The World’s Biggest Band Hijack MOJO!
July 2004, MOJO (UK)
thanks to Max for typing it out
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Clowntime is over for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the LA punks who defied death, grunge and a burning crack den to play the music they love.
Anthony Kiedis’ house, as an expanse of glass and whiteness, is right on top of the Hollywood Hills. Walk down the steps into the vast white glass-walled entrance hall land your eyes are drawn to the terrace, where the perfect lue water of a rimless infinity pool stretches out into a perfect blue Los Angeles sky. Inside, the walls are hung with photographs, a mix of old Hollywood and contemporary black and whites: Marilyn Monroe; a blur-faced PJ Harvey; the proprietor with Buster, his dog. Those last two are right now padding about the kitchen, another vast, glass-walled white room, whose surfaces heave with jars of vitamins and supplements. A cup of tea is offered - a long, intricate operation involving a glass jug of leaves, a plunger, and milk that Kiedis makes himself by grinding cashew nuts and blending them with filtered spring water. Most rock stars would find dunking a tea bag labor-intensive, but Kiedis is as zealous about his healthy lifestyle as he was about his mid-80’s one. The one that revolved around scoring heroin.
Listening to a man whose skin literally glows with wellness telling tales of flea-pits and crack dens and the various Hollywood squats that for a long time he and his band called home has a similar surrealist to watching a safari-suited John Lydon on I’m A Celebrity - Get Me Out Of Here! Gossiping with Jenny Bond.
“John Lydon,” Kiedis is saying, “once made a great stab at poaching Flea for Public Image.” Nearly got him too. “And Malcolm McLaren tried to poach the whole band. He sat down with us, watched us rehearse, and then eh said, ‘OK, here’s the plan, guys. We’re going to simplify the music so it’s just basic, old school, three-chord rock’n’roll and we’ll have Anthony be the focus of attention and you guys will be the back-up band doing this surf punk thing.’ At which point Flea keeled over and passed out. It could have been what we had smoked - we were very dysfunctional at that point - but I think it was more what McLaren had said.
This was 1985, soon after the band Kiedis calls the Red Hots and everyone else calls the Chili Peppers (“Red hot is a nicer name - stronger, less vegetable”) released their second album, Freaky Styley. Produced by George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic, it flew off the shelves not a jot quicker than their 1984 debut, produced by Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill, did. Too funky to be metal, too young to be punk, the band who, by current reckoning are one of the top three biggest in the world (25 million people bought their last two albums; just over half-a-million tickets have been sold for their current UK tour) were for much for much of the ‘80s, in music industry terms, several blocks south of nowhere.
In Silverlake, several blocks east of the specific somewhere that is Hollywood, Flea ponders his band’s early years on an LA music scene overflowing with poodle cuts and umlauts. Slighter than the appears in pictures, he looks something like a Barnardo’s home Chet Baker.
“We were so removed from the Motley Crue scene,” he says. “I didn’t know who they were, I never went to any of their shows. I’d see their pictures in magazines, all the funny hair and stuff, and laugh. It was a different world. We came from punk rock, played punk rock places like the Cathay de Grande, and aspired to be cool enough to hang out with bands like X and The Blasters, who were like senior members of that scene. But we did our own thing.”
A thing that got the Chili Peppers pegged as a ‘California surfer party wildmen band.’ While the Chilis, argues Flea, always considered themselves “an art band”. “We’d make what we thought was a beautiful piece of art,” sighs the bassist, “and then we’d whip out our dicks - because we were drunk or we thought t was a good look or we didn’t really care - and that would take over everything.”
No band in history has been so overshadowed by their own genitalia. Then there’s he rest of the baggage: the drug deaths, the tattoos, the dressing up as giant light bulbs. Their entry in Virgin Encyclopedia Of Popular Music hardly even mentions music, beyond crediting their dubious influence on Extreme and Limp Bizkit. But there are other views.
“From a musicianship standpoint, the Chili Peppers are untouchable,” insists Rick Rubin. “Flea is the best bass player in the world, Chad’s an incredible drummer, and John Frusciante is one of the handfuls of best guitar players. Bono once told me, ‘We have a great sound but we’re nowhere near as good a band as the Chili Peppers.’”
When Rubin needed a rhythm section for Johnny Cash, he hired Flea and Chili’s drummer Chad Smith. John Frusciante, who played the guitar solo on Personal Jesus, also got the job of arranging, singing, and playing al less Depeche Mode-y version for Cash to follow. The long list of Chili side projects ranges from John Fogerty to Jane’s Addiction, LL Cool J to PJ Harvey, Tricky to Shakira, Joshua Redman to James Chance. They’ve been on tribute albums to The Germs, the Ramones, and John Lennon; Fela and Frusciante had a Joy Division tribute band; and they’ve written and recorded a tribute song to Fela Kuti It’s called Fela’s cock.
Rick Rubin: “If you go back to the beginnings of the band and what they represented, no one would imagine that they would be where they are today. In the past it always had more to do with other things than the breadth and depth of their material. But now they’re really primarily a songwriting band - although they also happen to be better players than probably just about any other band there is alive today.”
When the Chili Peppers started 21 years ago they were, remarkably enough, press darlings. “How we started out,” says Flea, “was a friend of ours had this club, the Rhythm Lounge. He said ‘Why don’t you get one song together?’ After that show there were lines around the block. We opened up for some really great bands before we ever made an album - The Bad Brains, The Minutemen - and it sort of became the in-thing to see us.
Driving west along Hollywood boulevard in Flea’s jeep - early Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds on the CD player, Fela Kuti and The Beatles’ Anthology in the glove compartment - we pass by Vine Street, where the modernist record stack what is Capitol Tower still houses the Chilis’ first label, EMI. At Wilton we get stuck in a tailback caused by a movie premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theatre. “We used to live there,” indicates Flea. “The ‘Wilton Hilton’ - with a heroin dealer and another guy who I was originally trying to start a band with. We had a bunch of places where we didn’t pay rent and stayed till they kicked us out. The most interesting was probably the Land of Lee. A Serious crack-dealing house. The day we moved in they all started pelting u with rocks and bottles. We had to escape from the house - or into it - the whole time. Eventually our cat had kittens and they started shitting on the floor and no one wanted to clean it up. After about three weeks you just couldn’t live there anymore, so we moved on. The ‘Wilton Hilton’ was where we started the Chili Peppers.”
