Where The Funk Have You Been?

Nine albums into a career that has spanned over 20 years and the Red Hot Chili Peppers get their funk back. Blunt editor Matt Reekie travels to L.A. for a sneak peak at the new double album Stadium Arcadium.

Anthony Kiedis has been sitting in the same room of the Chateau Marmont for days now. The Red Hot Chili Peppers singer knows the layout of the notorious West Hollywood hideaway well. It was here at the Chateau that Kiedis recorded some of the vocal parts for the previous couple of Chilis albums, and – like many a celebrity before him – he’s enjoyed the odd bender in these lush Old Hollywood surrounds.

Ten or so years ago, the idea of Kiedis locked in a room at the Chateau Marmont for several days would’ve conjured up multiple images of self-destructive overindulgence. But right now the long-time clean and sober frontman is here for the relatively harmless purpose of having questions fired at him by an assortment of the world’s rock media who have congregated in Los Angeles for a sneak preview of the brand new Red Hot Chili Peppers album Stadium Arcadium.

In the past few days Kiedis has been asked all sorts of stuff, everything from questions about his battles with drug and alcohol addiction to his reasons for growing his hair long again. But the stupidest question of them all? “This journalist, Spanish I think, wanted to know if the fellas in my band were vegetables, what vegetable would they be,” he says, curling his mouth up at the side in a familiar smirk as he settles back into a large antique chair.
For a 43-year old who has spent the best part of his life battling with substance abuse, Kiedis looks surprisingly unscathed. Up close it’s obvious he has a certain manicured LA style – his hair nicely dyed and washed, his face freshly out of a mudpack – but there’s no denying how youthful and healthy he seems. Today he’s not in the mood to be the flamboyant flash-talking Anthony that often dominates the spotlight onstage and in the press, instead playing at the humbler, deeper-thinking, more reflexive Anthony – ironically the more confident of the pair.

“I’m not necessarily trying to exorcise all of my demons because those things are opportunities,” he says, fixing me with a stare that is engaging without being overbearing. In between the previous Chili Peppers album, 2002s By The Way and Stadium Arcadium, Kiedis issued his bestselling autobiography, Scar Tissue, which revealed details of his nomadic upbringing, the formation and existence of the band, and his experiences locked in the vicious cycle of addiction and rehab that inspired hit songs such as “Under the Bridge” and “Otherside”. “When the difficult times come round, it’s an opportunity” Kiedis continues. “And I thank god for the pain and the challenges and the difficulties because it’s an opportunity to change, and those things usually inspire powerful emotions and desire to create art and music.”

Another Red Hot Chili Pepper who knows all about pain, change and opportunity is guitarist John Frusciante, though yet to commit his memories, to paper, as Kiedis has done, Frusciante can just as vividly describe his trip to hell and back. Having joined the Peppers in 1938 at just 19-years of age after the death of original guitarist Hillel Slovak, Frusciante helped take them to a whole new stratosphere both creatively and commercially with 1991’s classic Blood Sugar Sex Magik album. But just several months after its release, he imploded due to a mixture of drug use, mental anguish, and an intense resentment of the band’s success, quitting while on tour in Japan in May ’92.

Without John, the Chilis floundered creatively. Without the Chilis, John sank into a decrepit world of almost suicidal drug addiction. In 1994 he claimed that voices in his head had told him to take drugs for 6 years. Around that time, actor Johnny Depp and Butthole Surfers singer Gibson Haynes directed a disturbing short documentary on Frusciante’s destructive post – Peppers lifestyle entitled Stuff. An article written by journalist Robert Wilonsky from the mid-‘90s paints a picture of utter squalor and impending death:

“There were whisperings about how he was holed up in his Hollywood Hills home, a place few dared to tread because of the stench. It was the smelt of death, or more likely just the smell of feces and urine collected over weeks and months. John’s house became notorious for its horrific mess and graffiti-covered walls. There were stories of a former superstar rock star guitarist who now sees little of the outside world, who stays in his house to read and write and paint and play guitar (and shoot up). But they’re not just rumors. John Frusciante is living the cliché – the rock star holed up at the Chateau Marmont, where bigger names than he have checked in to check out.”

