"For different reasons, I went into them thinking that I didn't hope to get the gig": Why Eric Avery didn’t think he was a good fit for Metallica or Smashing Pumpkins

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Jane’s Addiction bassist Eric Avery has been talking about the time he auditioned for Metallica, his brief tenure with Smashing Pumpkins and how he believes he was never a good fit for either of those bands.

Avery was considered for the vacant bassist role after Jason Newsted left Metallica in 2001, but in the end the band plumped for Robert Trujillo. In a new interview with Guitar World, Avery was asked whether he thought his career would be different if he’d joined either of those bands full-time.

"I have,” he considered. “I've thought about what that would be like – and it's not all to the positive. Well, I shouldn't say that in both of those cases. For different reasons, I went into them thinking that I didn't hope to get the gig because I really thought that I wasn't right for them.”

"So I entered into them as experiences, like, 'I'm gonna have a life experience; I'm gonna create a memory.' Not every day does one travel to Santa Rosa (California) to play a few songs with Metallica, you know? I didn't see it as a job audition; and in that way, it really delivered. They were great to me, too. I came away with a great day from my human lifetime."

A few years later Avery joined Smashing Pumpkins for a couple of weeks. Regarding that time the bassist said: "In the case of the Pumpkins, at the time, I didn't know Billy Corgan, but I knew he wasn't the easiest person to work with. And because of my tendency to have trouble not speaking truth to power, if power needs speaking to, I just thought, 'This is not going to last, but it'll be interesting. It'll be an interesting week or two.' And it really was."

But he added: "I found Corgan to be quite an inspiring guy to work with for the two or three weeks that I did."

Avery has had a varied career outside of Jane’s Addiction. After the group’s original split, he and guitarist Dave Navarro teamed up on the short-lived Deconstruction, he has also been part of Alanis Morrissette’s backing band and an unofficial member of Garbage for their last three albums. Then there was also his Nineties solo project, Polar Bear.

As for new music from Jane’s, Avery said he was “guardedly optimistic” that they’d be a new album eventually from the reformed band: “The phrase that Dave and I were talking about the other day is: ‘If there is a Jane’s Addiction in 2025, then there will be new music for sure.’ But you just never know if there’s going to be a band at all.”