Red Hot Once Again!
Can you talk a bit about your frame of mind when you left the Chili Peppers back in 1992?
Well, when you live this lifestyle where you do whatever you want to do…I found, after we finished touring for Mother’s Milk, that what I loved spending my life doing was playing guitar all the time. I loved learning about different colors that you can put through your instrument by studying all kinds of guitar players and just digging, really closely, the different ways that people use the instrument to get different kinds of sounds out of it. And I was having a really good time putting together different types of styles of guitar playing that I loved, and I started really developing my own style of guitar playing. I did nothing but that for the whole time we wrote and recorded BloodSugar. By the time we were done recording BloodSugar, it felt so good to be me. My head was just swirling all the time. I felt really free inside-like anything I played was gonna be a good feeling coming out. I felt that the type of style that I had come up with was something that could go a lot of different places. It seemed like no matter what I did- if I told myself, “Play shitty, play like you suck” – it would always sound good. Everything I did sounded good.
Then we had to go on tour, though, and I realized that going on tour was gonna fuck with me. It wasn’t gonna do anything for this state that I had gotten my brain into- where I just felt really good all the time and was putting really good feelings into the air. And my head was telling me to quite the band, but I couldn’t make a move that would create so many sad feelings among these guys whom I was very close to at the time. But once we started touring, we all drifted apart, and we weren’t getting along anymore. Anthony and I hated each other- we wouldn’t look at each other offstage, wouldn’t talk to each other. Flea eventually was really mad at me for not wanting to work on my relationship with Anthony, not wanting to do anything about it, just leaving it how it was. I didn’t care if we never spoke to each other; I didn’t care if we never looked at each other because I didn’t want to be friends with him. Flea started to resent me because of that, and maybe Anthony, too…I don’t know.
What was the breaking point while the band was touring in 1992?
It just got to the point where it was just…I mean, I could sort of pretend to be nice about everything and say the occasional sentence to Anthony here and there if we were eating together or something. But it just wasn’t gonna go anywhere. Everything that we had built up as a band from BloodSugar had gone downhill since then. I had lived this life of putting nothing into the air but good feelings, and then all these bad feelings had been generated, at which I was the center. And as a band onstage, we weren’t listening to each other- we were so tight that we didn’t have to listen to each other to sound good. But I was being real spontaneous every night, playing differently every night, only nobody was listening to me. The only people who noticed the vibes that I was grabbing onto every night were my guitar tech and some girlfriend in the audience.
It would’ve been impossible to try to make another album at that point. Bands do it, but that’s when they begin to suck. That’s when the music isn’t as good, because you’re not hearing people who are playing music because they love it and they love getting off on each other, they’re just playing music because it’s something that they make money doing and are successful at. I’m not into that, and I wasn’t gonna go forward with that. I felt no excitement about the camaraderie of the band anymore. I didn’t like the people in the band; we weren’t making each other happy. When I quit the band- I had been thinking about it for about a year- it had gotten to the point where it had fucked with me enough to where I felt like I had nothing left inside. I just felt destroyed, because I had gotten myself to this really pure, beautiful place, and I had just let touring destroy it all. To be putting out all these beautiful things in the air with these people who you had originally developed this expression with, and have them just not care at all.
During the period when you were away from the band, you released a pair of solo albums: Niandra La’Des/Usually Just a T-shirt and Smile from the Streets you Hold. I particularly enjoyed the first one, but I must say, Smile scared the hell out of me.
Smile was recorded into my four-track at the same time as Niandra La’Des was recorded: while we were writing and recording BloodSugarSexMagik. At the same time that I developed the guitar style that I felt would be the perfect kind of guitar playing to play with Flea, I also developed my own style of writing music, writing lyrics, and playing guitar in a very “non-rock star-ish” way. Niandra La’Des and Usually Just a T-shirt were released [on the same disc] because they were solid, conceptual records; they’re two complete sorts of feelings. Smile from the Streets You Hold was just leftover stuff that I had sitting around from the same period, with the exception of five songs: three songs that were recorded into a cassette player immediately before it was released- songs I really wish weren’t on there- and the two songs where I’m screaming, which were recorded in 1994 or so. But the rest of them were just leftover songs.
The album was made only because I needed money for drugs. I kept going back and forth with money, based on getting my record royalties every six months- I would spend that on drugs, and then I would have no money. And, at one of the periods where I had no money, this guy offered me a certain amount to deliver him a solo record. That was the only reason why Smile was done, so it’s scattered; it’s all over the place. I have certain friends who love it anyway and tell me, “Don’t try to get it back.” Because sometimes I think that I want to just get rid of it- buy it back from the guy or something. But I don’t really care. It is what it is. It’s music I recorded. I mean, I’m proud of who I’ve been; I’m proud of who I’ve always been.
I understand you quit playing guitar completely for a while.
Yeah. What I had expressed on the guitar hadn’t amounted to anything other than me just being severely depressed. So, when I decided to become a heroin addict, I felt good all the time. And I wanted to just devote my life to going inside myself and enjoying the feeling of not being responsible to do anything, other than doing things to make myself feel good- without any concern for how I appear to the outside world. I spent a few years being invisible and enjoying that, and I’m a much richer person now because of it. I wanted to expand my understanding of art and artists. I was looking up to certain painters for what they expressed and their way of expressing. And now I realize that I do the same thing with the guitar. I have a perspective on it that’s fresh, that I’m excited about. I’m so happy that, as a teenager, I put all the hours into practicing the guitar that I did, because I’m able to get any kind of color out of it that I want.
