Don’t Look Down
Last modified: 19:33:50 CET on 27 Mar, 2008 |
02nd November 2002, Kerrang (UK)
thanks to Serhiy Kovalenko, for typing it out
click the thumbnail for scans
ONE GOOD gust of wind and Anthony Kiedis is dead. He won't leave a good-looking corpse either, not after a 200-foot swandive onto the circular concrete drive at the entranceway to the luxurious Gran Melia Hotel here in downtown Caracas. Assembled with the rest of the Red Hot Chili Peppers to be photographed on the roof in the early afternoon October sun. the frontman has decided to walk out onto a girder protruding four feet into thin air.
There's no handrail and only a flimsy steel mesh between Kiedis and lethal freefall. so drummer Chad Smith protectively moves a little closer to the edge.
"You're making me nervous, Chad." Kiedis warns the drummer, the breeze tousling his brown hair.
"You're making me f**king nervous, Anthony!" shouts bassist Flea as guitarist John Frusciante laughs and shakes his head.
"I just want to be alone!" the singer shouts, enjoying the view for a few seconds longer before calmly taking three deliberate steps back to safety.
"We might be getting old." grins Smith, "but we're not boring.
The Chili Peppers are in South America to play 10 shows, many of them in uncharted Peppers territory such as Costa Rica. Panama and today's stopover. Venezuela's tense capital.
Looking straight down from the roof, the swimming pool below is surrounded by stunning women catching rays, sipping cocktails and flicking through 'Vogue' - Venezuela boasts five Miss Worlds, more than any other country in the event's 50-year history. Look a little further and you'll see the black iron hotel gate, watched over by two large men wearing jackets that fail to cover the bulge that big guns make. Look past that to the left - a direction that the staff in the lobby strongly advise against travelling - and you'll see the street where John Frusciante's guitar tech had his fake Rolex ripped from his wrist a couple of hours earlier. Beyond that, past the office blocks, clogged roads and garish billboards common to any big city, thousands upon thousands of brick huts stretch away up into the surrounding hills for miles into the distance. This is the barrio, a lawless makeshift slum that rings Caracas. When night falls this foreboding sprawl loses its daytime ugliness as the white lights from the crumbling dwellings twinkle like stars. A closer look will, however, get you killed. The police only tend to go here to perform "extra judicial executions" of undesirables, ie protecting their anonymity with hoods and shooting murderers and rapists, hundreds of them each year Even if the police hesitate to take some of these criminals out of circulation, routine mob lynchings get the job done just as effectively.
Eighty per cent of the 4.6 million population here in Caracas live below the poverty line, which is surprising when you consider that Venezuela is the world's fourth largest exporter of oil. Indeed, the oil boom of the 70s brought people flocking to the city from the countryside as the economy flourished. To use a local saying, life was easier than a low-hanging mango.
Recently, however, life has not been quite so carefree. President Hugo Chavez - reinstated in April after a violent coup - has put the brakes on oil production to protect Venezuela's natural resources in the long term. In conjunction with unstable oil prices, the socio-economic crisis has crept ever further into a very deep hole, the murder rate quintupling in the last 10 years. Violent street crime is rife - funeral homes hire security guards to prevent mourners from being robbed - with tourists viewed as especially easy prey to the extent that traffic lights are disregarded after dusk to combat car-jacking.
Found on the northernmost tip of South America. Venezuela is a beautiful country, boasting pristine beaches, luxuriant rainforests, the 979-metre high Angel Falls and the Andes. Caracas, however, is not a beautiful city, it's a desperate one.
TWENTY MINUTES after Anthony Kiedis' high-rise balancing act. Chad Smith is relaxing in the private lounge bar adjacent to the Chili Peppers' suites on the 19th floor. The drummer signs the bill for a trolley of prawn cocktail and spaghetti Bolognese as Dixie Normous - past aliases have included Willy Nailem, Haywood Jablowme, Ivan Joiderpuss. Mike Litoris and when in Ireland. Pat McGroin.
Even at 40. the six-foot four-inch drummer jokes around like a huge schoolboy - and in his grey and yellow DC trainers, striped T-shirt and Oakland A's ball cap swung backwards on his head he looks like one too. despite actually having three kids of his own.
"I'm currently single - unencumbered." he says, "Personal relationships I'm not so good at, I'll stick to playing the drums. I have three very steep child support payments every month, and that's fine because I love my kids and I want that they should be well taken care of and they are - but their moms are well taken care of as well".
The rest of the band want to wait until they have finished their duties for the day - a press conference and tonight's show - before meeting to talk, Kiedis and Flea relax, chowing down on room service in their rooms. Touring staff try to track down a pillow that Flea's 14-year-old daughter. Clara, knitted for him which has been left at the band's last hotel in Panama, while an assistant searches a nearby mall for hair-clippers to trim the bassist's bleached crop. Frusciante tends to spend all of his free time playing guitar and listening to his iPod or Discman - the 16 hours a day he habitually uses these portable CD players means the tour manager carries spares for when the motors inevitably burn out. Smith has no need for "me time", however, preferring to lark about with anyone in his vicinity and chain-smoke cigarettes.
"I don't have to meditate with Flea or do yoga with John to feel connected to them." he explains. "We have two buses. I'm in the smoking meat wagon, they're on the tofu bus."
