Still Hot Chili Peppers
18th June 2006, Los Angeles Times (USA)
The Red Hot Chili Peppers make music that is all sinew, knuckles and gut groove, the kind of songs that, for two decades, have provided a soundtrack for keg parties everywhere. So there were plenty of puzzled looks and even some laughter from the audience when, at the wonderfully dank Irving Plaza, the band recently decided it was time for a slow-skate song. As the other three Peppers looked on, guitarist John Frusciante hit all the high notes on the Bee Gees’ feathered-hair classic “How Deep Is Your Love.”
” ‘Cause we’re living in a world of fools
Breaking us down
When they all should let us be
We belong to you and me.”
At that last line, lead singer Anthony Kiedis pointed to himself and then to drummer Chad Smith. Flea, the band’s impish bass player, just stared with a gap-toothed grin frozen on his face. It was a relaxed moment that would not have happened in past years when the band was bickering, churning through members and tearing off on dark binges.
The Peppers have a past that has left painful marks, but for now they’re enjoying perhaps their finest career moment — scars and all, they find themselves with some measure of peace.
The band of “Hollywood knuckleheads” — the term they use to describe themselves, frequently and dispassionately — first made a name with a primitive meld of funk and punk that they often performed wearing nothing but tube socks affixed to their genitalia.
This month, the bare-butt knuckleheads are closing in on 23 million albums sold in America. More than that, last month the band scored its first No. 1 album ever on the pop charts with a sprawling, 28-song CD called “Stadium Arcadium” that has earned the Peppers some of their best reviews ever. There have been plenty of signature L.A. bands past and present, but the Peppers may represent the most sustained, defining sound of the place since the long run of the Eagles.
“I would go back even further,” said Rick Rubin, the producer of “Stadium Arcadium.” “I would say that not since the Beach Boys has there been a group that was so representative of L.A. and been so tied to it.”
The Peppers may also have more songs mentioning Southern California than anyone since the Wilson brothers of Hawthorne. Tracks such as “Hollywood” and “Californication” spring to mind, but most especially “Under the Bridge,” the cautionary drug tale with the memorable line: “Sometimes I feel like my only friend / Is the city I live in, the City of Angels / Lonely as I am, together we cry.” The first single from “Stadium Arcadium” is “Dani California,” which adds to the Peppers’ list of songs about characters who wander L.A.’s scruffier districts. The title is a girl’s name and her dreams of fame and fortune on the West Coast end badly. The chorus: “California, rest in peace.”
Going back two decades
“I’m sure some people thought we’d all be dead by now; we sure tried our best.” Flea said this as he sipped tea and waited in the green room at a hip-hop radio station in New York. “I don’t know what this station wants with me; they don’t play the music. But it’s all for the cause.”
The radio show was bizarre. It opened with a long recording of a Charlie Manson rant and then the host played “Dani California” — but not all of it; he zapped it partway through, a decision that made Flea wince. When the co-hosts on the show (one was nicknamed “Queer” and the other “White Trash”) began shouting and hooting, Flea looked simply stunned. Still, he played the genial guest. Afterward, he just smiled and shrugged. Asked if a sense of humor is required for longevity in rock, he shrugged again.
“I don’t know how we got anywhere. But we love the music, and we work really hard at it, and we respect it.”
Their first gig was 23 years ago at the Rhythm Lounge in the old Grandea Room, a club on Melrose, and their first song was the Kiedis-penned “Out in L.A.,” a rough effort that, nonetheless, flashed the influences that would shape them — a funk groove, punk energy and a hip-hop approach to vocals. The stage was barely big enough for Kiedis and his two buddies, all of whom had met a few years earlier when they walked the corridors of Fairfax High.
At that 1983 debut, the band was Kiedis, Flea and Hillel Slovak, a lanky, Israeli-born guitarist. The performance by the trio wasn’t intended to launch a world-class rock band; it was a one-off gig suggested by a mutual friend. Slovak and Flea were already in bands and doing well. They were a bit skeptical of Kiedis as a frontman for the simple reason that, well, the guy clearly could not sing.
“When we started, Anthony hooted and hollered and he rapped,” Flea said. “After a few records he started up a little melody and held on to it for dear life.” Kiedis had a childhood that taught him how to survive but also how to take desperate chances. His father was a drug dealer who serviced the Hollywood elite, raising his son as if they were a two-man tribe living a life somewhere between the scripts of “Hair” and “Drugstore Cowboy.” In his 2004 autobiography, “Scar Tissue,” Kiedis wrote of his childhood odysseys: He and his father were intensely close, with a relationship more like best friends, but he was also ferrying suitcases filled with marijuana when he was 12.
What Kiedis brought to the band was his almost lupine stage presence — he remains today, at age 43, a taut, muscular figure — and a vocal style that was influenced by Grandmaster Flash and, especially, Jimi Hendrix. He is the first to concede that he was born with limited vocal gifts, but in recent years, he got a vocal coach to save his throat from the rigors of the stage and, in the process, he expanded his range, strength and ability to bend notes. With the 1999 album, “Californication,” and the two since, Kiedis has elevated his game considerably, both in singing and writing.
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