The World’s Biggest Band Hijack MOJO!
The line-up - Flea and Kiedis, guitarist Hillel Slovak and drummer Jack Irons - had been friends at Fairfax High (whose graduates include Phil Spector and Slash and whose gym was used to shoot Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit video). Aged 11, Kiedis had moved to Hollywood with his B-movie actor father Blackie Dammett, from Grand Rapids, Michigan. At the same time Michael Balzary (Flea), a young Australian trumpet prodigy, arrived with his mother and stepfather, an alcoholic jazz musician. Slovak’s family had moved to LA from Israel when Hillel was five. Irons was the only native Californian.
Slovak and Irons, who knew each other from junior high, were the first to form a band, Chain Reaction. When Flea joined (“I was set on becoming a jazz musician but then I became friends with Hillel and he said, “I don’t like our bass player, why don’t you start to play bass’”?) it became Anthym, which in turn morphed into What Is This. Kiedis was more interested in acting - he got the part of Sylvester Stallone’s son in F.I.S.T.. but the four had a non-musical group together called Los Faces, a private club where they discussed music, talked about “silly stuff in funny voices,” and gave each other the kind of paternal support they didn’t get at home.
Flea: “There’s that time when you’re coming into your sexuality and you have to deal with all those things that make you become a man, and your father is supposed to walk you through this thing. We - Hillel and me particularly - didn’t have that. Looking back at it, I think we looked to each other for it. I always looked up to Hillel. When I first started playing rock music he was my mentor, because I didn’t now anything, I only listened to jazz. Hillel had a real sense of cool - coolest hair, coolest clothes, a rock star arrogance - which I loved.”
The first song the foursome wrote was called Out In L.A. (the article had “Out Of The Way”, but I know for a fact that it’s Out In L.A.)
Flea: “The bass line was a total rip off of a song by Defunkt, a band we were into. And Anthony had been to see Grandmaster Flash and was totally blown away. He said, “I can rap,” and started rapping one of his poems. That was it.”
When the band now called Red Hot Chili Peppers were offered a record deal six months later, on the strength of their live performances, tey had just five original songs to their name. Moreover, with What Is This also signed to MCA, Slovak and Irons were contractually barred from playing, so Flea and Kiedis brought in guitarist Jack Sherman (from Captain Beefheart’s band) and drummer Cliff Martinez (The Weirdos). It wasn’t a great way to start.
Flea: “The album was stiff and didn’t groove. It was a big mistake. I don’t blame [producer] Andy Gill - Gang Of Four were one of my favorite bands - but I used to.”
Flea reportedly made his feelings known by presenting Gill with a turd in a pizza box… “What actually happened is, I said (yells), I gotta take a shit! And Andy Gill goes (posh English accent), bring it back for me, will you? So I shat on a pizza box top and stuck it on the mixing board. I don’t think he was too pleased. We weren’t getting along, but I think we were pretty hard to get along with. There were so many situations where we thought we were funny and shocking and we were just disrespectful and obnoxious.”
By Freaky Styley, Flea had persuaded Slovak to return.
Kiedis: “Praise the Lord! The next thing you know we were rehearsing and we got all this music. Our A&R man said, “You can have anyone in the world you want to produce,” and we said, George Clinton. This whole kind of fairytale experience was unfolding.”
Suddenly, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were in a studio with Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker, playing songs by Sly Stone and The Meters.
Kiedis: “[Clinton] was insane and a bit dysfunctional, but he was so smart and so creative and so loving and non-judgmental. He wasn’t like the great super-genius who was above us, he was the great super-genius that was right in there teaching and cheerleading and pushing and being part of the band.
The album, like it’s predecessor, flopped. The record company, strangely, didn’t seem to bothered. “We were beneath the radar,” is Kiedis’s theory. “Every now and then it would be, “Who are these guys walking around here?” “They’re on your label.” “They are?” EMI were really into Kajagoogoo and that glam metal band, Hanoi Rocks.
In one way the label’s ambivalence proved a blessing.
“I think if we were financially successful in the beginning,” says Kiedis, “we would have simply died. I ran out of money after Freaky Styley, a time when I was definitely about o do myself in.
Kiedis and Slovak were on a downward spiral of heroin use, but it was Slovak who died. The Uplift Mofo Party Plan (1987) would be the only Chili Peppers album to feature the complete original line-up, since Jack Irons had also briefly returned. The timing, on a career leve, wasn’t great. A few months before the 26-year-old Slovak OD’d, EMI had detected a buzz around the album and packedt he band off on a UK/European promo tour. They rush-released an EP, Abbey Road, named for the cover picture taken by British photographer Chris Clunn of their re-enactment of the Beatlaes’ zebra crossing shot, naked bar those now-famous socks.
Flea: “Hillel’s death was just devastating. I was so choked when it happened, I just fell on the floor, gasping for air. As we started getting older and drugs became more and more prevalent, Hillel started having a deep sadness to him. I didn’t really know how to deal with that sadness and I don’t think he knew how to deal with it.”
Irons blamed the band for what happened. Locking himself in his house, refusing to take calls, he suffered a mental breakdown and was institutionalized.
Kiedis: “I was just hanging on by a thread at that oint, I had bee so demolished by drug use. For weeks after Hillel died I kept getting out of my mind. Then a month later I got sober. IT was such a life-altering loss. And a horrible disfiguring of our band dynamic.”
But they preserved. DeWayne ‘Blackbyrd’ McKnight - the former P-Funk guitarist who stood in briefly for Slovak when the band sacked him in a previous spat over drugs - and ex-Dead Kennedys drummer D.H. Peligro were hired. Then fired. Peligro was first to go. Flea and Kiedis contacted 30 drummers and started auditioning.
Halfway between the music school that Flea helps fund and Anthony Kiedis’s place, a narrow turning off the road to the Hollywood sign leads another hilltop house. This time a grand old Spanish villa of the sort once favored by movie stars. Its previous owner, in fact, was Cary Grant. There’s a framed B&W of him on the wall, posing with the current owner - the tall man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and backwards baseball cap who at this moment is warmly shaking MOJO’s hand and offering drinks.
“Not bad, is it?” Chad Smith smiles, showing us around. “For God’s sake, it’s just a rock band. I’m so fucking lucky.”
Smith came to LA from Detroit in 1988 to go to music school, when he heard the chili Peppers auditions. “I thought, oh yeah, the guys with the socks on their dicks.”
Smith’s appearance, as much as his musical tastes (Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Queen), seemed more suited to the heavy rock bands that still held sway in Los Angeles (Guns N’ Roses clones now more than wannabe Motley Crues). “I had a mullet - more a new wavy kind of poodle cut - and they said, ‘Will you shave your head?’ Fuck you, you shave yours. And they’re, ‘He’s fucking punk rock, telling us to fuck off.’ A month later I was taking pictures for a magazine with a sock on my dick so it was, I guess I’m in the band.”
