Can The Red Hot Chili Peppers Live Through This?
Hence the entusiasm around Californication, which reunites the band members with Rubin. The album is a pop-oriented Blood Sugar extension, from the bittersweet "Scar Tissue" to the near-ballad "Porcelain". The psycho-sexy funk stomp returns in a few songs, most notably "Get On Top" (in which Kiedis rhymes "gorilla" with "cunt-illa"). Lyrically Kiedis is alternating melancholua with positivism-witness "Road Trippin'," about three friends (Kiedis, Flea and Frusciante) journeying up the California coast, where they stop to dig the poetry of Big Sur and the setting sun.
The ingredients for success seem to have carefully stirred in though the band claim to be feeling no pressure to match Blood Sugar.
"Sure we want to sell a lot of records, and we want everyone to think we're cool" says Flea, a spark plug in a Charles Mingus t-shirt. "But wa feel like we made a really good record. We made an honest record. We've had success, and we've been a popular rock band for a long fucking time, and we're so past validating successful. When we had our biggest success, I was more miserable than I've ever been in my whole life."
Between Blood Sugar and Californication the band released 1995's One Hot Minute. While the Chili Peppers don't disavow the record, theu don't embraceit, either. One Hot Minute was, to many, the band's "heavy metal" record. It fell short of Blood Sugar both in sales and in critical acclaim.
One Hot Minute featured Dave Navarro, the guitar-playing phenom who injected Jane's Addiction with a Led Zeppelin-metts-punk charge. Navarro joined the Chili Peppers in 1993, despite his dislike for funk, and left the band in 1998. While the band avoid dissing Navarro, who's currently readying an album with his new project, Spread, they clearly feel that the marriage seemingly made in rock Valhalla never worked.
Kiedis remembers the tensions that led to Navarro's 1998 departure. "The difference between Dave and the band grew larger and larger, and Flea's lack of fulfillment got bigger and bigger until something had to break".
"Basically, Dave left the band;" explains Flea, choosing his words carefully. "We did not fire him; he did not quit. It was like, this is not working. Basically, the intangible thing that make magic happen were not happening."
Now the Chili Peppers offer quotes like Kiedis"[Californication] has absolutely no relationship to One Hot Minute." And Navarro, when describing Spread's album, tosses this barb: "It's certainly darker than the Chili Pepper record-there's not much that isn't."
"It got to the point in the last line-up of the band where we weren't having fun," says Flea. "Now we're in a situation where I can't fucking wait to get into the rehearsal studio and rock the fuck out. I can't wait to get up on a stage and jump out of my skin until I explode !"
Pause. "I haven't felt that way in a long time."
The Chili Peppers' rehearsal space sits on an innocuous block in Hollywood: in front of it is a theater in need of a paint job. The large, air-conditioned room contains two back seats from a car, complete with seat belts, so visitors can watch the Red Hots drive. Christmas lights decorate a spiral staircase. An image of a duck graced with a halo hangs above Smith's drum kit.
