Socks Away!
Q Magazine (UK), June 2002
found on a dead internet forum
In their two decades together, Red Hot Chili Peppers have seen their share of the dark side of Los Angeles: the crumbling apartments, the seedy bars and, famously, that spot “under the bridge downtown” where their frontman Anthony Kiedis scored heroin, later immortalising it in a hit song. During one of his bleaker moments, Kiedis once described LA as “a stifling land of smog, violence and hate”.
However, on a Monday morning in May 2002, Red Hot Chili Peppers find themselves in a part of town better suited to their buoyant mood. Santa Monica’s Casa Del Mar hotel reeks of money. In the foyer hangs a colossal wrought-iron chandelier cradling a copper boat. It’s stupid and ugly but expensively so. In a bar the size of a tennis court, guests survey the Pacific Ocean.
Upstairs, in three opulent two-storey suites, the band gather for the first public airing of their imminent album, By The Way, to a phalanx of European TV crews. When Q arrives, bassist Michael ‘Flea’ Balzary is already there, twisted like a pretzel into some implausible yoga pose. Q would shake his hand if only it were clear exactly where his hand was. He wears asymmetrical electric blue hair and navy blue shirt and trousers.
Kiedis follows. Sporting a precisely trimmed goatee, he is unexpectedly sombre for a man whose image has previously suggested an interminable adolescence. He proffers a half-handshake and a quarter-smile, which signal a wavy tolerance, but no great love, for the press.
Next is errant guitarist John Frusciante, who aided the band’s path to megastardom, left to spend five years in the clutches of heroin addiction, and returned in 1998. Last time Q photographed the group, a straggly bearded Frusciante stuck out like the result of a hobo replacement scheme. Now he resembles Vincent Gallo playing Jesus of Nazareth, another famous resurrectee.
Finally, baseball-capped drummer Chad Smith barrels in, clearly not long out of bed. “I thought it was noon,” he jovially protests. “Nobody does interviews before noon!”
You wouldn’t immediately put these four men together, but their mutual affection is transparent. Flea and Smith make a wisecracking, sarcastic double act. Alongside Frusciante, Flea is more sincere and almost paternally protective. Kiedis and Frusciante comprise the most intense alliance.
The interviewer from British TV’s CD:UK has met the group before, but only Smith recognises her: the rest aren’t great with faces. She asks Kiedis for a precis if the band’s history. She has asked the wrong band. Kiedis gamely rattles off a condensed chronology, but is practically incomprehensible to anyone not aquainted with their contorted family tree. “I wish Mel Brooks was here,” he sighs. “Our history would be much funnier.”
Next February the Red Hot Chili Peppers will be 20 years old; Kiedis and Flea will have been Chili Peppers for exactly half their lives. Only now has their number of albums (eight) overtaken their tally of guitarists (seven). As Kiedis later tells Q, they have been on the verge of calling it a day at least four times, usually in the wake of a disappearing guitar player.. And then there are the bits that Kiedis opts not to share with the CD:UK audience, namely their previous Herculean drug intake. Heroin killed founding guitarist Hillel Slovak in 1988, poleaxed Frusciante and has plagued Kiedis intermittently.
“Is that a brief history?” the frontman asks when he’s finished. Then, as if he’d temporarily forgotten the whole point. “Oh, we had fun. We had a lot of fun, too.”
If anyone decides to make a Red Hot Chili Peppers biopic, the most apt title has already been taken by M. Night Shyamalan: Unbreakable. The tagline they could filch from Nietzsche: what doesn’t kill them makes them stronger.
It’s been five years since the band last contemplated dissolving, a record for them. In 1997, Dave Navarro, the Jane’s Addiction guitarist recruited to replace to replace Frusciante, wasn’t fitting in and the album he appeared on 1995’s muddled One Hot Minute, was both a commercial and creative disappointment . Kiedis had been using heroin again, while Flea and Smith were ready to quit.
Read any interview from that period and you’ll see that the group are masters of “We’ve never been happier” rhetoric, even when the truth is very different. These days, though, it’s hard to disbelieve them. By The Way marks only the second time they have recorded two successive albums with the same line-up. The last occasion was during Frusciante’s first stint: Mother’s Milk (1989) and Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991). If the guitarist’s departure derailed the band after the breakthrough success of the later album’s 8.85 million sales, this time there’s nothing to stop them building on the unexpected career high of ‘99’s Californication, which has cleared a remarkable 12.5 million copies.
Rick Rubin is back in the producer’s chair for the fourth time in a row - Kiedis says they never considered anyone else – but By The Way does not chart familiar territory. Aside from a brief flurry on the title track, there is no sign at all of their trademark funk-metal. Instead, there are mellifluous harmonies (think Smile-era Beach Boys and any-era Beatles), avant-garde quirks and the most fluid, untethered playing of their career. Frusciante has gone all Jonny Greenwood, expanding his repertoire to synthesizers, mellotron and overdubs, and taking inspiration from techno boffins Autechre and Boards of Canada. In late 2000, he and Flea moonlighted on Tricky’s Blowback album and formed and unnamed Joy Division covers band for just one gig: consequently the bassist’s playing now owes more to Peter Hook than Bootsy Collins. Kiedis’s songwriting, meanwhile, is wise and persuasive.
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