The Many Trials & Resurrections Of The Red Hot Chili Peppers

“There was some demon inside waiting to have its time with me.” - Anthony Kiedis

A SUMMER’S DAY IN July of 2011. A hot one in Venice Beach, the deep-blue Pacific Ocean sparkling under the California sun. Anthony Kiedis, perched on a sofa in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ rehearsal space, was considering the abundance of turbulences to have assailed his band to this point.

“I love our story,” he told me, chocolate brown-eyes unblinking. “For better or for worse, for the pain and gain.”

Long before then, the Chilis’ collected store of ups and downs was overflowed. They’d actually begun as Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem in Los Angeles, 1982.

Four Fairfax High schoolmates. Their singer Kiedis, son of a bit-part actor dad, screen name Blackie Dammett, Israeli-born guitarist Hillel Slovak, Jack Irons on drums, and bass player Michael Balzary, known to one and all as Flea on account of his diminutive stature. They were the Chili Peppers by March of 1983, their stock-in-trade a melange of punk spunk and bendy funk.

“As a 20-something kid who’s making noise, you really want attention,” Kiedis reflected of those early years scrapping around their home city. “At least I did. Flea and I would go from bar to bar handing out our hand-drawn fliers for our little shows. Telling anyone who’d listen that they had to come and see the most amazing thing ever.”

“Anthony and I were inseparable,” Flea furthered. “Even though our relationship was really fucking antagonistic. We’re very different types of people. We offend each other, and we can both be a couple of self-righteous twat cunt-faces, but I fucking love the guy, he’s like my brother.”

Nothing about their first couple of albums amazed. Both of their self-titled debut of 1984 and the following year’s, George Clinton-produced, Freaky Styley was a half-formed jumble, a mess. Irons quit and then came back for The Uplift Mofo Party Plan in 1988. They’d wanted Rick Rubin to work with them on that record. Rubin declined over their manifest drug issues.

“I was a time bomb always ready to go off,” said Kiedis. “There was some demon inside waiting to have its time with me.”

“We grew up in a drug culture,” Flea reasoned. “I did a lot of drugs as a kid. Every kind. I always found slamming a quarter gramme of coke would burst your fucking eyes out.”

It caught up with them, of course it did. Just home from the tour for …Mofo Party Plan, on the 25^th June 1988, Slovak overdosed on heroin at his Hollywood apartment. Dead at 26 years old.

“The emotional depths,” said Flea.

“Probably the most dramatic thing that’s ever happened to me in my life,” said Kiedis. “The turning point of our young lives.”

“I never felt like dying was a good idea.” - Anthony Kiedis

THEY CARRIED ON, BUT reeling. Irons bailed for good. Kiedis’ and Flea’s first attempt with a new guitarist, DeWayne McKnight, didn’t stick. By the end of that year, though, they had happened upon a powerhouse drummer, Chad Smith, and an 18-year-old wunderkind guitarist, native New Yorker John Frusciante. Together, this new four-piece made Mother’s Milk in 1989, their first platinum album, Stevie Wonder cover ‘Higher Ground’ and defiant funk-a-thon ‘Knock Me Down’ its twin peaks.

“I never felt like dying was a good idea,” Kiedis noted. “Never felt like throwing the towel in on this band.”

Next there was BloodSugarSexMagik in 1991. Made with Rubin at last, and at a Hollywood mansion where Harry Houdini was reputed to have once lived. An even bigger hit. The elastic ‘Give It Away’, and ‘Under the Bridge’, Kiedis’s hymn to his lowest ebbs, their first properly great songs. Platinum seven times over in the US. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins their support acts on the ensuing North American tour.

All of it way too much for Frusciante. Heroin again. He walked out on the band in the middle of a Japanese tour, May 1992. Flew home to LA, holed up in an apartment in the Hollywood Hills and sunk into his habit. Somehow, he was able to get a new band going, P, alongside Butthole Surfers’ frontman Gibby Haynes, Johnny Depp, and Depp’s 21 Jump Street co-star, Sal Jenco, but not as it was any good. In 1993, Depp and Haynes circulated Stuff, a gruesome 12-minute film they’d shot of Frusciante at home. A portrait of a lost soul living in squalor, destitute.

