A RHCP article from Boston Globe

I figured out this would be a nice preview for those who are going to the show so…read on. There are some interesting things the most of people probably haven’t heard about before.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Anthony Kiedis, the frontman for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is sitting on a velvet sofa in his dressing room at the General Motors Arena. A beautiful blond woman is crouched beside him, tightening a tourniquet on his arm. She fills a syringe and slips a needle into the singer’s vein. It looks like a textbook scene from a backstage debauch. Except the young woman, Sat Hari, is a holistic nurse, and the potion flowing into Kiedis’s body is a multivitamin infusion, heavy on the magnesium.

“It burns my throat. And other places, too,” says Kiedis, looking down. “But I can’t afford to get sick on the road.”

Everything changes, but not necessarily in the ways we imagine they will. The Red Hot Chili Peppers should be dead — literally (at least some of them) and figuratively (that the band has survived addictions, including Kiedis’s, countless personnel upheavals, fallow stretches, and artistic nosedives is a source of marvel for all). Instead they just keep getting bigger.

The Chili Peppers are in the fifth month of a world tour that stops at TD Banknorth Garden for two shows this month and will keep the band on the road through the end of 2007. The “Stadium Arcadium” show is massive, with the most elaborate lighting and extravagant video technology the group has ever used. So too is “Stadium Arcadium” the album, in every sense: The Chili Peppers’ first double disc sold more than half a million copies during its first week of release in May.

Think about it: A funk-punk band of 40-somethings releases a pricey 28-track opus — the double-album concept itself is a veritable relic — in the era of digital downloading, and it becomes the fastest-selling album in the group’s nearly quarter-century history. What gives?

According to Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Tom Whalley, such a counterintuitive move is precisely what the times, and this band, call for.

“Yes, it goes against the grain, but my approach is that you have to do things differently in the physical world to compete with the digital world,” says Whalley. “When they approached me it wasn’t because they felt like making a double album, it was because they felt so passionate about the songs they were writing. I heard the music. It was an easy decision.”

Kiedis credits the restless artistry of guitarist John Frusciante — who abruptly left the band midtour in 1992 and came back, post-rehab, for 1999’s “Californication” — and the unwavering work ethic of jazz-schooled bassist Flea for the group’s vitality and sense of purpose.

“Having those two types of forces and the way they play off each other has kept us from becoming complacent,” says Kiedis. It’s also kept them in a near-constant state of creative power struggles. Mistakes have been made and micro-catastrophes have plagued the band, Kiedis says, from the start. Happily, rounding out the foursome is Chad Smith, the group’s cheerful monster of a timekeeper, who is neither prima donna nor control freak. That makes one of them. In the end though, Kiedis says, their explosive chemistry is more valuable than any simple democracy.

“It’s still a learn-as-you-go process, and why we haven’t come apart at the seams, that I can’t explain,” Kiedis says. “I think in order for us to not be sick in the head we had to realize that life is not about your own selfish drive but more about service. There was enough pain and hurt and self-destruction along the way that we had no choice. If we wanted to survive, we had to learn a better way.”

Kiedis, an intense performer with an uncommonly sordid past, is everything you wouldn’t expect: soft-spoken and gracious, generous with his time and patient with children. When Mike D of the Beastie Boys, a close friend and Malibu neighbor, drops by the dressing room with his young son for dinner, Kiedis holds his own in a conversation about bunnies, monsters, and juice. It’s only six o’clock, but Kiedis has to eat at least three hours before he goes onstage or else he throws up. Tonight’s meal is pheasant and organic greens. Kiedis, a “vegequarian” (he eats fish) for 20 years, has recently started eating wild birds. Tour chef Wayne Foreman does research on the Internet prior to their arrival in each town to find butchers that sell squab, guinea fowl, and game hens.

The bedlam of the band’s early days has been replaced by something resembling serenity — shattered momentarily when Frusciante arrives in a huff, cursing about a new driver who had trouble finding the proper entrance to the venue. It blows over quickly, and after dinner he retreats to a corner of the room that’s been transformed into a sort of meditation center. A woven mat and pillow are laid out on an Oriental rug. Frusciante’s guitar is standing next to a small stereo system. He’ll spend a solid hour flat on his back playing along to whatever music feels right that night and descending, according to Kiedis, into “a beautiful trancelike world.”

Here, surely, is where Frusciante draws inspiration for his mind-blowing cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her.”

