Socks Away!
When many bands might have settled into a comfortable holding pattern after 20 years, the Chili Peppers have made an expectations-confounding new album that reiterates their skills as musicians and songwriters and demonstrates a refreshing reluctance to sit back and trade off past glories. They have finally, decisively, grown up.
It would not, however, be a Red Hot Chili Peppers record without some strife along the way. Towards the end of the Californication tour, Frusciante was locked into a stressful relationship and suffering from psychosomatic back pain. For much of that same period Flea was even worse, reeling from a traumatic break-up with his girlfriend of five years and wracked by panic attacks.
However, mid-way through the tour, Flea experienced an epiphany after a conversation with self-help writer Caroline Myss. “She said, Everytime you go on stage you feel you have to prove something to the audience and you don’t have to prove shit. You’re gonna kill yourself that way. And it was some of the best advice I ever got in my life. That was definitely a watershed moment.”
Frusciante meanwhile is blissfully happy with his current girlfriend, 19-year-old Stella Schnabel. She’s the daughter of artist/director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls), who provides the faintly disturbing cover art for By The Way.
Frusciante and Kiedis worked on the vocals and overdubs for several months at the Chateau Marmont, where the guitarist was living. It seems strange for Frusciante to return to the same hotel where he almost wasted away at the height of his heroin addiction in’97, but Kiedis contends otherwise. “There’s no reason to pretend like it didn’t happen. It was pretty dismal and scary but we lived through it.”
None of the band need prompting to sing Frusciante’s praises. When the guitarist was first in the band he was closer to Kiedis than Flea, but it was the latter who maintained a friendship in the following years while the singer simmered with ‘animosity’. During the frustration following One Hot Minute, Flea told Kiedis that if they didn’t try to get Frusciante back, he was leaving. So, after a fraught separation from Navarro, that’s just what they did.
“All that resentment just evaporated instantly, “ says Kiedis. “It’s like a boyfriend-girlfriend thing. Sometimes you’re so fucking hurt by somebody that you won’t allow yourself to be friends with them. It doesn’t mean that deep down you don’t love them. But, you know, ego. Ego and mind games.
“New Agey as it sounds, I think we were put on this planet to make this special, magical music,” says Smith. “When he came back we realised that. We don’t take it for granted now.”
And what a curious chemistry it is. They don’t live in each others’ pockets anymore, nor has their friendship become a mere business arrangement. Their bond is both genuine and, to the outsider, unfathomable. As Rick Rubin says, “They’re very different individuals. Each has their own world.”
At the Casa Del Mar, the CD:UK interviewer asks Flea and Smith who their favourite British bands are. Smith names Ocean Colour Scene (he’s friends with Steve White from Paul Weller’s band). Flea opts for the Prodigy and Aphex Twin.
“I think English people are repelled by me,” he tells Q later, only half-joking. “One newspaper called me an oafish troll so I’m going to hold that against them for the rest of my life. Spirituality be damned! I’m gonna be bitter.”
