The Red Hot Chili Peppers Are Back

We admit: A headline like ‘ The Red Hot Chili Peppers are back’ has a very amusing deja-vu like quality to it. But in contrary to then (1995 and the fiasco One Hot Minute) now there is truly something going on: the Chili Peppers are back. The successful line-up of the break through album BloodSugarSexMagik, including ex-junkie John Frusciante and producer Rick Rubin, made a really great new album with Californication.

“Have you really eaten it?” singer Anthony Kiedis asks semi strictly. Next to him on the couch in a very impressive hotel room in Los Angeles (for those who want to know: hotel Beverly Hills, immortal thanks to the cover of Hotel California of the Eagles) sits John Frusciante. 29 Years old. Guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in ’88 till ’92 and ’98 till now. Skinny posture, long dark hair, Bowie-T-shirt (period Aladdin Sane), red trousers. Two different socks.

John Frusciante has a funny, difficult to understand and childish voice. Donald Duck with one drink too many. Not a voice to say serious and profound things with. But he does. If we look back to the turbulent, heavy and sometimes insane time the Chili Peppers went through in the ’90s we wonder what kept the band together all these years, John sweeps those external appearances off the table. ‘The real fights take place in your head. And in your relationship with the outside world. All of that outweighs keeping the band together. Such a band… You have to look at it as a sort of blessing at the end of a journey, if you, after years of troubles and doubts, find yourself balanced, usually you are still standing. At least if the band members are strong enough.’ In a while he will contradict himself when he talks about his sudden departure from the Chili Peppers in ’92.

But that’s later on. First we go back to the question if John really ate it. What? That pastrami-sandwich that Anthony brought him while he was in rehab. ‘Yes I did, I really appreciated it.’ He saw it as a small, caring gesture that proved that the Chili Peppers-singer still loved him. The years before that were a bit different. After John’s abrupt and ill-timed departure, at the eve of a prestigious tour with Lollapalooza ’92 as a main act Anthony and John had not had any contact with each other. It wasn’t any different before that. “Of all personal understandings in the band the one between Anthony and I was the worst,” says John. “Our friendship had already reached an all time low before BloodSugarSexMagik. When I left the band we hadn’t spoken to each other in months. That situation was one of the reasons for me to leave the band. If friendships within the band do not have any more growth, the band doesn’t have any growth either. And if there is no form of comradeship you can just stop being a band. I’m convinced of that. And that’s what bothered me at that time. I noticed that we were just moving along to the success of BloodSugar and only did things that made us money. And on top of all that the friendship between Flea and I wasn’t going well. We still cared about each other but mentally we were on different wavelengths. Flea was having personal problems and I.. I was happy, but had locked myself up in my own world… You know what I mean.”

Those that followed John Frusciante and/or the Chili Peppers these last few years, know what he means with his own world: drug hell. After John left the band, he sunk into a deep black hole above which he hung his days with the Peppers. VPRO’s Bram van Splunteren visited him at home in ’94 and made a moving and shocking TV-reportage: we saw a sad, worn-out and nervous human being that was talking gibberish, but in clear moments he spoke frankly about ideals gone by, his musical example David Bowie, his depressions and, if there were any, the motives for his heroin use.

The year after that his first solo album, Niandra Lades And Usually Just A T-Shirt, was released. The record contained 24 bizarre songs and got mixed reviews, Some found the album one of the worst they had heard in ages, some thought of it as the awakening of a musical genius. The second Frusciante-CD was barely noticed outside of the United States. Shortly after this he retreated from the music scene and it seemed that he hadn’t played or even touched a guitar for a long time. He has never heard One Hot Minute, the somewhat unsuccessful ‘comeback-CD’ that his former band members made in ’95 with guitarist Dave Navarro (ex-Jane’s Addiction who’s been active as a solo artist recently with the multimedia project Spread Entertainment). John refers to his long-time drug use as the years of imbalance. Even when he is asked to try to explain how he experienced those years, the word balance is mentioned frequently. “I loved and still love drugs, but as a human being you have to apply balance to what you give and take. You’re constantly busy taking things, but you never give anything back to the outside world. Well, not anything beautiful anyway. For a long time I was still at peace with that situation, because I thought that I was giving enough with my music and that it was time that what was in me got some attention and recognition. When I left the band I decided to focus on myself. Drugs are very good for that. Luckily I found out that I was out of balance in time.” Anthony nods. “That’s a good way of looking at it.”

