The Band That Tried To Kill Themselves
October 1999, Q Magazine (UK)
thanks to Eleni and Katie, for typing it out
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There was heroin, spanking, prostitutes, heroin, indecent exposure, divorce, lethal dengue fever and more heroin. Then thing got really bad for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Q essays four gruesome years at the heart of the world’s funkiest rock band, the fall and rise of guitarist John Frusciante, and their amazing rebirth. “It’s almost worth the price we paid,” they tell Phil Sutcliffe.
It was 1997 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were nowhere to be seen. Two years on from their sixth album One hot Minute’s lukewarm reception and no new songs, no show in the studio, not a funky beat, not a sock on a cock. Never a sighting of the foursome in the same place at the same time. It looked bad – particularly when the guitarist and provocateur Dave Navarro took bassist Michael “Flea” Balzary off on a Jane’s Addiction reunion tour and lured drummer Chad Smith towards joining him in a putative band called Spread.
Then Red Hot Chili Peppers announced that they would play the Tibetan Freedom Concert. But they pulled out because they hadn’t rehearsed. Instead, they planned exotic gigs in Hawaii and Alaska for July, which were later postponed to September when, back home in Los Angeles, singer/rapper Anthony Kiedis crashed his Harley Davidson, the redemption rock’n’roll glamour of the accident rather tarnished by the revelation that he had been felled by an elderly motorist who failed to check her mirror. In August, they did get on stage in Japan’s Mount Fuji Festival, but halfway through their set a hurricane struck and that was that. Then drummer Chad smith came off his motorbike on Sunset Boulevard, dislocating a shoulder. Those Hawaii and Alaska gigs were put back to December.
At this point, Kiedis went on MTV to fly the flag and admitted that he had been using heroin again (having overcome a near-fatal addiction in 1988 after an overdose killed the band’s original guitarist, Hillel Slovak). He explained that “When I sue drugs, my life sucks,” but promised he was clean again so it was “really beautiful”.
On the whole, that seemed encouraging. But nothing happened except that the December dates in Hawaii and Alaska were postponed, again due to lack of rehearsal. Flea said 1997 was “the year of nothing”.
The bleak mood was further darkened by news of John Frusciante, the handsome young guitarist who left in 1992 after playing on two of the band’s best albums, Mother’s Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The Los Angeles New Times newspaper found him holed up at the Chateau Marmont in a ghastly state: immersed in drugs, teeth gone, hair falling out, fingernails broken and bloody, skin scarred and scabbed, saying “I don’t care whether I live or die. I’m not afraid of death”.
Everyone who knew him thought was done foe. And few were much more optimistic about the band either. The only uncertainty seemed to be whether their demise would play a farce or tragedy.
But that was then and this is 1999. Reunited, refurbished, practically resurrected, Red Hot Chili Peppers are riding three million worldwide sales of their new album Californication. It’s a fixture in the US Top 10 and the summer’s European bestseller. Live, as Flea put it, they have “beamed down from Jupiter and exploded in the faces” of the multitudes who attended in antiviolence tour for American high school kids, the third Woodstock and a row of European festivals included, at press time, Reading and Leeds on August 29 and 30.
So here they are in a murky LA rehearsal studio – Q their only audience – stood in a circle facing one another, grooving like madmen. On guitar, long hair lashing, false teeth flashing, funky right hand thrashing, all the way from the edge of darkness: John Frusciante. Red Hot Chili Peppers are the band that refused to die.
They Blow into a photographic studio off La Brea, steaming ideas, irritation and deodorant-defying sweat. Smith takes everything in a large, good-natured stride, but Flea and Kiedis sulk over clothes and poses, while Frusciante rejects the stylists’s suits – “Aren’t my clothes good enough for you? I only bought them two days ago” – and takes against the photographer – “I don’t want him telling me what to do. I don’t him telling me how to play guitar”.
There’s one thing on their minds when they dally with the media: preconceptions. Right after “hello” Flea complains about “the way people, particularly in Europe, see us as these clownish, jock, Californian, misogynist playboys. It’s insulting and offensive to me.” Conversely, Kiedis immediately brings up an antique Q article which averred that Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “homoerotic history is almost as interesting as their music”.
Red Hot Chili Peppers stand simultaneously accused of gross daft laddishness and angling for the pink dollar and they swear they can’t understand why. OK. Let’s refresh their memories.
Clownish? The band first made its name by stripping down to sports socks on willies at an LA club and repeated the routine for the Beatles-parodying Abbey Road EP sleeve in 1988. They have played major gigs light bulbs and flame-throwing helmets on their heads. Sexist/misogynist? Their early albums features unambiguous anthems such as Party On Your Pussy and Freaky Styley (“I fuck ‘em just to see the look on their face”). Later, in 1990 Kiedis, Flea and Smith had coincidental conviction for sexual misbehaviour with female fans – Kiedis for flashing his genitals at a backstage meet-and-greet, Flea and Smith for “spanking” a stage invader. Homoerotic? Flea and Kiedis maintain torsos of carved muscle and love to get heir shirts off on stage – Flea oftentimes, as at Woodstock, going the full naked monty. And they have done photo sessions in full drag, they hug a lot in public and their 1995 warped video featured an enthusiastically interminable kiss between Kiedis and Navarro…
Red Hot Chili Peppers are sexy to all-comers, they’re wild and funny and sometimes they go too far. But they’ve also written tender love songs to close, dead males which bely their musclebound, party-on shtick. On 1991’s rumbustious Blood Sugar Sex Magik, My Lovely Man bade the gentlest farewell to Hillel Slovak (“Listen to Roberta Flack/But I know you won’t come back”), while 1995’s Transcending was addressed to another friend and drugs victim, River Phoenix (“I love you, you’re my brother”).
Kiedis shrugs, “Yeah, they’re love songs for a man. Not sexually romantic love songs, but love songs nonetheless. We didn’t grow up in a homophobic community, so we never worried about showing affection for one another, the ‘don’t undress in front of me, I’m not like that’ feeling.”