He did one of his few, chaotic gigs with P at Depp’s West Hollywood club, the Viper Room, the night of 30^th October 1993. It might have been remembered for the fact Flea was there, and but for 23-year-old River Phoenix dying on the sidewalk outside of the venue as the band was playing.

It took the Chilis three goes to replace Frusciante. Arik Marshall and Jesse Tobias came and went in short order, before Dave Navarro stepped into the breach and out of Jane’s Addiction. Not just then perhaps the best man to help them navigate to calmer waters. With Navarro, and Rubin again, they made One Hot Minute in 1995, adding up to a fine, freewheeling single, ‘Aeroplane’, and not much else that sounded as though it had come easy.

I had my first close-ish encounter with them that October, as they were embarked on the tour for the album. Stood outside of London’s Brixton Academy, listening to them jam through an open dressing room window, one floor above the street. A loose-limbed funk exercise, more fun sounding than the way they looked onstage. The three of them, and Navarro apart, like a stranger at a wedding party. Besides their dislocation, nothing else about the gig has stayed in my mind.

“It was a weird period for sure,” Kiedis admitted to me 16 years later. “Musically it was odd because personally it was odd. I’d kind of gone off the deep end and Flea was having his own personal struggles. God knows what Chad was doing, but it was probably in a darkened closet somewhere.”

“God bless Dave Navarro, he’s great, but his heart just wasn’t in it with us,” said Flea. “The whole process was like pulling fucking teeth, in every way.”

Share

RE-ENTER JOHN FRUSCIANTE. He’d checked himself into rehab in 1998, his apartment having burnt down, a latticework of track marks scarring his arms, his ruined nose requiring surgical reconstruction, dental implants replacing the teeth he’d lost to an oral infection, but he’d survived. Flea invited him back into the fold, and at which he broke down in tears. There was, said Flea, “a big feeling of rebirth.”

Out of it came Californication. Chock full of inspired songs. The emollient ‘Scar Tissue’. ‘Otherside’. The grandstanding title track. Their best yet by a distance, and with Frusciante’s liquid lead guitar lines running through it like sweet honey. I went to LA to interview them ahead of its release for Kerrang!, the four of them holed up in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not, for me at least, an especially enjoyable occasion.

Flea was guarded, Frusciante still ever so fragile seeming. Chad Smith tried the hardest to make nice, Kiedis was the prickliest. He repeated most of my questions back to me in an exaggerated English accent, took issue when I suggested they were now moved on from their more cartoonish moments.

“Name one,” he snapped back.

Socks on cocks. Lightbulbs on heads. I needn’t have gone on. He stalked out of the room five minutes ahead of our allotted time, without so much as a backward word, leaving Smith to smile, shrug, and make small talk. Californication went on to sell 16 million copies. They toured it for two years.

By The Way in 2002 was even better. Their masterpiece, in fact. Pet Sounds as if it’d been made by Jimi Hendrix. After it, no band coming out of the American alt-rock era could lay claim to more solid gold-standard songs. Certainly, there wasn’t a maestro to touch Frusciante.

“John is brilliant,” said Flea. “I would play something and he would – bam! – hit into it. In all different kinds of ways, melodically, chords, phenomenal.”

Another multi-million-seller, another globe-spanning tour. Friction bubbling under as ever and brought up to the surface by Kiedis’s tell-all memoir of 2004, also titled Scar Tissue.

“I’ve never read it,” Flea answered when I pressed him on the many revelations in Kiedis’ book.

“I could’ve revealed a lot more,” Kiedis insisted. “In retrospect, I did make some mistakes, and I made apologies for them.”

Two years on there was Stadium Arcadium. A terrific single album lurking inside of an elephantine double. Among their best ever songs, ‘Especially in Michigan’, the imperious ‘Wet Sand’, their first Number One record in the US, and Frusciante playing like an angel, but lingering, the sense of hubris.

