Good Time Boys
Because the interplay between the four is so intuitive and emotional, it’s often impossible to reduce a Chili Pepper jam to a simple process of cause and effect. “It’s not like listening to another guy and hearing what he’s playing, and saying, ‘Oh that’s bitchin’. That’s gonna make me do this,’” says Flea. “When it’s at its best, there’s no thought involved. It’s just like energy in the air.”
Inevitably, the band will go back to the best bits of a particular jam and try to develop them into a song. “We all kind of know when it feels good. So if it feels good, then we’ll record it,” says Smith. “We’ll make little tapes, then Antyhony will go an dlisten to them in the car. He’ll come up with an idea, and he’ll come back to us. It kinda goes around like that.”
“The reason this record came out so good for me is because the music sort of told me what to sing,” says Kiedis. “I didn’t have to think too much about it. The music definitely implied what the vocals should be. All I had to do was close my eyes and I could hear what my parts were. Which is a huge difference from how it had been for a while, where either my head had been closed off or I wasn’t as inspired by what I was hearing. But when John came back, things just flowed.”
Ironically, even though things were rockin’ when the four played together in Flea’s garage, life outside rehearsals was just plain rocky. Kiedis and Frusciante were in the process of getting sober after dealing with long-term drug problems, while Flea and Smith were going through romantic difficulties, with Flea suffering through a painful breakup and Smith dealing with divorce.
The Chili Peppers don’t subscribe to the “you gotta suffer” school of music-making – “We don’t have to be tortureed to make good music,” Smith says flatly – but neither do they deny that there was some exceptional emotional energy at play in the making of this album. “I listened to it the other day, and I thought, Wow, it really is a pretty relaxed record,” says Flea. “And considering what we’ve been through, I would have thought it would be more edgy or something. I know for myself, a lot of times when we were recording the record I was feeling so much emotional pain – hot and cold flashes and stuff. But it really is relaxed.”
For a moment, Flea is at a loss to explain how the album could feel so comfortable when he and his bandmates were in torment. Eventually, he suggests that what we’re ultimately hearing in the album is honesty – the sound of four guys who aren’t afraid to be open to one another. “Being true to yourself is about being relaxed,” he says. “So I guess, even though you don’t even realize it at the time, wen you’re like in romantic pain or some kind of pain like that, by feeling that pain and not running away from it, you’re being honest… I guess you’re relaxed when you’re really being yourself. Even though you might not feel like it at the time.”
For his part, Kiedis was feeling awash in affection while the band was making music. That’s reflected to a certain degree in the album’s lyrics, which are far more romantic than the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am attitude found in early Chili Peppers songs like “Party on Your Pussy.” It’s one thing for Kiedis to come off all warm and fuzzy on ballad fare like “Porcelain” and “This Velvet Glove,” but there’s even a sensitive, romantic side to uptempo funk-rockers like “Around the World.”
Funky But Chic
The history of the Red Hot Chili Peppers
Talk to the Red Hot Chili Peppers about how they make music, and they’ll asure you that every member of the quartet is an equal. Talk to the band’s fans, though, and you’re more likely to hear about Anthony Kiedis and Flea than you are about John Frusciante and Chad Smith. Obviously, some of that may have to do with the energetic stage presence the singer and bassist have maintained over the years. But it may also be because those two are the only guys who have been Chili Peppers from the beginning.
The two met as students at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. Both were transplants. Kiedis grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, before moving to L.A. to live with his actor father; Flea – born Michael Balzary in Melbourne, Australia – had grown up in New York before moving to L.A. as a teen.
When they first hooked up, Flea was playing in a band called Another School, with drummer Jack Irons and guitarist Hillel Slovak. Kiedis signed on as the group’s M.C., but the group fell apart after Flea got an offer to join the seminal L.A. hardcore band Fear.
Flea’s involvement in Fear didn’t last, though, and in 1983 he and Kiedis played their first gig as the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their sound was unlike anything on the L.A. scene, while their stage show – which sometimes saw the band taking the stage wearing nothing but strategically placed tube socks – made them a must-see. Within a year, the group, which also included guitarist Jack Sherman and drummer Cliff Martinez, was signed to Enigma, and cut its first album. Produced by Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill, Red Hot Chili Peppers (1984) was built around the funk-punk fusion that would become the band’s hallmark. But the sound was too raw and unfocused to have much commercial impact, and the album stiffed.
Sherman and Martinez left and were replaced with Slovak and Irons, who ad been playing in a group of their own called What Is This? Deciding to focus on the funk side of their sound, the Chili Peppers hired P-Funk mastermind George Clinton to produce their second album, Freaky Styley (1985). Although the album never cracked the charts, its approach was much closer to the mark, as the Chili Peppers let their funk flag fly on such down-and-dirty numbers as “Blackeyed Blonde” and “Catholic School Girls Rule.”
By 1988, the band seemed on a roll, as The Uplift Mofo Party Plan (1987) finally earned a place on the charts. It wasn’t a very high place – the album peaked at No. 148 – but then again, radio stations weren’t exactly eager to get beind a band whose signature tune was something called “Party on Your Pussy.” Still, the Chili Peppers’ blend of instrumental energy and conceptual audacity (the album also included a rap-style remake of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”) was quickly building the band an audience.
The group almost lost everything in June of 1988, though, when Slovak died of a heroin overdose. Irons, worried that Kiedis’ drug problems would result in a similar end, bailed, leaving the Chili Peppers for Eleven (he eventually wound up drumming with Pearl Jam). P-Funk alumnus Blackbyrd McKnight was brought in to replace Slovak, and Dead Kennedys drummer D.H. Peligro filled Irons’ chair, but that line-up fell apart before the band could get into the studio.
