The Young Ones
When you look back to those days, does it terrify you?
“No, it doesn’t terrify me at all,” he says. “I’m really proud to have gone through it, actually.”
Proud? That’s an interesting word to use.
“Well, I’m proud to have come through it,” he says. “I’m not so much proud to have done it, but I am proud to have emerged from it. I don’t see drugs as my enemy because I know there’s no way I will ever go back to them. And because of that I’m very happy with who I am as a person right now.”
A lot of conversation here has centered around the theme of pain. What was the cause of that pain?
“That’s too personal a question,” says Frusciante, with both a thin smile and a deep frown. “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that.”
MICHAEL ‘FLEA’ Balzary has swimming pool eyes and an air of ragged intensity that he can’t shake, even in front of a perfect stranger brandishing a tape recorder. He’s just finished a lunch of local Chinese food, which, he says, was “delicious”. Flea prayed, as he always does, before eating the meal. In Australia, he’ll tell you, he recently “freaked out” while listening to the album “Los Angeles” by X; lunging around the room and smashing plates to the feral beauty of the music. His daughter, with worried eyes, asked him what was wrong. Dressed in blue jeans and tight navy Dickies shirt, Flea will sit cross-legged on a sofa for much of this interview.
He isn’t new to this. Despite a love for the jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton – from whose band, The Red Hot Peppers, the Red Hot Chili Peppers may or may not have cribbed their name – Flea moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was nine years old, and by the time he was 11 he was spending his life – if not actually living, as his parents always gave him a bed – on the punk rock streets of West Hollywood. This was where he discovered a sense of community that has remained with him till this day. Eleven years old was also the age that he began taking drugs. Right up until the recording of “BloodSugarSexMagik” Flea had recorded each and every one of his basslines shitfaced on pot.
I don’t know how you managed to stand up.
“Well I think a lot of people smoke pot when they play music,” he says, without a smile. “And for me it was a question of becoming meditative and just getting into the space where I played. After I stopped, the music felt a little cold. In time it became more transcendental, but in hindsight I would have preferred to have left the drugs alone and worked on making the music transcendental for me from the start.”
Flea’s accent has the sunshine twang of Southern California. When he was 18 he joined the notorious LA punk band Fear – sample lyric: “Steal the money from your mom, buy a gun/Kill your mother and father” – and he’ll speak of those days with as much energy as he will telling you about his band’s new album. Lee Ving, Fear’s charismatic, red-necked, blue collar frontman, was, he says, like a father figure to him, even though he’s since learnt a few things about the man that he doesn’t care for. Not that he’s keen to discuss them with you, if it’s all the same.
Unlike Kiedis and Frusciante, Flea was never a junkie.
“But I started doing drugs when I was 11 years old and I didn’t stop until I was 31,” ha says.
“A couple of things made me stop. One of the things was just tired of it. I did heroin, cocaine, psychedelics, and I smoked pot every day. God, I smoked so much pot.”
And he had breakdowns as well. Proper crawling-the-walls, bloodied-fingertip breakdowns.
The first of these came in 1991. The second came two years ago. The bassist was, he says, “suicidal”. He offers all of this as if he were talking to a therapist rather than a journalist.
“I have gone through some things in my life that have led me to the point of absolute collapse and nervous breakdown,” he says. “I would say for myself, emotionally, that a couple of years ago I went through a relationship break-up and I was in a place where I didn’t trust anyone or anything. I was depressed and miserable and practically suicidal. I couldn’t sleep and I was neurotic.
“But I had to suffer so much fear and so much pain that I was able to be really clear headed about it and to say, “Bring it on. Whatever happens to me, just bring it on. I don’t care if I die. I’m going to feel all this pain and absorb all this pain”. And in doing this I managed to purge myself of all this shit that I’ve been carrying around all of my life. And I was able to get to a place where I was just this clear and liberated person and I could focus on the things that really mattered to me.”
Which are?
“The band. Apart from my family, my friends in the band are what really matters to me.”
BACK IN the journalists’ waiting room, “By The Way” is on its fourth of fifth spin. Sitting down and listening to it, once again, some sense of accomplishment of this band begins to shine. It’s not so much what the album sounds like that is its true achievement, but rather what the Red Hot Chili Peppers have managed to attain, not only with their music but also with their standing. That is, they stand alone. Only Metallica have managed to shed their peers and contemporaries in quite the same way as the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Metallica are the only other band who one mentions without reference to anyone else.
Perhaps more than this, though, it’s the sense of unity surrounding the band which is the most remarkable. Each story – whether it be Anthony Kiedis and Flea aglow with nu-age redemption, John Frusciante rotting in his room or Chad Smith talking of nothing more than playing goal in a celebrity ice hockey match at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit – eventually swoops to this point, the point of togetherness; how hard it was to earn and how much it is now cherished. The frictions of the past, they say, are gone; the future is clear. It’s not unusual for band to claim togetherness, but the sheer weight of evidence on display here goes some way to resting the case beyond words. The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been together for 20 years now. Today they sound nothing like they did at the start, without losing the sense of authenticity that made it all worthwhile the first place. They have the smiles and they have the scars. Literally. And while the stories of the past are compelling, it’s the music of the present that really keeps them sticking around.
“This band means everything to me,” says Anthony Kiedis. “And I think I can speak for each one of us when I say that. There’s a chemistry at work when the four of us go into a room that I’ve just never experienced with anyone else. We’ve learned from our mistakes and we’ve grown from our experiences, and I can only see this band getting better and better. I can only see this band sticking around for a long time to come.”
---Ian Winwood
