Don’t Look Down
Having changed into their performance clothes -much like their normal clothes except for Smith who wears a bright green, sleeveless, two-piece jump-suit - the band make the short walk to the stage. The next hour-and-a-half proves exactly why the Chili Peppers are where they are today, rubbing shoulders with stadium mainstays like U2 as one of the biggest rock bands in the world, out on their own as the best at delivering it live. A few tunes from 1991's 'BloodSugarSexMagik' - including a pounding run-through of 'Give It Away' and the soulful 'Under The Bridge' - are as deep into their back catalogue as they delve tonight.
Otherwise the set is wholly gleaned from current album 'By The Way', and its predecessor, 1999's 'Californication'. The Chili Peppers have reined in the funk, and in doing so found exactly what makes funk work - soul.
As Kiedis takes a short break. Flea gets behind the kit while Smith plugs in a guitar and leans back to-back with Frusciante to jam. Kiedis watches from the side, smiling broadly as he sips his herbal tea. Besides writing their best songs to date, the Red Hot Chili Peppers seem to be really enjoying themselves rather than just "hitting territories" to sell more records. The crowd screams and applauds maniacally from start to finish, partly in disbelief that they are actually getting to see the band live. Caracas is a brutal place to be young, which only serves to heighten the atmosphere tonight, an unforgettable, intoxicatingly joyous release for the 10s of thousands that have diligently saved to buy their tickets. Also, the only other act scheduled to play there this year is pop-reggae gonk Shaggy. Understandably, they're making the most of it.
THE AUDIENCE was so good tonight so appreciative," says a shirtless Flea afterwards, perched on a white plastic chair as the band's personal effects - diet books, joss sticks, rugs and so on - are packed into flight cases for the trip to their next show in Chile. "It's audiences like tonight that make me think that what we're doing is a really worth¬while thing, but being here is bizarre. It seems really dangerous and wild and crazy. The second we got off the airplane people started mobbing us. That's happened a lot of times, but this time it just didn't feel like normal, it felt dangerous."
When on tour. Flea misses his house in Malibu (celebrity neighbours include Tom Hanks), his new girlfriend Tobey Torres, and surfing, though a day off tomorrow will be spent on a slight detour with Kiedis riding uncrowded, perfect waves in Peru. Chiefly, though, he misses his daughter
Is your daughter happy that your hair's not blue anymore?
"I think she's getting cooler with that now. She's getting to the age where kids have funny haircuts so she doesn't think I'm such an idiot" he says clasping his hands together across his stomach, 'LOVE' tattooed across the right knuckle, 'LOVE' etched again across the left, "Perhaps sometimes she wishes I was a lawyer or some corporate executive like her friends' parents in her fancy private school, but I know in her heart she's really proud of who I am and what I do."
'PROUD' IS a word that John Frusciante uses a lot almost exclusively in reference to how he's feeling about the way things are going for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and his own contribution to the band. Frusciante is swigging from a bottle of root beer as he enters the dressing room, his shoulder length hair held back in a ponytail. He too is bare-chested, though as our conversation progresses he will pull on a blue longsleeved shirt and remove it again five minutes later. The guitarist will talk intelligently on any subject, though prefers to discuss music or films.
"I love to lay in bed at home watching an old black and white movie, James Cagney or Bob Hope," he says. "I have one of those big plasma screens. It just looks so good and pleasant to fall asleep to."
Home is a recently purchased house in at the top of LA's Laurel Canyon, complete with a monstrous stereo system hooked-up by longtime Chilis producer Rick Rubin.
"I have these huge speakers that are as tall as I am and this amplifier that's the size of three normal amplifiers and it sounds so good."
Frusciante travels light - music mainly - with scant regard to wardrobe.
"I don't bring that many clothes. Three outfits maybe, and just whatever I'm comfortable in, it has nothing to do with the way I look because I just don't care," he laughs.
A FRESHLY showered Anthony Kiedis makes himself comfortable on a couch in the band's moodily lit backstage meditation room. Unlike his bandmates, he has covered his torso with a black vest. Even in this half-light the singer's dark brown eyes shine from beneath the damp strands of his fringe, his face a serene mix of smiling post-show contentment and wariness at the conversation we might be about to have.
"It's not like I hate interviews, they're just normally not that satisfying, a routine series of uninteresting questions, just the same thing over and over."
Such as?
"l won't even try to regurgitate these questions. Fortunately, I'm not carrying them around in my head right now."
Though Kiedis does not elaborate it's fair to say that these questions involve playing gigs with socks on his dick and taking heroin, both dead subjects that the band have addressed fairly comprehensively over the years. The singer is currently among the world's most eligible bachelors, still single following a split from his girlfriend, Yohanna, earlier this year. As many of the songs from 'By The Way' were written when they were together, it must be difficult to perform them night after night?
"It hadn't been up until recently, for some reason," he says. "I still felt enough pain and enough love and enough of a connection to her that it was really exerting to play those songs because it reminded me of specific periods of time. Even if it was a sad feeling it was inspiring and made it easy to sing those songs. Very recently I stopped feeling so worried about her, even in memory, so it's become a little more difficult to get that open-heart feeling to connect with. Hopefully it's just a phase."
