Getting Better All The Time
On By The Way, Frusciante made use of a 200-watt Marshall Major and 100-watt Marshall Super Bass. He generally runs one of these in a stereo configuration with some other guitar amp, typically a blackface Fender Showman driving a Marshall cab. For acoustic parts, he relied on several Taylors. "I don't even own one," he adds. "We just rented them. They sounded good for recording. On the song 'Cabron,' the acoustic guitar is capoed. I really love having the capo. I've been learning a lot of Johnny Marr things recently, and it seems he always used a capo. There's also a lot of capoed acoustic guitar on the Jethro Tull album Aqualung, which I was listening to before I wrote 'Cabron.'"
A DigiTech digital delay figures on the song "Don't Forget Me." "I'm playing [double picked] 16th notes," Frusciante explains, "but the echo is set to where it's doing triplets. That whole song, by the way, is played on only the high E and B strings." A large German made modular synthesizer is one of Frusciante's prize toys these days. It was used to process some of the guitar tracks on "Throw Away Your Television" and "Don't Forget Me."
As for Flea, he played his tried-and-true rig for the sessions: a Modulus bass with a Galien Krueger head and a Mesa/Boogie cabinet. Although for the song "Cabron" he used a Hofner bass with a capo on it. "John suggested the capo," says the bassist. "That song was a little frustrating for me; it took me awhile to find the right bass line. Basically I had a bass line that I love, but everyone else didn't like it. Then John said, 'Use a capo, it'll make it sound completely different.' When I finally got that capo on that bass, it sounded right."
Lyrically, Kiedis describes most of the tunes on By The Way as love songs. "In very obscure, less than obvious ways, I feel a lot of it is about either being in love or the desire to be in love. It's definitely what I've been feeling for the last year. A profound sense of wanting love in my daily experience."
The song "Don't Forget Me" deals with a kind of universal, mystical love that Kiedis says sustained him through the darkest hours of his drug addiction. "It's about that spirit of universal love and the spirit of God. Whatever that might be to you. I don't mean it in a religious sense at all. Let's just call it an energy, or beauty. That energy is everywhere. It doesn't turn it's back on people because they're fuckups, losers and dope fiends. For me, that beauty has always been there, even when I was dying. It's infinite. It's in the jail cells. It's in the ocean. It's in all of us. It's there when you're born and it's there waiting for you when you die."
The album's title track is more a love song to Kiedis' home city. "'By The Way,'" says the singer, is about "the color of any given night in The Los Angeles basin. What's going on in the streets-from a crime in a parking garage to a sexy little girl named Annie singing songs to some guy who she's got a crush on. It's an atmospheric lyric-just painting a picture rather than a whole plot. The feeling that inspired the chorus melody is one of waiting, hoping and wanting to make a connection with another person. A romantic connection. Just that feeling of, 'Is this gonna be the night?'"
The Red Hot Chili Peppers' image has always been intricately bound up with the City of Angels. "I love being associated with L.A. because it is such a paradox of a land," says Kiedis. "And I believe in paradox as being a kind of higher truth. L.A. is the most ridiculous place in the world, but it's also the greatest place in the world."
And the Chili Peppers embody this paradox perhaps better than any other band. Their muscleman image reflects the city's obsession with the beauty of the physical body-pumped up pecs and bulging biceps glistening in the smoggy golden sunlight. But the Peppers are also deeply enmeshed in the other side of L.A. culture, it's obssession with the spiritual. There are probably more gurus, ashrams, yoga studios, fortunetellers and New Age shops per square mile in Los Angeles than in any other American city. And the Red Hot Chili Peppers -with their frequent disquisitions on brotherly love, Frusciante's vivid supernatural encounters and Flea's interest in meditation and Buddhism- are prime exponents of L.A. spirituality. Non Angelinos may scoff at the city's equal reverence for Barbie and the Buddha. But the Chili Peppers, they understand.
"There is something that is very important about the physical existence," says Kiedis. "The pagan connection to the earth-the celebration of being in this body and all we can do with it. But at the same time, we are physical beings having a spiritual experience. And the combo platter of those two is very much the makeup of what the Chili Peppers do. With any kind of funk music, there is a visceral, guttural celebration going on, where you just wanna hump and dance and jump. But there's also a sense of the spirit that inspires all that."
---Alan diPerna
