Socks Away!
During the recording of By The Way, Red Hot Chili Peppers decorated the studio in order to feel more at home. Some members brought tapestries or film noir posters or incense. Chad Smith brought a picture of dogs playing poker. “You familiar with that one?” he says with a throaty laugh. “Ha! That was my inspiration.”
Smith is one of those drummers who seem to consider it their duty to act in a drummer-like-manner. A couple of years ago he attended a ‘drum clinic’ in England with fellow sticksmen from the likes of Jamiroquai, the Prodigy and Iron Maiden. It sounds like the set-up to a light bulb joke. “Drummers are the nice guys of the band,” he says. “They’re more normal and stuff. Those guys out front, I dunno about them.”
Smith’s smoking Marlboros now, jamming the stubs into Flea’s lamb chop massacre. He looks like he should be the star of a sit-com about a skirt-chasing baseball coach. However, Q’s suggestion that he is the least troubled Chili Pepper prompts an explosive roar of laughter.
“It’s all smoke and mirrors my friend. I'm the worst, heheheh! But, yeah, maybe it’s part of my role in the band, being the drummer. I like the other guys to feel like they can always count on me. But, you know, there’s dark places.
When was the last time you went to extremes?
“Pretty recently, heheheh. It’s been, like, the last three months. Up until about two weeks ago. I had things I didn’t really want to confront, I got into a pattern of numbing myself with alcohol, and I was fucking shit up in my personal life. I’m not like, [whining] I’m never gonna do anything ever again! There’s just a point like, h this is no good. I’m a grown man for god’s sake!”
Smith is a father twice over, divorced from the mother of five-year-old Manon, but still with the mother of 16-month-old Ava. Recently, he was the first band-member to turn 40 (Flea and Kiedis are 39), and celebrated with a “pimp and ho” garden party. “John came as a giant pimple and Flea came as a garden hoe,” he reports. “Very clever, those two, verrrry clever. My mom came out. She was a good-looking ho.”
Contrary to rumour, Chad doesn’t travel on a separate tourbus; he laughs at reports that he’s nicknamed the others’ vehicle ‘the tofu bus’. “We hang, not as much as we used to, but it’s not a substance thing. I don’t feel I have to go to yoga meditation class with Flea to feel connected. I’m not really at that point yet. I'm getting there, though.”
What are your interests outside music?
“I like to ride motorcycles. I like to scuba dive…. My favourite colour is red.”
Tonight, Smith is off to LA’s Viper Room to an ironic hair metal club night called Metal Shop. Yoga can wait.
The following lunchtime, Anthony Kiedis goes to his favourite vegan restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard. It’s been said that LA is the only place where famous people can feel normal, and today, like most days, he’s just another diner, tucking into a bowl of black bean soup.
Between the ages of six and 11, Kiedis lived in Michigan. He has spent the rest of his life in this city. His father Blackie Dammett was an actor and, when he was 14, Anthony appeared in a couple of films under the name Cole Dammett. But his role in 1978’s F.I.S.T. – as Sylvester Stallone’s son – was something of a disappointment. “I had one line. It was, Pass the milk. And I think you can just see my arm in the frame as I say it.”
When Kiedis devoted himself to music instead, he was determined not to let it fail, even when Hillel Slovak and drummer Jack Irons left to join another band before they’d even recorded their first album. “I was left there sobbing, thinking, Well, there goes my plan to conquer the world. But six hours later we regrouped and said, OK, we cant’s let this die now.”
Kiedis has shown similar resolve at several crunch times since, but his iron will leaves little space for frivolity. He sits bolt upright, hands clasped together on the table like a guest on Newsnight. He is slow to smile but, like Bruce Willis, he has the kind of mouth that takes little prompting to twist into a mirthless smirk if he dislikes a question. He laughs twice in an hour.
Several of the lyrics on By The Way suggest a sunny optimism quite at odds with Kiedis’s normal mood. One factor was his girlfriend Yohanna, whom he met, Don’t You Want Me-style, when she was a hostess in a New York restaurant. With awful timing, the couple split while he was recording the songs she inspired. “Those feelings are still there. If anything, you get that extra dimension of sadness that makes it even more meaningful and satisfying to sing.”
So what happened?
“I was ready to go all the way and she wasn’t really into having a family and she got on this career path and we just wanted different things. It’s not like we ever really fell out of love.”
He changes the subject to the quality if his soup. Unlike his bandmates, Kiedis has little taste for self-analysis. He bats back several questions about the future or his motivations with a curt, “I don’t really think bout that,” or smothers them in dippy Californian gush. When he’s in a funk, so to speak, he prefers to go on an adventure. In the past he’s dealt with bad times by trekking in Borneo and India.
“I constantly have a degree of wanderlust,” he says. “I just like to go and see new places and be in nature. I’ve gotten a lot more out of the ocean than I have out of a shrink.”
Another area Kiedis would rather not examine too deeply is his own history of heroin use. When Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley dies recently, he could, “definitely relate. It makes me think, There but for the grace of God go I, or most of my friends.”
He refuses to discuss his rehab method (he’s been clean since 1997) because he’s concerned that if he relapses people will infer that the process is faulty. However, he hasn’t banned drugs in his touring party, as Aerosmith famously did, and refuses to preach. Does he share Frusciante’s confidence then?
“I worry about myself a little more. You know, there are times when I’m tempted just to fuck it all. But I don’t. There was a time when I thought I would live and die sober without any question but, y’know, a couple of setbacks and it sort of fucked with my thinking about that.”
Life outside the Red Hot Chili Peppers is something he doesn’t really think about, as if the mere thought might jinx them, and he never dreams of a quieter life. He enjoys a degree of fame, which has never become overwhelming, but could he handle not being famous one day?
“It’s too late for that. I think all you have to do is be in the public eye for 10 years and you’ve sort of sealed your fate.”
You’ll be the guy who used to sing that song…
“Yeah. Remember that guy? You shoulda seen him in his day.”
Back at the Casa Del Mar, Kiedis claims that, “I feel like we’re just getting started”. It’s another bit of familiar rock speak that actually has a ring of truth here. The Red Hot Chili Peppers have always moved forward, but previously they hurtled or lurched or stumbled forward. Now, perhaps for the first time, they’re striding steadily into the future.
“Who would have thought that Californication, 18 years into our career as a rock band, would have been our biggest album?” ponders Kiedis. “With this album we had so much stuff. We never felt we were hitting writer’s block or feeling the pressure in any way. Nobody talked about sales and there’s nobody punching cards when it comes to working. We do it all in our own time.”
Life is good then for the Chili Peppers?
“ Barring some unforeseen meteorite coming through our path, we’ll be alright for a while.”