“We wrung the sponge,” Kiedis confessed.

Not so much Flea. “I loved that it was a really good summary of everything we’d done up to that point. The intense funk backbone, hard rocking shit, melodic rock, it incorporated everything.”

For his part, Frusciante evidently felt spent. He departed, once more, in 2009. His friend, and their back-up tour guitarist, Josh Klinghoffer, took his place. Klinghoffer debuted with them on I’m With You in 2011, a solid record overall, but unspectacular as a rule. Gold in the US, nothing more.

I met up with them in Venice Beach ahead of its release. An easier interview this time. Flea and Smith pairing in a kind of comic double act. Kiedis, more attentive, charming even, tending to Klinghoffer, quieter, apparently not so certain of his place in the scheme of things, unfeasibly youthful looking.

“Oh, he’s gonna get all the pussy,” Flea cracked, cackling.

They could as well feel the earth was shifting beneath their feet. Pop culture lurching towards the more ephemeral, the disposable. Streaming and social media, here today, gone tomorrow. Reflecting on such things, Flea’s face was a picture of disgust.

“Tweeting makes me want to suck my own cock,” he barked. Abruptly, he changed tack. “Chad used to know this guy…”

“Oh, no, no!” Smith interjected, mock appalled.

“Well, I knew a guy… That better?” Flea carried on, unperturbed. “He had to drink a bunch of coffee to do his job, which was to squat naked on a glass table, under which lay these real pervert guys. He’d do really big, gnarly, brown, diarrhetic, psychedelic shits on the table, and the guys would lie there and whack off their cocks.”

“It was called,” Smith shared, “the Glass Bottomed Boat.”

“Humanity has given us such great things,” Flea concluded. “Bach, Da Vinci, Charlie Parker… The Glass Bottomed Boat.”

“I’ve been a fucking rude, obnoxious, self-centred, self-righteous asshole many times, and I’m grateful for it.” - Flea

UNSURPRISINGLY, JOSH KLINGHOFFER’S TIME with them was limited. One more, largely forgettable record, The Getaway in 2016, and he was gone. Six more years passed before the third coming of their prodigal son, Frusciante. An album, Unlimited Love, heralded by a rousing single, ‘Black Summer’, Frusciante picking up right where he left off, their electric conductor. The rest of the album paled beside it, likewise the odds and sods Return of the Dream Canteen, arriving six months on its heels, but they went out and filled stadiums.

Fast forward to the present. Slovak honoured with a Netflix doc. Their music catalogue sold to the Warner Music Group for a princely $300m. A solo album from Flea, Frusciante promising the same, mutterings, too, of the Chilis also making new music together again. Kiedis, Flea, and Smith into their sixties now, Frusciante 56. Their spirits unbroken, their odyssey ongoing.

“There’s an expression,” Kiedis informed me. “You better find humility, or humility will find you. The same holds for change, I think. We’ve all been little bitches from time to time. And then again, we’ve grown up and been men along the way, too.”

Sitting there with them in Venice Beach, the evening sun slipping over the horizon, I asked him and Flea if they could possibly sum up the full arc of their journey together. Where they’d gone to, and to where they might go next.

“No regrets,” said Flea. “Nothing. Change all of the complete fuck ups and mistakes that I made? No.

“You come into this world, and you have to make your mistakes in order to grow. I’ve been a fucking rude, obnoxious, self-centred, self-righteous asshole many times, and I’m grateful for it.”

“I’m still a selfish pig,” Kiedis replied. “The older you get, the faster time goes. We all feel that, and I accept the challenge. I really kind of like the idea of defying the convention of what it is to be in your forties, fifties, sixties. Maintaining my youthful spirit.

“I think dying is the ultimate high. I like Chris Rock’s definition of how he wants to pass, which is driving 150mph while getting head from a Kardashian and listening to NWA’s first record at full volume. How do I want to go out? In the backseat with the other Kardashian sisters, of course.”