RIP Jani Lane

[CrimsonE]

From TMZ.com:

"Jani Lane -- former lead singer of the rock band Warrant -- was found dead at a hotel in L.A. Thursday evening ... TMZ has learned.

Lane's body was discovered at the Comfort Inn hotel in Woodland Hills, CA. So far, no official cause of death has been released."

If this is true, then it is a shame.  Warrant  & Jani Lane may not have been the cup of tea for many on this board, but I really dug them in the heydey.  Aside from their flirtation into seriousness in the mid 90's, Warrant was a band that pretty much knew what it was about and did a decent job of playing their role.  Jani may not have been the best vocalist, but you can't deny that he went out there and had fun almost every night.  I met him a couple of times after shows, and he was always cool to me, fulfilling a motto he said often on stage back in the day:  "If you can't party with the people you're playing with, you shouldn't be playing for them in the first place."

[TAC]

Saw this this morning. Didn't care really for the studio stuff, but they were a great live band. Saw them twice back in the day, opening for Paul Stanley on his 1989 club tour in Hartford, and then again opening for Motley Crue on the Dr. Feelgood tour in Worcester later that year. Whether small club or arena, they put on a GREAT show.

[Tick]

My band opened for Warrant in the early ninety's at a club in New Haven called Toads Place. I shot some pool with Jani Lane before the show. He was quite a nice guy with a great sense of humor.
I was not a fan of the band but I enjoyed playing in front of them that night.
Very sad.

[WildeSilas]

Had no love for him in Warrant's heydey, but everyone should check out the mid-90's Ultraphobic and Belly to Belly. It was alt-rock at it's finest, though I think they were more like Lane solo albums rather than proper Warrant albums. I was stunned at the quality of songwriting because it was so far and above anything I'd heard from Warrant.

[bosk1]

Posted this in the other thread, but I guess I'll repost here as well.

First off, any story about finding someone at the "Comfort Inn in Woodland Hills" just cannot have a happy ending.  Ever.  Just...ugh.    But now that that's out of the way... 
 

This is one band I was sad to see fall over the years.  I saw them during the winter of 1988/89 (can't remember which month).  They were opening a show for Britny Fox, and nobody really knew who they were because they hadn't even released their first album yet, but they put on an absolutely amazing show with a ton of energy and some really well-written songs.  I remember buying DRFSR in February of '89 right when it came out (as I recall, I bought that and Tesla's The Great Radio Controversy in the same trip to the record store).  That was back in my military days, and I remember sitting around with that tape (no CD's, my friends!) blaring out of a tiny boombox while a bunch of us were sitting around playing spades out in the sand in Twenty Nine Palms, California, and people going "who are these guys?  Wow, yet another no-name rock band."  It was pretty satisfying seeing some of these same guys totally into the band six months or so later when Down Boys and Heaven were burning up the charts and their videos were all over the place.  Although I feel like I grew out of the subject matter of most of their material, I still pull out those old albums every now and then and am amazed at how well-written a lot of their songs are, and how brilliantly they could go from "chicks and party!" songs to songs that were really insightful and deep, more so than many would expect from your "typical hair band."  Mr. Rainmaker and Song And Dance Man are still some of my favorite songs from any band during that era.

[ZKX-2099]

I wasn't a big fan or anything but Uncle Toms Cabin is fucking awesome.

[EPICVIEW]

Sad News..

RIP..

saw and met them a few times, nice guys.. 

[jjrock88]

Lane was a great songwriter.  Uncle Toms Cabin is one of my all time favorites.  RIP

[CrimsonE]

To add to what others have said, it's a shame that Warrant got pigeonholed by the songs that really hit it big such as Heaven and Cherry Pie, because they had a number of other songs with some sophistication.  Uncle Tom's Cabin is a brilliant bit of storytelling, while I Saw Red blew away most of the "hair metal" ballads out there.  And although it was quite different from the immediately preceding albums, Dog Eat Dog had a number of really cool tunes such as April 2031 and Hole in the Wall. 

[Lowdz]

An underrated songwriter. Uncle Tom's Cabin, I Saw Red are great songs. Cherry Pie and Dog Eat Dog are great albums.

I know he was a tortured soul (aren't they all?) and it seems his demons have got him in the end. I hope he's happy now.

[wolfking]

Sad stuff.  He did have huge substance issues.

[YtseBitsySpider]

I heard today the police have a suspect............................................there's a warrant out for his arrest.












(too soon?)

at least they didn't find him in Uncle Tom's Cabin.....

or did he choke on some cherry pie?

Ok ok I'm done....sorry.

[The Dark Master]

Damn shame, he was a great song writer.  Even though I will admit to enjoying Cherry Pie as something as a guilty pleasure, that band had so many great songs that were just overlooked by the mainstream, the few MTV hits they had in the late 80's early 90's really did not do them justice.  Warrant was the prefect example of a band that was trapped by their own success.  At least they had a good run.

RIP, Jani 

[bosk1]

Absolutely terrific article:

Jani Lane was the first person to speak from the stage at the first concert I ever paid money to see, a 1989 show at the West Fargo Fairgrounds featuring Warrant, Great White, and Ratt. In retrospect, that was a real triple-bill of tragedy — Ratt’s Robbin Crosby was the first major '80s metal figure to contract HIV from heroin use, Great White was the accidental catalyst for the death of 100 people at a 2003 show in Rhode Island, and — today — the news broke that Lane was found dead at the age of 47 in Woodland Falls Hills, Calif. As I type this sentence, the cause of death has not been reported … but this was a 47-year-old musician who died in a hotel room. Do the math.

