Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Greatest Hits DVD: comments on videos, 2003

These are the comments on videos compiled on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Greatest Videos DVD, which you can acquire here.
NOTE: Only John’s comments and John-related comments are shown here. Comments on videos are given in the order the videos were made in.

Higher Ground
“When we did this video, you know, it was a lot like — I mean, as you can see, I’m wearing a different outfit for every single shot. It was all… We-we were very much about the way we looked at this time. Like, it was… it was very important to us to like… to wear funny hats and funny pants. ”

Flea: It’s funny to see John… yeah, uh, in this video, ’cause he’s just so different now, you can’t imagine, like, sticking his tongue out and being silly and running around anymore like he did then, you know? He’s so, like, young and down with the program of being, like, a crazy Chili Pepper, you know?

“I can’t say that I’m crazy, you know, about watching this. I don’t like the person who I was back at this time, and-and, uh… I think I had all my priorities in the wrong places, and I think if I were to spend as much time playing guitar as I did picking out stupid shorts and stupid hats and stupid, you know, overcoats, I would’ve… I would’ve been able to write some good songs, you know? I can’t watch this version of myself and be at all happy about it. I want to… I want to strange myself when I see this video. I was 18 years old. 18-year-old that deserved to be slapped upside his head. (giggles) ”

Flea: “Yeah, this was the beginning of our-our… time with John, you know?

Give It Away
“It was funny, like, while we were making this video, obviously we… our eyes were seeing everything in color. You know, it’s a good thing we were all right with being silly, ’cause we really looked silly. When you see it on film and everything, it has this classical kind of a… classic thing of a look to it, but… when it was us just painting ourselves silver and wearing these big boots and stuff. I mean, it felt like glam rock or something.”

“I saw everybody else going fast, so my idea was to just go really slow, you know. I was stoned out of my mind for every second of it.”

Suck My Kiss
“There we were, hanging upside down for a photo session. Anthony and I were talking about that the other day. It was the last happy time for me, uh, up until the point where I… where I quit the band, you know?”

“I like seeing the footage of us at the house. As far as this video goes, I…I’m not crazy about the… the parade part of it.”

Under The Bridge
“Uh, the way this song came about was, was that Anthony came into rehearsal one day, uh, being coaxed by Rick, uh, to sing us this song that he didn’t think was appropriate for the Chili Peppers that he had written in his car. I think the reason I chose to choose the chords that I chose at the beginning was because it starts out in a major key, was because I had… When I originally heard it, my brain interpreted it as being this really sad song. So I thought, if the… if the lyrics are really sad like that, I should write some chords that are more happy.”

“I woke up that morning, and, uh, my girlfriend at the time, Toni Oswald, uh — she picked out this outfit for me. She just went in my closet and, um… She might not have actually even officially been my girlfriend yet at that point, but she went in my closet, and she-she picked out that shirt and those pants and those shoes and that hat. Uh, and-and that’s… and that’s what I wore to the video. And when I got there, Gus Van Sant was just looking at me and he was just going, “God, I’m so glad you wore that hat. I’m so glad you wore that shirt. Oh, those pants are so great. I’m so glad you wore those. He-He just kept complimenting my… outfit. And-and, uh, it was the first time, you know, in this video that-that I’d made that decision to just stand there and play the song, rather than jumping around; but the music obviously seemed like it called for that.”

Flea: Gus is great, you know, because he knew that that footage of John looked really great, and he just left it and used it real plain.

Scar Tissue
“The whole thing with me driving is funny ’cause I’ve-I’ve never driven in my whole life. I-I-I drove a Cadillac once that I had bought. Um, I had bought this car for $1,500 because of the size of the ash tray when I was 19 years old. It had a gigantic ashtray which me and my friends thought was really great. And, um, I-I nearly hit a jogger on my one attempt to drive, and that was the last time I tried to drive.”

“A lot of people have asked me about this broken guitar here that I’m playing. That was Stéphane’s idea. I-I didn’t think it would look good, but it, you know, it ended up looking okay.”

Around The World
“When we were doing the performance, like I said, that’s the part of making a video that I like, is-is just, when the camera’s actually on, you know. So, I like, uh, flipping out and jumping around, and ever since I was a little kid, I loved just jumping around and going crazy, so it’s fun.”

Stéphane Sendaoui: Um, John is very beautiful. You know, very uh… he has a very, very strong sensuality.

Otherside
Jonathan Dayton:I just saw John play that guitar string, that big long rope that John plays, and I remember, he wasn’t happy about that at all. He was like, “Can’t I just play my guitar? I don’t want… I feel silly.” And it’s funny, ’cause he looked so cool but he… he was worried about it beinhg silly.

“This is one of those things, you know, where I just had to trust the director because it didn’t make sense to me about what they asked me to do there. I-I didn’t want to do it. It, you know, it was one of those things where it made no sense to me.”

Californication
“We each had to go to some place in Beverly Hills where the doctors take the pictures of your head from every possible angle so they can give that to the computer people so they can make the caritacure out of you.”

Flea: John really loves da Vinci a lot. They show, you know, the Mona Lisa there. Then they have da Viinci, you know, invented this flying contraption, and John’s in a da Vinci flying contraption.

Valerie Farris: John is a big Leonardo da Vinci fan, so it was just, like, okay, well, yeah, we’ll put him in one of his flying machines. You know, you just do anything.

“I guess this is the first time in a video that I ever showed my arms since my arms have been scarred, ’cause my arms are-are pretty badly scarred. I guess people are always wondering, so I might as well say that, um, that the way that my arms got the way that they look, um, is, was from abscesses, which came from shooting huge amounts of drugs. The results could have been a lot worse, so I’m happy to have the scars from a period of my life where I was living destructively just as a… as a sign of what I’ve been through. And, um, these days, I-I’m, you know, being healthy and taking care of my body is so important to me. But, looking at it here, it seems like my arms have gotten better since then, so… that’s nice to see.”

Road Trippin
“That song was only released as a single in Europe, so that’s why in America, it’s, uh… people never saw the video, but people in Europe have seen it. Because, uh, because it was only released as a single over there because the business world didn’t feel that Americans wanted another mellow song, so…”

“Flea and I and Anthony just sort of put the music together, and then Flea and I took a nap. And when we woke up, Anthony had written the lyrics to the song.”

By The Way
“People were trying-trying to talk on their CBs, and, uh, Flea and I were in the car by ourselves, and we got on this station, and Flea started talking like Mike Tyson and, with the lisp and stuff on their channel, and we were laughing about it, and then… and then we heard them say to each other, “Change to channel two, will you?” and then they changed to channel two, and then we changed to channel two, and then I handed it back to Flea, and he continued doing the Mike Tyson impression… and it was so funny. (is laughing all the way)”

The Zephyr Song
“Nobody tells me how to jump around or anything, um… That would be pretty funny. (giggles) We usually do much more than anybody would’ve expected us to do or asked us to do, you know.”

“I like these little repetition things. I-I think I actually like this video. I know some of the guys might-might not like it, but I think… I think it’s interesting, you know?”

Can’t Stop
“While we were doing it, I wasn’t sure at all how, how it was going to come out, but Mark Romanek was very, uh, sure of himself, and not very interested in our input, and I thought I respected him for that, I thought that was cool. Um, I even played this guitar here, it wasn’t a guitar that I would normally play, but he wanted me to play it because of the color, and I thought it was, you know, it looked like a pretty cool shape guitar, anyways, but guitar people would know that I wouldn’t normally play that ’cause I play only old guitars but…”

Universally Speaking
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