Anthony gives Flea all the credits for surviving during the Chili Peppers period after One Hot Minute, ’96 till ’98. In those years the band only existed on paper. “Flea was always the one that stayed optimistic and patient. He believed in the band. A lot more then I did. I mean, I know my weaknesses. Within the band I am the one with the longest drug past. You know; on and off, on and off. Again and again. Since One Hot Minute I’ve got it under control again, I know drugs have nothing to offer me anymore. Do you know what the worst thing is that heroin does to you? It destroys all the love that is in you. The love for others, yourself, and the beautiful things in life… Anyhow, Flea stayed strong. He kept the faith, regardless of his personal crisis. He was often close to despair; he found it terrible, the way the band was especially in ’97. But he was the one that encouraged me to visit John in rehab last year.” The question about how that went, the first meeting between John and Anthony in years is met with a deep silence at first. “Well eh…,” starts Anthony, after which he turns to John. “Is this a uncomfortable subject for you?” John nods no. Anthony then talks about their mutual friend Bob, that called him one day with the announcement that John was doing better. He was in a new, final stage of rehab. “John was going to be transferred to a closed observation centre, where he could get in touch with himself again. Bob said that he had asked John if he wanted anyone to visit him, on which John said two names, one of those names was Bob’s. After that Bob told John that he knew someone else who cared about him: Anthony from the Peppers. And John replied: Okay, you can add Anthony to the list, since visitors had to be on a official list before they were allowed into the centre. So I finally went there.” According to John it was a series of meetings. There was the meeting with the sandwich, that was from before that time and the two had met before at a reunion concert of Jane’s Addiction. “It was great to slowly become friends with someone again who I wasn’t always this close with. I noticed that Anthony had changed a lot since the time in which I was in the band. It finally made me feel good to be close to him.” Both emphasize that those meetings had absolutely nothing to do with music and John’s return to the Chili Peppers. “We weren’t thinking about that.” says Anthony. “We had to first trust each other and become friends again as humans.”

In the spring of ’98 the big moment was there: Flea had talked and confronted Anthony with it being time for John to come back. “But I hadn’t even thought about it,” says Anthony. “ I thought John wasn’t interested in that.”

One phone call from Flea was enough for John: John said yes. Gladly. After that everything went quickly, says Anthony. From the first minute that he, Flea, John and drummer Chad Smith played together, it was great. “The old chemistry was back. We experienced a great summer with the four of us. We locked ourselves up in Flea’s garage and jammed for months. Man, you should have seen it, 3 guys in a corner of the garage, rockin’ as hell. I hadn’t heard that in 7 or 8 years. So inspiring. Especially the sight of John. When he closed his eyes and his hair fell in front of his face, I thought:O shit! I then knew what we had missed for all those years. And it only got better.” The new Chili Pepper-CD became only a matter of time. Or actually: no time at all. “It all went so frighteningly fast,” says John. “Soon we got a lot of new material. And everyday it became more.”

According to Anthony the band is doing so well is mainly because of John. And his long absence. “A big cliché, I know, but I think that it all had a reason. If John hadn’t left in ’92 we wouldn’t have been here. The band would have exploded a long time ago. The way things went then couldn’t go on much longer. We are now this good because of the split not in spite of it. And we have all become older and wiser. When John joined the band he was only eighteen. He was confronted with things he couldn’t deal with. Luckily he has always been smart for his age. As stand-up philosopher (laughs), as an artist and as a thinker. In many ways John is the brightest of the bunch.”