But Frusciante didn’t check out. Almost 10 years to the day he was pronounced clinically dead from an overdose, and he’s back at the Chateau and completely changed man. He looks like he’s been though the wringer – possibly even twice – but both physically and mentally he’s stronger now than he has been in years. In faded green pants that seem about an inch too short and blue thrift-shop jacket, he slouches in a chair with his smelly, sneakered foot perched up on the fine linen of the bed. Throughout the interview he’ll scratch himself.

Unlike Kiedis, Frusciante, 35, wears his experiences in the deepening lines on his face. He talks in a slow drawl, but unlike the slightly spaced-out hippy he was when he rejoined RHCPs in 1998, he’s personable, sensible, grounded and articulate. It’s like that weird long-haired lobotomy patient who did interviews for ‘99’s Californication has been replaced by a completely different John Frusciante; the star of Stadium Arcadium.

“I wanted to bring in everything I knew about music and about the guitar,” the axeman says with a pride that’s betrayed only by his enthusiasm for discussing the new album. “I wanted to have the songs take turns and go places you might not expect. I wanted to have instruments clashing and playing off time from each other to create friction and tension. Me and Flea (bass) have been listening to a lot of R&B singers like Brandy, getting interested in the way they use their timing to create interesting counter-rhythms. On By The Way I wanted everything to be perfectly in synch, everyone playing on the beat together, whereas this time it was more about letting loose, falling back in and out of time, even playing different styles that complimented one another; realizing there is a deeper way to connect other than just people playing in time with each other.”

Thankfully, Stadium Arcadium doesn’t sound much like Brandy. It’s late-February 2006 and the album is still not yet complete, but the band have invited select media in for a sneak preview of 21 of the double album’s final tally of 28 tracks. The other 7 are still in the mixing stages, and the all-important track order has yet to be debated upon by the four members of the band and the unofficial fifth Pepper, producer Rick Rubin.

My first impression of the un-sequenced bunch of tracks is that Stadium Arcadium is going to be the kind of record Red Hot Chili Pepper fans will have wet dreams about. A vast and varied collection of virtually unlimited scope, it toys with every genre, influence and style the foursome have ever touched upon, and even brings in a few fresh ones. In many ways it’s the definitive Chili Peppers album, fusing their distant and recent pasts together in absolutely mind-blowing fashion.
“I guess we kind of honoured the thread that went from our very first record to this record,” offers Kiedis. “Not so intentionally though. It was just time for something new.”

And by new, he means old. While Stadium Arcadium retains the lyrical and melodic maturity the band achieved on more recent efforts, it actually has more in common with the unrestrained scope and limitless invention of Blood Sugar Sex Magik than anything else. Oh Yeah, and the old school funk is back in a big way.

“The funk cannot be denied,” laughs Kiedis, neglecting the small fact that for a long time, it was denied. When Frusciante split in ’92 the band began evolving away from their funky beginnings. Guitarist Dave Navarro, who played on 1995’s weak One Hot Minute album, had neither the soul for the funk nor the precise chemistry to help extend RHCP’s creative capabilities. But even when Frusciante returned to the fold, his tender mental state, coupled with the fact that he had to basically relearn to play guitar all over again, meant that his contributions to the next two albums, Californication and By the Way, were clinical and reserved in comparison to his initial stint. Having almost completely detached themselves from their funk roots, Red Hot Chili Peppers concentrated those last two albums on pop songs that served melody above anything else. With nicer production, opulent layering, and simpler arrangements, they managed to at least maintain their commercial viability (indeed, they probably enhanced it), but it’s fair to say those albums will not stand the test of time the way Blood Sugar Sex Magik will; or Stadium Arcadium for that matter. The inspiration the band were feeling is tangible.

“There was a certain point where we had written a lot more music than we originally set out to write, about three times as much,” Kiedis boasts. “We really had to take a minute to assess what the hell was going on here, and we had a great problem which was too many songs. You might get your head around 20 songs if you were really focused, but 38 just becomes a bit impossible.

“So there was a moment where we had conflict, y’know when John wanted to take another year to finish the record and I wanted to finish it in 6 months. But I had to concede to his wishes, because, well, basically I didn’t want him to be unhappy. I had to kinda just let go and have faith in the process and hope that maybe next time we’d get to do something short and sweet.”

