Getting Better All The Time
"I think you can definitely make a case for us being a big part of what became nu-metal or rap metal," Flea adds. "But other bands were influential in that way, like the Gang Of Four, Defunkt, Grandmaster Flash. There were the Big Boys, Konk, and the Braniacs. A lot of rock bands were drawing from funk and rap, but a lot of it was done in a very arty kind of way. So when I meet those bands today that are along that rap metal vein-nu-metal or whatever you want to call it-they often say they enjoyed us when they were beginning."
"Some of them come up and make mention," Kiedis acknowledges. "But I'd rather not have any kind of throne and just be vibrant today, rather than being remembered for something that happened 20 years ago."
The Red Hot Chili Peppers almost didn't make it out of the Eighties. One of them, in fact didn't. In 1988, not long after the release of the band's third album, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, Hillel Slovak was found dead of a heroin overdose in his Hollywood apartment. Jack Irons decided to leave the group shortly after the guitarist's death. Vowing to press on, Flea and Kiedis recuited Chad Smith and John Frusciante. A bit younger than the others, Frusciante had been a huge Chili Peppers fan. He suddenly found himself playing guitar in the band he'd so often gone to see at L.A. clubs. In 1989, the new lineup released Mother's Milk, an album Frusciante now says he detests.
"That was our main 'macho' album," he says. "I don't really get into that emotion. I remember when I joined the band I had a very limited idea of what they were trying to do, and I just tried to fit in with that. But in time I started learning more about what kind of music they liked or what kind of ideas they were open to. Some of it was stuff I wouldn't have expected them to be into. Like when I first saw Flea wearing a Talking Heads T-Shirt, I said, 'Cool, he's into that too.' And I started to realize we could do something with a much broader scope than what they had been doing."
The new lineup really connected on 1991's Blood Sugar Sex Magik. It marked the beginning of their ongoing relationship with producer Rick Rubin, who'd made his name in hip-hop and metal both as a producer and as cofounder of Def American Records, and would go on to distinguish himself with productions in a wide range of musical styles.
"To me, Blood Sugar is the first time that we got down on tape what we really do," says Flea. "We'd never done that before. In the past, we'd always been intimidated by the studio. It would be a tense and alien environment. But that album was more about creating a vibe for us to jam and do our thing in."
In addition to being their first album for Warner Bros., Blood Sugar Sex Magik was also the Chili Peppers' first big mulit-Platinum success, a disc that catapulted them to a new level of fame and acceptance. But the group's road has never been a smooth one, particularly where guitarists are concerned. In May 1992, just as the album was hitting it's peak in the U.S., Frusciante quit the band, citing an inability to deal with the pressures of touring.
It was the start of a long period of intense psychic struggle for the guitarist, who had already become heavily involved in drugs. For a while he stopped playing guitar entirely. He began to paint and to delve deeply into the world of the supernatural. His fascination with paranoral experiences had begun during the making of Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
"When I was playing guitar, I would play a game with myself. I would say, 'I'm going to leave my body now. I'm going to be holding the guitar and recording what I'm playing, but I'm not going to be here.' In time I just started having this natural belief in these spiritual forces that were possessing my body. I'd always had voices in my head as a kid, but now I started getting a really excessive amount of voices in my head. They were having conversations with me. Telling me about the future. They'd say something was going to happen in two minutes. And whatever it was they said would really happen. They would do these things to show me that they were in tune with the future and could see the future. Because the future has already happened many times. They don't live in a dimension that has time, but they sort of feed off the energies of people who do live dimensions that have time.
"By the time I quit the band, I pretty much was devoting myself to nothing but magical progress. I made it my life's purpose to achieve a more full kind of contact with these beings. And I did. I got to the point five years later where I could sit in a room with a ghost or an astral body for a half hour at a time, which takes a tremendous amount of concentration. I would do that everyday, for at least a half hour.
