Shocks, Pods, Anecdotes
Last modified: 21:16:58 CET on 01 Jan, 2012 |
July 2007, Guitar Magazine (Germany)
Many thanks to Sabrina Samwald for the translation.
Click the thumbnail for scans.
Drug excesses, many quarrels, a tragic death and more than one visit to hell’s antechamber – the Red Hot Chili Peppers never missed a chuckhole during their long career. In our Legends Special we also want to show the positive side: Their great songs.
The history of one of the most successful rock bands in the last quarter of a century starts with everything but not with rock music. The later voice of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, [in the article they even translated that to German as a gag…] Anthony Kiedis, had nothing to do with music at all at the beginning. At the end of the 70s he becomes part of a private debating club named “Los Faces” at the Fairfax High School in Los Angeles (in the gym of this school the legendary video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana was shot many years later). The other three members were Michael Balzary, Hillel Slovak and Jack Irons.
Balzary comes from Australia, loves Jazz and plays the trumpet that well that he thinks about a career as a professional musician in the E-music-section. Kiedis, on the contrary, dreams about a life as a Bohemian while writing poems and acting and in 1978 he manages to get the role as Sylvester Stallone’s son in the movie “F.I.S.T.”.
Rock with socks
At this time the tolerable drummer Irons and Slovak, a Hungarian-born [no I did not make a translation mistake. That’s what they wrote] guitar talent, had a band together but they only mark time. When their bassist starts getting on their nerves because he can’t play properly, they boot him out. Slovak talks to Balzary, known to the world under his nickname Flea, into exchange his trumpet with a bass. Slovak teaches him basic bass knowledge and recommends rock legends like Jimi Hendrix warmly to him. His student makes fast progress and also develops a fondness for funk legends like Funkadelic/Parliament and Sly And The Family Stone – extremely rhythm oriented bands. Kiedis also likes them and he also starts to follow his friends’ career with growing interest.
Because the three of them don’t have much luck with their singer either, Kiedis is persuaded to come onstage with them at a gig at the Rhythm Lounge in L.A. They play an improvisational song and Kiedis raps one of his poems over it. The gig was planned as a one-time-event but the audience like them so much that the owner of the club books them for another gig in the following week.
The quartet renames itself from Tony Flow And The Miraculously Majestic Masters Of Mayhem into Red Hot Chili Peppers, begins to rehearse seriously and to expand their program. Their funk rock sound is influenced by protagonists of the blooming L.A. punk scene like the Germs, X and Black Flag, but also by hip hop innovators like Grandmaster Flash and with their energetic and spontaneous stage presence they soon become one of the most popular live bands in the city. The habit to go on stage appareled only with a sock, which was first born as a gag, does the rest to make the young savages popular in the underground music scene. They support acts like Bad Brains, live as squatters together with heroin dealers and psychopaths and they only slightly notice how Mötley Crüe set out from the immediate vicinity to conquer the world with their glam rock.
Bad temporary solutions
1984 the major label EMI offers them a lucrative record deal but at the same time Irons and Slovak also received a record deal from the competing label MCA with their second band What Is This? and they thought that it would be better to stay with that band. Time is short because the first studio date is already booked and so Flea and Kiedis have to find some new co-musicians. They decide on Cliff Martinez, drummer and a friend of Flea, and the guitarist Jack Sherman from Captain Beefheart’s band [again I translated right] but they’re not convincing temporary solutions. The new members suit the two remaining Chili Peppers neither personally nor musically as good as their predecessors. Accordingly bloodless is the first self-titled record. Many rudimentarily elaborated songs were recorded with the old cast of characters, but the songs from the actual recording session lacked this wild and debauched drive which has made them one of California’s hottest concert acts.
“We had some trouble with our producer Andy Gill”, Flea remembers years later. “He wanted us to make more stuff that could be played on the radio and he got on our nerves for a long time, until I slammed a pizza carton full of shit unto his mixing desk. We thought we were really cool and funny at that time but most of the time we were just disrespectful and disgusting.”
Sparkling song ideas
The LP stays like lead in the stores and during the following, not really successful tour Kiedis who takes every drug he can find and the much healthier living Sherman have an argument too much and Sherman gets sacked. Slovak returns remorsefully to the band because his dream to reach worldwide success with What Is This? doesn’t get fulfilled due to signs of disintegration within the band.
Kiedis: “As soon as Hillel had returned the song ideas just poured out of us and the record label was to such an extent thrilled of the new tracks that we were allowed to choose the producer for our new record. We would have never thought that the record label would pay a legend like George Clinton from Funkadelic/Parliament but they did and we felt like we were in paradise. By-and-by we realized that George was also rather crazy and chaotic but his creative power and his really friendly nature helped us in our working process. He wasn’t the super genius who looked down upon us but he was the super genius who cheered us on, supported us and nearly acted like a band member.”
But also the second Chili Peppers record “Freaky Styley” bombs. The world is 1985 not yet ready for the innovative mix between Funk, Punk and Rock. The band’s enormous potential blows out in a musical cosmos that is ruled by Synthie-Pop bands and sleazy poser-rockers.
Only in faraway England some music insiders acknowledge the talents of the Californians. Sex Pistols’ squaller Johnny Rotten tries to get Flea for his new band Public Image Ltd. and ex-Pistols-manager Malcom McLaren wants to convert the Peppers into a Surfpunk-combo which is tailored to Kiedis’ sex appeal. The meeting considering this ends in a collective fit of laughter of the musicians and a pressing advice to McLaren to quickly book his flight home.
