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Anthony gives Flea all the credits for surviving during the Chili Peppers period after One Hot Minute , '96 till '98. In those years the band only existed on paper. “Flea was always the one that stayed optimistic and patient. He believed in the band. A lot more then I did. I mean, I know my weaknesses. Within the band I am the one with the longest drug past. You know; on and off, on and off. Again and again. Since One Hot Minute I've got it under control again, I know drugs have nothing to offer me anymore. Do you know what the worst thing is that heroin does to you? It destroys all the love that is in you. The love for others, yourself, and the beautiful things in life... Anyhow, Flea stayed strong. He kept the faith, regardless of his personal crisis. He was often close to despair; he found it terrible, the way the band was especially in '97. But he was the one that encouraged me to visit John in rehab last year.” The question about how that went, the first meeting between John and Anthony in years is met with a deep silence at first. “Well eh...,” starts Anthony, after which he turns to John. “Is this a uncomfortable subject for you?” John nods no. Anthony then talks about their mutual friend Bob, that called him one day with the announcement that John was doing better. He was in a new, final stage of rehab. “John was going to be transferred to a closed observation centre, where he could get in touch with himself again. Bob said that he had asked John if he wanted anyone to visit him, on which John said two names, one of those names was Bob’s. After that Bob told John that he knew someone else who cared about him: Anthony from the Peppers. And John replied: Okay, you can add Anthony to the list, since visitors had to be on a official list before they were allowed into the centre. So I finally went there.” According to John it was a series of meetings. There was the meeting with the sandwich, that was from before that time and the two had met before at a reunion concert of Jane's Addiction. “It was great to slowly become friends with someone again who I wasn't always this close with. I noticed that Anthony had changed a lot since the time in which I was in the band. It finally made me feel good to be close to him.” Both emphasize that those meetings had absolutely nothing to do with music and John’s return to the Chili Peppers. “We weren't thinking about that.” says Anthony. “We had to first trust each other and become friends again as humans.”

In the spring of '98 the big moment was there: Flea had talked and confronted Anthony with it being time for John to come back. “But I hadn't even thought about it,” says Anthony. “ I thought John wasn't interested in that.”

One phone call from Flea was enough for John: John said yes. Gladly. After that everything went quickly, says Anthony. From the first minute that he, Flea, John and drummer Chad Smith played together, it was great. “The old chemistry was back. We experienced a great summer with the four of us. We locked ourselves up in Flea’s garage and jammed for months. Man, you should have seen it, 3 guys in a corner of the garage, rockin' as hell. I hadn't heard that in 7 or 8 years. So inspiring. Especially the sight of John. When he closed his eyes and his hair fell in front of his face, I thought:O shit! I then knew what we had missed for all those years. And it only got better.” The new Chili Pepper-CD became only a matter of time. Or actually: no time at all. “It all went so frighteningly fast,” says John. “Soon we got a lot of new material. And everyday it became more.”

According to Anthony the band is doing so well is mainly because of John. And his long absence. “A big cliché, I know, but I think that it all had a reason. If John hadn't left in '92 we wouldn't have been here. The band would have exploded a long time ago. The way things went then couldn't go on much longer. We are now this good because of the split not in spite of it. And we have all become older and wiser. When John joined the band he was only eighteen. He was confronted with things he couldn't deal with. Luckily he has always been smart for his age. As stand-up philosopher (laughs), as an artist and as a thinker. In many ways John is the brightest of the bunch.”

Anthony and John don't want to know anything about a relative comparison between the current positivism within the Chili Peppers and that of four years ago. “That was a totally different thing.” But still: the band was trusting and optimistic in '95, just before One Hot Minute came out, as well. The band also had a series of nasty incidents, after John’s downfall there was the problem of finding a replacement, the long-term fatigue sickness of Flea, the adjustment problems with Dave Navarro and then there was finally something to be happy about: a new CD, a scheduled tour and a line-up that seemed indestructible. It became a disillusion: One Hot Minute was not as successful as expected and that was also applied to the tour. Moreover the band couldn't adjust to Navarro. In '96 the band faced a temporary stop and in '97 everything was quite around the band, Flea calls this year the year of nothing. John admits that even now “he can think of small things that can make the band fall apart in a second,” but he trusts the wisdom and life experience of the members. “Meanwhile I have experienced too many hard and painful things to worry about a potential disaster, especially at a time in which everything is going well. Man, I've been through such shitty times that I'm cheerful even when things are going wrong. You can imagine what I am like when things are going well.” (Laughs)

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