially considering it was their first LP and we were only just getting to know these pumpkin kids. It would’ve been worth stealing, sure, but certainly not worth the trouble of getting caught. Therein lies the question, my friends: What album would be?

Try to forget all the logical alternatives to jacking what is essentially a luxury item, and just focus on the potentially humiliating ordeal of heat. Also key to remember is that the RIAA is too busy suing the homeless and the occasional preteen child of a disabled mother to get its tentacles dirty with jurisdiction on the street. When it comes to old-fashioned boosting, it’s just between you, the store, and the cops, and with that in mind, the most straightforward options (in my case, demographically speaking) would have to fall within the realm of authority-hating punk classics. Black Flag’s Damaged naturally punches itself to the fore; an HMV-style bust would only have made my love of that album so much more cathartic as an alienated tween. The working, responsible grown-up me would feel a little bad stealing from SST, though, even if it was via Best Buy or what have you. So I guess we have to narrow the question further; either it’s strictly in the context of short-sighted adolescence, or we rule out anything on a respectable indie label.

There’s the somewhat shallow irony of the aforementioned Jane’s Addiction, Ritual de lo Habitual, and yet classic though it may be, it’s also just a little too cheeky. To play so pivotal a role in such a real-life foible, an album with a hit single that obvious lacks a certain “zing.” There’s the more delicious irony of sacrificing oneself for the most innocuous imaginable music, Celine Dion or Debbie Gibson, but that’s only funny for a second. In real life, the joke would be pretty short-lived. There are then the less funny, yet more demographically ironic, options; a little, Jewish, suburban white boy like me getting caught swiping, say, Tupac’s Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., or better yet, N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton.

One appropriate choice my mind refuses to dismiss is Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut. It’s era-appropriate, for one thing. It was released on a major label (Epic, aka Sony BMG), it’s chockfull of antiestablishment fury, and I have to admit I had a lot more fun listening to that one than I ever did Smashing Pumpkins. A little cheesy, sure, and a little lower on the “indie cred”-o-meter, but the band would probably have happily supported the subversion of little suburban pukes like me getting busted in an effort to consume their message. I’m pretty sure I paid for that one in dollars, not dignity, and I’m also pretty sure that if I still owned it today, I wouldn’t listen to it much. Even less, perhaps, than Gish. In retrospect, it would have made sense, but that’s life for ya. I obviously didn’t plan on getting caught, and the last thing one can expect from life is for it to make any sense. The longer I keep hoping that it might, however, the more obsessed with music I am bound to become.

Watch: Jane’s Addiction, “Been Caught Stealing“  [at youtube.com]

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