“These songs lent so much to experimentation,” Frusciante exclaims in his own defence.

If Blood Sugar Sex Magik captured the blossoming of John Frusciante as one of the most interesting pop musicians of that era, Stadium Arcadium presents him as one of the true musical geniuses of his time. It’s almost as though he had to get his head together before he could completely lose it again. Enjoying a heavier role in the creation of the new album than at any time since his return to the group, Frusciante leaves his mark on almost every track with some utterly awe-inspiring guitar work.

In a strange unspoken way Frusciante acknowledges his playing on the new album is something special, but he completely surprises me when he explains that this is the firs time since he first joined the band that he has shown the full extent of his axe-wielding power. Few could ever deny the brilliance and originality of what Frusciante laid down on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, however, the guitarist says with 15 years hindsight to help cloud the picture, he can relate more to his playing on his 1989 debut, Mother’s Milk.

“I spent so many years hating that part of myself but now I can see that at least I was trying to play to fullest of my ability on Mother’s Milk,” he admits. “That was all I was capable of back then, but at least I was trying to step out. Ever since Blood Sugar… I feel like I’ve been restraining myself, and even making that record, I wasn’t believing in it fully. I left the band only a few months later. In many ways now I can relate more to the 19-year old kid who played on Mother’s Milk than anything I’ve done since.”

While Stadium Arcadium reconnects the band to certain forgotten aspects of their musical past, it also returned them to a few of their old stomping grounds during its creation. Most of the writing took place in a funky old rehearsal room just outside Hollywood in The Valley where the band had not been for a decade, while for the recording Rick Rubin took them back to the same Laurel Canyon mansion they recorded Blood Sugar… in all those years ago. Rubin has since utilized the house, also known as the “Houdini Mansion”, to recent albums for Slipknot, System of a Down, The Mars Volta and others, but the Chili broke the place in, and for them it will always hold special significance.

“It was a really enjoyable process,” Kiedis says of the making of Stadium Arcadium. “From the day we showed up to start writing these songs I could tell there was a pretty comfortable chemistry going on between us. Y’know, you never really know what you’re gonna get when you put four guys in a room, if they’re going to get along, if there’s going to be clashing or differences of ideology or it could be anything. But we got off a pretty smooth start and it never really stopped.”

With inspiration channeling through them, the band wrote enough quality material for three whole albums. Originally they toyed with the idea of releasing Stadium Arcadium in three separate parts spaced six months apart. But in the end common sense prevailed and a double-album format was agreed upon, with the discs split into one called “Jupiter” and the other called “Mars”. What those discs offer is an album with plenty of everything and not too much of one particular thing.

Encompassing everything from the intelligent pop of opener “Dani California” to the complete below-the-waist funkiness of “Hump de Bump”, the album explores the gamut of the band’s capabilities. “Snow” and “Hey” are simple By the Way-style ditties, while the tight funk rhythm of “Tell Me Baby” recalls the back-end of Blood Sugar… There’s songs like “Charlie” that hearken back to pre-Blood Sugar… approach, while some others just kind of breath in the entire history of the band and exhale something completely fresh, the most notable of those being “Hard to Concentrate”, “Warlocks” and “C’Mon Girl”. It’s rare for any of the songs to end up the same place they kick off, and in this way Stadium Arcadium is like one epic journey comprised of 28 joyous mini-epics.

“Everybody in this band is very interested in the experience of change, which is really helpful in continuing to evolve,” Kiedis concludes. “Everybody is very teachable. John and Flea are real students of new music, always increasing their ability to write and just be creative in general, and I think there is a willingness to listen more carefully to all of the great spirited energy that is in the universe and have the capacity to channel a lot of that stuff so it’s not just guys coming up with ideas among themselves but tapping into some greater source of energy in the universe. That can be really helpful when you have to write a record.”

In many ways, Stadium Arcadium would make a perfect final Red Hot Chili Peppers album – one that perfectly bookends both sides of their career in emphatic style. But for a band who’ve never stopped evolving in two decades of making music, you can be sure it’s merely another new beginning; yet another opportunity for change.

—Matt Reekie