It’s easy to compliment the dead, but that’s often the only time we admit noncontextual truths: Lane was an incredible frontman, particularly in 1989. He was loquacious and funny and famous-looking, and Warrant tried so hard to be entertaining; they probably played for only 40 minutes, but they clearly did not want all the teenage girls wearing Ratt T-shirts in the mud to feel remotely ripped off. The only song most of the crowd knew was “Down Boys,” which they may have played twice; I remember they played “Heaven” and everybody sort of instantly knew this would be a supersuccessful single that a lot of guys would pretend to hate during prom. Considering how emotionally invested Warrant seemed in playing for 8,000 people in a city they knew nothing about, it must have been a wonderful time to be the singer in a band that seemed engineered for joy and hugeness. Yet I wonder how often Jani Lane was happy during the 22 years that followed. He had success, but it was the kind of success that’s hard to appreciate.

Lane wrote most of the music for Warrant and was extremely excited about the release of what would be their second album, which he wanted to title Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He thought the hypothetical title track, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was the most sophisticated thing he’d ever composed, and it probably was. But the people at Columbia Records thought it was too understated and maybe “too political” (or something), so they told Lane to write an anthem that was consciously unserious. He supposedly wrote “Cherry Pie” in less than 15 minutes, made several million dollars, and regretted it for 15 years. When you interviewed Lane during the late '90s, he would talk about “Cherry Pie” like a man who’d thoughtlessly married a gorgeous woman and immediately came to realize he’d irrevocably altered the very meaning of his life, but I guess Lane did that, too (in 1991 he married the actress from the “Cherry Pie” video, Bobbie Brown, but they divorced in ‘93). He sighed a lot. He still made jokes, but they were dark.

In general, Warrant had bad timing. They were blamed for killing heavy metal, even though they never exhibited any interest in being heavy or metallic. Warrant entered a genre of music after that genre had already peaked, which meant they were artificially pushed by industry insiders (who refused to accept that glam was fading) and unfairly maligned by self-consciously trendy fans (their ’91 tour with Trixter and Firehouse was mocked by everyone, including kids who went to the show and admitted it was awesome). Lane often told a story of walking into the Columbia offices in 1993 and expecting to see a framed poster of Warrant in the reception hallway, because that’s where it had always been; when he saw that this picture had been replaced by a likeness of Alice in Chains, he knew it meant something bad. But he kept trying. He really did. He still loved music. Critics will forever argue that the pop he made was fundamentally fake, and I understand what that argument entails. But Lane was not a fake person. When he did (what amounted to) a solo tour in ’96, he would make this weird pact with the audience: He would tell the crowd that he’d play all the old songs he kind of hated if they would just be willing to listen to the new songs he liked. That might sound retrospectively desperate, but that’s not how it felt at the time. It actually made him seem reasonable. He understood how expectation functioned and he realized that the experience of entertainment had no relationship to how non-fans viewed the quality of his work. Lane was less pretentious than most of the credible musicians who usurped his role in the popular culture.

Lane’s life got weird post-1996: A native of Northeast Ohio (and born with the paradoxical name of John Kennedy Oswald), he moved back to Cleveland and briefly became a chef. He gained weight and started wearing eyeglasses, and people thought this was hilarious, because guys who used to sing in rock bands are apparently supposed to live off blueberries and have 20/20 vision. He appeared on one of those terrible VH1 shows about losing weight and temporarily replaced the lead singer of Great White; he made a power-pop album that would have appealed to old Warrant fans if they’d only known it existed. He got a DUI and spent four months in jail. He leaves behind a 19-year-old daughter who probably looks a lot like the beautiful girls who used to be in Warrant videos. He died in a Comfort Inn, which just seems depressing as @#!*% . I can’t tell if he had an obviously great life or a quietly tragic life. Probably both, which is how it goes for most people.

https://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/32502/klosterman-remembers-warrants-jani-lane

[ZirconBlue]

Absolutely terrific article:<snip>

https://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/32502/klosterman-remembers-warrants-jani-lane

That was awesome. 

I saw Warrant opening for Poison (on the Flesh & Blood tour).  They had the best live audio mix I've ever heard.  You could actually hear the vocals clearly over the music, rather than the typical "crank the guitars to 11" you get at most rock concerts.

[CrimsonE]

I had the good fortune to see Warrant about ten times or so over the course of the late 80's and 90's. 

I first caught them opening for Ratt (along with Great White) in 1989, then again with Motley Crue later that year.  In 1990, I saw them with Poison.  I wouldn't see them again until a bar show in 1994, after Jani left and returned to the band the first time. Over the next few years, I'd catch them in several bar shows int he Chicago area, including two New Years Eve shows (1995 & 1996).  In 1997, I caught them opening for Alice Cooper (along with Dokken & Slaughter).  The last time I saw them was in 2001, when the co-headlined with Ratt (along with openers Dokken and Kip Winger). 

No matter who they were with, or how long they played, Warrant always gave their all, and Jani was a large part of it.  It's a shame they got pigeonholed into the "glam" genre, because much of their 90's work showed they could get beyond that.  But thanks to the rise of grunge and the decline of pop metal in the early 90's, much of the audience never got to hear it, and these days, the only thing we here from Warrant live was their first two albums, and a couple of songs from Dog Eat Dog (an album I can appreciate a lot more now than I did at the time).