Anthony and John don’t want to know anything about a relative comparison between the current positivism within the Chili Peppers and that of four years ago. “That was a totally different thing.” But still: the band was trusting and optimistic in ’95, just before One Hot Minute came out, as well. The band also had a series of nasty incidents, after John’s downfall there was the problem of finding a replacement, the long-term fatigue sickness of Flea, the adjustment problems with Dave Navarro and then there was finally something to be happy about: a new CD, a scheduled tour and a line-up that seemed indestructible. It became a disillusion: One Hot Minute was not as successful as expected and that was also applied to the tour. Moreover the band couldn’t adjust to Navarro. In ’96 the band faced a temporary stop and in ’97 everything was quite around the band, Flea calls this year the year of nothing. John admits that even now “he can think of small things that can make the band fall apart in a second,” but he trusts the wisdom and life experience of the members. “Meanwhile I have experienced too many hard and painful things to worry about a potential disaster, especially at a time in which everything is going well. Man, I’ve been through such shitty times that I’m cheerful even when things are going wrong. You can imagine what I am like when things are going well.” (Laughs)

According to Anthony there is also no reason for concerns about the future. ‘The optimism from before One Hot Minute… I get what you’re aiming at, it was a completely different feeling and a completely different time.”

Well then. A different feeling, a different time and, not unimportant, a different CD. Because let it be especially clear that One Hot Minute more then pales in comparison to the album that will be released in early June Californication: a inspiring, animated and sound Chili Peppers record that doesn’t offer many new angles, you could call it a old-fashioned Chili Peppers record because of it’s BloodSugarSexMagik like soul, regardless of that it has rock solid song material. And in the meantime the band goes to extremes: in Around The World, Get On Top and Purple Stain they are playing more angular, stripped down and more virulent then ever and with intimate songs like Porcelain, Savior and the title song they are, this is rare in the Chili Peppers oeuvre, moving.

“We shouldn’t look for explicit signs of what happened these last few years on Californication,” says Anthony. “I’m not someone that tries to analyze things from the past or put them in songs as metaphors. If I think about facts, I can ‘t be creative. You can say that It puts my mind in the wrong space.”

And even if the album title and the many references in the song texts refer to Hollywood and California do make you think of that concept, according to Anthony it’s barely there. “Those geological references appear frequently, every time there is a different reason for it. I understand that Hole made a concept record about Los Angeles with Celebrity Skin, but I’ve never listened to that CD. There is a pretty innocent idea behind the title Californication: it’s a word that I made up for the.. How else am I suppose to say this? The californication of the world. In the last few years, alone and with the band, I’ve traveled a lot and I discovered that everywhere you go, even in the weirdest places, you find influences from the Californian culture. I’ve seen little boys, live in the jungle in self-made huts 3 meters above the ground, wearing Dukes of Hazard-T-Shirts. And there is not a country in the world where the people don’t think of movies and glamour when they hear the name Hollywood.”

What is also noticeable: Anthony refers to two songs, This Velvet Glove and Purple Stain, that are literally for John Frusciante. “Yes. Out of pure love for him. Our regained friendship has made a huge impact on me and I couldn’t let that go during the writing of the lyrics. External factors work with that: the environment in which we rehearsed, the weather, the euphoria within the band… I noticed that I, after years of being stubborn and disinterested, became sincerely interested in John. For his life, his craftsmanship, and his way of thinking… Some of that has turned up in the songs. Moreover the band members’ background has always been a big influence on my lyrics. Even in the first Chili Peppers song, Out In L.A. every member was given a small ode… If you look back on our careers the band always stood or fell by resilience of the mutual relationships. There were never any purely musical differences of opinion. Because our friendships were on a temporary stop there were times the band was on a temporary stop as well. And when the band was going well, like now, that was the reason that we could connect as humans. Look at the friendship between Flea and I; it dates back to five years before the foundation of the Chili Peppers. Because of that we do not have a business relationship. When things go wrong we never say: Okay, fuck you and fuck you, I quit, it’s finished. Because you know and feel that you are connected to each other down to your toenails. You don’t give up something like that.”

By Erik van den Berg/Photography Niels van Iperen

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