Still Hot Chili Peppers
The day before the “SNL” performance, when Frusciante answered his door at the Ritz-Carlton, his room was chaos — music gear, magazines, organic foods, philosophy books and huge binders full of CDs. He was exhausted, he said, from months of intense mixing; the exacting wizard’s studio labors are far more than his bandmates’. He stared out the window at Central Park and talked about the album and the strange influences that he brought to it, among them R&B singer Brandy, for whom Frusciante is a surprising fan. “No, really, I love what they’re doing on those records. What she does with her songs, bending and overlapping, is very similar to what I am doing with my guitar.”
Frusciante is the classic obsessed guitar player, but Kiedis is not so easy to catalog. His is a rock-hard stage presence, but offstage he’s more surfer poet. Despite a string of famous girlfriends (Ione Skye, Heidi Klum, Sofia Coppola), he seems to disdain celebrity rituals. During an interview with a TV crew, the peppy host asked Kiedis if he had any plans to use his good looks to make Hollywood movies. The singer made a face: “No, I think the thing that I am best at is being in a band.”
Kiedis’ autobiography, “Scar Tissue,” was published in 2004 and, for a book crammed with drug and sex escapades, it has a tone of surprising serenity. The singer is like that himself. The last page of the book isn’t some grand summary of a life or lofty statement of worldview. Kiedis just says that whenever he feels like checking into a motel with a few grand worth of drugs, he looks over at his dog, Buster, and remembers that his pet has never seen him high. Why start now?
It should be noted that no other Pepper has read the book. Smith thumbed through it, Flea didn’t even do that. Frusciante said Kiedis promised repeatedly to send a copy but never did — but, hey, he already knows a lot of the story anyway.
“I bet there are more than a few dead bodies buried over there.” Chad Smith nodded out the window toward the shipyards of New Jersey. He was standing in a CBS Radio studio on the 46th floor of a skyscraper on Broadway — unshaven, wearing a blazer and tattered jeans. His knees were sore and creaking — he had played hoops a few days earlier for the first time in many weeks — but he was in good spirits. Smith is actually in good spirits most of the time; defying the conventions of rock history, he is a drummer who appears to be the most stable person in his band.
Donning headphones, Smith got to work. “Hello, Cleveland!” The agenda for the morning was 16 interviews with morning DJs, all of them seemingly named Jimmy the Weasel, Jimmy the Geek or Jimmy the Bull. “It’s like the Mafia moved to Ohio and got jobs in radio,” the drummer said during a break.
Smith is the only member of the Peppers who might be mistaken for a radio show host. The Peppers all go crazy on stage, but the other three are almost bookish when the amps go off. Smith yells and tells jokes (he does a robust imitation of Courtney Love vomiting at a fancy restaurant), and when the band is not working, he wraps a bandana around his head and takes off on his motorcycle. Before the Peppers, he played drums in hair metal bands and those roots (unlike Flea’s jazz mind and Frusciante’s search for studio alchemy) give him a healthy awareness that, hey, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll.
It was a few days before the street release of “Stadium Arcadium” and Smith said he was antsy. He checked his Blackberry and wondered if the Peppers would finally get their first No. 1 album on the pop charts (they would) — that set him apart from the rest of the band, each repeatedly insisting that the sales crown was far from a priority. “No, not me, I really want to come in at No. 1.” Smith’s e-mail told him that the Gnarls Barkley album would be hitting stores the same day. “I wonder if that hurts us? I think that hurts us. Nick Lachey is the same day too. But who buys that?”
The topic of history and the Peppers’ place in it is increasingly interesting. Once a party music band, they have to be taken more seriously now. Even by themselves. Flea got a call early this year that sent him “working feverishly.” The Sex Pistols were to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and organizers hoped Flea might be one of the speakers at the ceremony.
“I got up at like 5 a.m. and I’m working on this big, long speech about what they meant to me and how they completely changed my life,” Flea said. He let his shoulders sag and gave out a melodramatic sigh. “And then they didn’t show up.”
The topic of rock history is one that matters to Flea. That’s not the case with his fellow Peppers. Kiedis, for one. When asked to discuss the Peppers’ place in rock history, he said: “I don’t even know how to think about that, honestly, so I don’t know what to say. Really.”
Flea wanted to answer but couldn’t do much better: “I do care because I do love rock ‘n’ roll history … but I have no idea where we fit in, and it’s not my place to say.” He asked when a band is eligible for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame consideration and was told that the Peppers would make the list in 2008. “Wow, not that far, huh? But I still don’t know where we fit. And then there’s everything we’re doing now and all the stuff we will do in the future. We’re still not done.”
Smith smirked and nodded. “Hey, he’s right. Knowing us, we still might crash and burn.”
— Geoff Boucher
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