War Ensemble
Anthony Kiedis is looking sharp in 3-piece suit. Less tall than you might think, there is nonetheless something intimidating about him. Kiedis refuses to be drawn into talking about the problems between Flea and Frusciante. “It wasn’t that I didn’t notice” he says. “But I had no idea Flea was feeling so creatively stymied. After By The Way there was a certain amount of disconnected behaviour but not to the point of death.Sometimes people just go their own ways for a while.” Flea had admitted that he wanted to leave the band during that period. “I’m actually glad he didn’t tell me,” says Kiedis. “Sometimes things like that are a personal struggle. If he had told me when he was going through it, it probably would have just freaked me out.” His unwillingness to talk too frankly makes him sound like a man who plays his cards close to his chest. That’s not necessarily so. In 2004 he published his autobiography ‘Scar Tissue’. In that book he talked in great detail about his drug use, his relationship with his womanising father and about his own relationships. He also revealed a lot about the workings of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and its members. Surely exposing so much caused some problems? “I’d be much more worried about not putting myself out there,” he says. “Secrets have been the death of me in the past. It feels good to get it out, to discard it and move on.” On the subject of drugs, Kiedis admits that although he’s now been clean for “five years and four months” heroin still plays on his mind. “But being a drug addict in recovery is actually a great place to be because you’re forced to look at the rancid layers of the onion that you’ve been carrying around for a long time. I’m actually grateful for it.” He could still go back to using drugs, “Well, sure I could,” he says. “Today, I’m not interested in it though.” What he’s more interested in is starting a family. Flea has a new child and seems ecstatically happy with his wife; Frusciante is in love with his 25-year-old girlfriend while Chad Smith and his wife have a new one-year-old baby. Kiedis, however, has never been able to settle with a woman. “I don’t know what that’s about,” he says. “Today, I feel like I’d like to get married and have a family. More so than ever. I really don’t think I was capable of being that guy about two months ago.” Because you feel lonely or jealous of others? “No, it’s because a bomb went off inside me a few months ago. I broke up with a girl that I was really into. I started really wondering why the break-up happened and I realised it was because of some of my own character defects – the feeling of wanting things you don’t have. The minute I started seeing how these defects of character were controlling and dominating my life, they vanished. Suddenly, I didn’t think the grass was going to be greener, I didn’t feel like I wanted something I didn’t have. I actually went back to that girl and patiently waited to see if she was willing to give it another go. Now I’m quite content to marry this girl and have a family – if that’s something she’s into as well.”
The first thing that strikes you about Chad Smith is his size. The man is immense but he’s enormously affable too. He has a slow Midwest drawl, words creep slowly from his lips as if deeply considered. Sometimes it seems he’s simply given up half way through a sentence, so planetary are the pauses between his thoughts. He also has a reputation for being ‘the normal guy’, the regular person in the band. “I don’t mind being the guy in the back,” he says. “I’m less interesting, I don’t have the drug problems…” He’s frank about the rift between Flea and Frusciante. He saw the problem as competitiveness between the two. “When we were rehearsing, John would come in, especially after a weekend, with a lot of stuff,” he says. “I don’t know if Flea felt he had to keep up…you know that John’s always going to have a lot of stuff. He could take a shit and write a fucking album, it’s just coming out of him all the time.” Things are different now, he adds. The band relationship is harmonic, partly because, “we’re all a little more sensitive now, we’re more capable of correcting things when we go out of whack.”
