Punk Funk Mofos from Hell
April 1990, Guitar Player (USA)
thanks to Naomi for typing it out
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When Hillel Slovak O.D’ed in the summer of ’88, it looked like the plug had been pulled on the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The 25-year-old guitarist had defined much of the quartet’s sound and attitude, and he’d been a soulmate of bassist Flea and vocalist Anthony Kiedis since the three were teenagers.
Drummer Jack Irons quit after Slovak’s death, and Flea and Anthony set about rebuilding the band. Their first attempt misfired; recruiting sometime Parliament/Funkadelic guitarist Blackbird McKnight and ex-Dead Kennedys drummer D. H. Peligro was neatly symbolic of the Peppers’ funk and punk roots, but the chemistry wasn’t right. Flea and Anthony took another stab at the formula, and this time they blew up the chem lab. Current guitarist John Frusciante combines the over-the-top craziness of Slovak with the metal edge of Jack Sherman, the band’s very first guitarist. And Chad Smith, while not as straight-out funky like the group’s earlier drummers, anchors the proceedings with a rock-solid groove.
The group’s latest album, Mother’s Milk, is a bona-fide pop hit. The Chili Peppers are breaking out of the college radio ghetto, and their rubbery mugs are all over MTV. All this, mind you, without having watered down their music (equal parts early-‘70s funk and early- ‘80s thrash), their live shows (high impact, sweat sodden aerobic soul reviews), or their attitude (an appealing sex-as-liberation ideology combined with a locker-room grossness that sometimes degenerates into jock-headed sexism).
But there’s more to being a Red Hot Chili Pepper than playing James Brown licks at 78 r.p.m. while wearing nothing but a tube sock on your penis. Flea and Frusciante are terrific players, and the band’s songwriting is better then ever. They’ve always demostrated impeccable taste in choosing cover tunes (recording Sly Stone’s “If You Want Me To Stay,” The Meter’s “Africa,” and Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” among others), but on Mother’s Milk, originals like “Taste The Pain,” “Knock Me Down,” and “Johnny, Kick A Hole In The Sky” hold their own quite comfortably against powerhouse renditions of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” and Jimi Hendrix’ “Fire”. At their best, the Red Hot Chili Peppers can animate your ass and hormones like few other bands.
The Philosophy
John: Before I joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers, they were my favorite band in the world. I knew all of the guitar parts, solos, bass lines, and lyrics.
Flea: I met John through D. H. Peligro, and we jammed a couple of times. I was recording some stuff for the new record at home, and I thought the things I recorded with John sounded better than what I recorded with Blackbird.
John: Ever since I first started playing, I’ve only had one philosophy, and it’s one that I share with Flea: Play every note like it’s your last. It isn’t technique that’s important, but the expression of your life through your music.
Flea: When John first joined, he was not playing as much good stuff as he does now, even though he was perfectly capable of it then. But he was worried about playing things that would please us, instead of just being himself and letting his natural playing flow, which is what he’s doing much more now.
John: Yeah. And my playing has changed a lot since we recorded the album – I play a lot less. This isn’t the kind of band that features any one player, and there’s no room for a guitarist who wants to show people how fast he can play. For example, the perfect guitar part to suit one of Flea’s bass lines might be just one note every bar. But I might have been afraid to do that when I first joined the band, because I figured if I didn’t put any thought into it, how good could it be? It’s a matter of not being afraid to play the simplest part imaginable, because that’s what good bands do. So I’ve become more relaxed with myself.
The Album
Flea: This band has been through a lot of good things and a lot of bad things. I think our current success is due to a variety of reasons. For one thing, the record company has changed, and there are different people working on our record. Then there are the years of touring and working real hard. And we’ve got a really good record.
You’ve kept the heavy groove, but now it’s supporting the stronger songs.
Flea: That has a lot to do with the new elements in the band. John wrote the chords for “Knock Me Down.”
John: Stuff like that just comes naturally to me, I guess. I know my scales, modes, chord theory, and all that stuff, but I don’t think about what I’m doing. We never think of the technical aspects of what we do, or what type of song we’re trying to write. But even though the structure of that particular song was mine, everyone puts in their two cents on every song, so everything is really written by the whole band. Most of the shit just come out of jamming with each other.
Is Mother’s Milk the closest you’ve come to capturing your live energy in the studio?
Flea: It’s hard for me to say. It may be.
John: It’s hard to look at your own work very objectively sometimes. I can’t really listen to the album myself because my own playing has changed, plus there were the problems we had making it – how long it took, and the friction between us and the producer.
Flea: There’s always the album you want to make, the album you make, and the album you wish you made.
The Mothership
Flea: I never thought, “Hey, I’ve got a great idea! Let’s take punk rock and funk, and put them together and make a song!” It was just elements of all the things that I loved. It was what I liked, what I listened to, and what I was able to play. It was never really conscious. At that time, a lot of our songs just started from bass lines. But when I picked up my bass and started wailing by myself, that was the kind of shit I played. Basically, I liked playing funk, but the natural me was very aggressive. I liked that feeling of beating the shit out of the bass, but doing it in a funky way.
Much of your sound is derived from early –‘70s progressive black rock.
Flea: Like I said, we don’t try to copy anything, but that is some of my favorite music – Sly And The Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and, in particular, Funkadelic. They’re my favorite band. My favorite P-Funk record is probably America Eats Its Young, but there’s so much great stuff that most people have never heard, albums like Hardcore Jollies and Let’s Take It To The Stage. One Nation Under A Groove is an incredible record, but that was their first hit album, and it was more slick and produced. The earlier Funkadelic stuff was balls-out rockin’.
John: The shit before that had a lot more heaviness going on in the guitars. They’ve just released Maggot Brain on CD, and that’s one of the fuckin’ heaviest albums.
Flea: They just did the music they wanted to do, and it didn’t fit into any category. When I first started playing in this band, I had never heard a lot of Funkadelic, but I think what we’re doing is very similar, except they came out of the acid/hippie thing, and we came out of the punk rock thing. Rock, funk, whatever you want to call it, they were one of the greatest bands. As a guitar player, Eddie Hazel is right up there with Jimi Hendrix.
John: Yeah, I’d like to tell the readers of your magazine who listen to all this heavy metal bullshit being played nowadays that the truest, heaviest metal is on early Funkadelic records.
Flea: They were heavier metal than Black Sabbath ever was.
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