Wonderland
What would Hollywood smoothie Cary Grant make of the guy in his house these days? Drummer Chad Smith has the keys to Grant’s Hollywood Hills mansion now. Improvements have been made. Smith has ‘photoshopped’ himself into a portrait of the screen legend, displayed as you enter. He’s turned Grant’s old bedroom into the pool room. “You’re interviewing the others, you just want me to cross the Ts, right?” says Smith, an affable no-nonsense beanpole, taking the steps down tino the lounge in one. He swings his baseball cap round backwards and tosses a still shrink wrapped Kasabian album off the sofa.
Smith drums but also anchors the band. There are no car-crash lost years. He doesn’t do meditation. The band’s on-tour catering area bristles with the organic and macrobiotic. Smith has pizza. He was cited in the Guinness Book Of Records for playing a 308-piece drum kit – a favour for a friend who owns a drum store back East. “I’m a Midwest guy…I’m just normal,” he says, before taking 10 minutes to explain that this doesn’t mean he thinks the others are weirdos.
When Kiedis asked him to join, he was offered the job on condition he shave his head to achieve a more ‘punk’ look. Smith turned up for his first rehearsal still with his hair in a bandanna. He was allowed to stay because Kiedis thought his obstinacy was impressive.
“My take on our history is quite simple. John is alive. Anthony is alive. These two facts right there are incredible. I’m incredibly grateful for that. The fact we’ve been making the best music we’ve ever made…to me that’s just the gravy.”
Granted entry through the electronic gates of a beautiful Malibu home, I search in vain for the host. By the pool, a voice rings out. “Hey, I’m Michael Jackson!” Michael “Flea” Balzary is holding his 4-month old baby daughter Sunny Bebop over the first floor balcony. When we meet moments later in his homely kitchen he’s dressed in yellow tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt purporting to show him with female breasts. Everything suggests Flea the baby faced gap-toothed punk rocker.
But the 43-year old Australian-born bass player has not been happy. Five minutes later, on his library’s plush sofa, he’s explaining how he decided to leave the band after the last album. “On BTW, John went to this whole new level of artistry. But he made me feel like I had nothing to offer, like I knew shit,” he says sitting Buddha-like and nursing a mug of tea.
For the first time ever, the RHCP had ceased to be fun. It became a confidence-sapping, challenging environment. Also he had ended “an addictive relationship” and spent 2 years alone.
“Throughout the BTW tour I would play a show and then go and sit on the end of my bed in my room staring into space,” he says. He told no one how he was feeling. Not even Kiedis because “I just love him too much. I’ve never told him to this day.” And not Frusciante because he thought he wouldn’t understand. “I almost had a nervous breakdown around the time of Californication and John found that hard to deal with. Suddenly I didn’t fit in with the kind of person he thought I was supposed to be. I guess I didn’t want to go through that again.”
He decided to leave. One plan was to spend time teaching at the Silverlake Conservatory Of Music in East L.A., the 600-pupil music college he built and funded for its first 2 years. It’s not a “rock school”, he is at pains to point out. It offers a range of instruments and he teaches there between tours.
By the time of the 2004 Hyde Park shows he was ready to try again. He’d fallen in love with Franke Rayder, a girlfriend he first met 15 years ago. Kiedis’ words for Hard To Concentrate – that wedding proposal set to music – ask “Will you agree to take this man into your world?” and later, “Take this woman and make you my family”. “Anthony’s words are so beautiful. I get tears when I hear it,” says Flea. As the sessions for SA began, Flea finally told John about his near departure. By this time the bass player had discovered the ancient Indian technique of Vipassana meditation. They agreed that if Frusciante embraced it too, it would help bring them closer together.
But what all the intra-band tensions were really about were insecurities dating from his childhood. “I always felt ugly. I’m small. I was never popular. Anthony was different. He had such a will. He’s made this band what it is today just by his desire and ambition. I guess I was facing up to all that.”