Meanwhile, Flea has arrived and is pacing the halls with his bass strapped on. “I’ve only played one day out of the last 10,” he frets. Flea’s fingers are flying across the neck of his bass at a pace that suggests he will recapture his mojo before showtime. (He does. The concert is vintage Chili Peppers: uncorked and virtuosic.)

Kiedis brews a pot of strong black tea to share with Smith, who will run to the bathroom to relieve his bowels before brutally assaulting his practice kit for 10 minutes while Kiedis does vocal warmups and body stretches. Just before taking the stage, the Red Hot Chili Peppers will join hands, bow their heads, and perform what Kiedis describes as their most sacred and meaningful ritual: the soul circle.

“We just kind of pray, silently,” he says, “and think about where we come from and what we want to give the people we’re going to play for and try to tap into a power greater than ourselves and recognize that that’s where we get our strength and our creativity and our light.”

The soul circle is a Chili Peppers tradition that’s evolved, to say the least, over time. Twenty years ago it was four guys jumping up and down, screaming, and slapping one another as hard as they could in the face.

“It was a bit more primitive,” Kiedis concedes, “which had a very provocative and stimulating effect, almost like you’re getting ready to go into battle and you need to be as alert as possible. We still recognized the beauty of our predicament, that we were going to go do this thing we loved and make people happy and make them dance. So the spirit and intention were always in the right place. We just had more abrasive and chaotic personalities at that time.”

For rock bands that make it this far, the approach of middle age often looms like a threat — of commercial irrelevance, of a creative lull. But the Red Hot Chili Peppers seem comfortable, grateful even, for the settling effects that have come with the passage of time. During the writing and recording of “Stadium Arcadium,” and for the first time in the band’s history, each member was in a steady relationship. Smith’s wife gave birth to their first child the weekend they went into the studio. Flea and his fiancee, model Frankie Rayder, have since welcomed a daughter, Sunny Bebop; Frusciante is her godfather. Even Rick Rubin, the Peppers’ longtime producer, was in love.

“Whatever is happening in an artist’s personal life can’t help but spill over into their artistic life,” says Rubin in an e-mail. “Sometimes it’s a good thing and sometimes it isn’t. In this case there existed a sense of joy in our lives that made its way into the final result.”

“Stadium Arcadium” is an expansive album — stuffed with the group’s once pioneering and now-familiar fusion of funk, rap, rock, and pop. The first single, “Dani California,” which initially gained fame for its resemblance to the Tom Petty song “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” went on to become a cross-format smash across the radio dial, a common phenomenon in hip-hop but a rarity in rock ‘n’ roll. “Tell Me Baby,” the second of four to five singles Warner Bros. plans to release, is now sitting at No. 1 on Billboard’s modern rock charts, and according to Dan O’Brien, music director at Boston’s WBCN (104.1), it shows no signs of letting up.

The band’s continued good fortune makes it possible to indulge in a few extravagances. All four members travel separately. Smith, who’s antsy, flies, and the other three each have their own tour bus. Frusciante, who likes to sleep on the bus, will leave after the show. Kiedis, who can’t sleep on the bus, will leave in the morning, happy to watch old movies and stare out the window for the nine hours it will take to get to Calgary. Flea wants to spend the next day in Vancouver, so he’ll bomb to Calgary the following night.

“We’re all very peculiar and particular,” says Kiedis. “Over time, we’ve refined our approach so that it becomes possible to keep doing this.”

Every three weeks the band goes home for 10 days. Flea and Smith, who both live in Malibu, spend time with their young families and hit the links together. Frusciante, the last Hollywood holdout, returns to his beloved urban jungle. Kiedis will rest his body and his voice, hang out with his girlfriend and his dogs, and ride his Vespa through Los Angeles. The City of Angels is perhaps the one constant in Kiedis’ life, certainly his most reliable muse, celebrated throughout the years in all her seductive, nefarious glory.

“I feel like a kid in a candy store in LA,” he says. “In my youth my thing was traveling by skateboard, and then by bicycle, so I got to see the streets and neighborhoods and it just goes on and on. The band used to play house parties and really be right in the thick of the mix. Things change, of course, and you can’t just go be in the thick of the mix anymore like when you first started out. It’s different. But this is still the thing we’re best at.”

With that, Kiedis remembers that it’s time to get ready for a concert. He slips back into the dressing room to peruse a table lined with tidy rows of fingerless gloves in various colors and an unfinished set list. He settles on the black gloves. But when showtime arrives Kiedis still hasn’t decided between “Soul to Squeeze” and “Under the Bridge” for the first encore. No matter. The final list goes out with a question mark, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers figure it out as they go.