Red Hot Chili Peppers: The Naked Truth
Anthony Kledis will not disclose the exact location of the bridge. “It’s downtown,” he says warily, gesturing vaguely at a distant spot on the glittering Los Angeles night-scape outside a high-rise Hollywood hotel room. “but it’s unimportant,” he adds sharply. “I don’t want people looking for it.”
Kiedis, the singer and lyricist of the Red Hot chili peppers, has already immortalized the spot in “Under the Bridge,” the stark and uncommonly pensive ballad — at least for the usually sex-mad, funked-up Chili Peppers — that unexpectedly drop-kicked the band into the Top Ten. But Kiedis is understandably reluctant to turn the bridge into a pop-music tourist attraction. For one thing, it was, and still is, on L.A. street-gang turf; casual visitors are not suffered gladly. For another, it was under that bridge that Kiedis’s life bottomed out a few years ago under the weight of a severe heroin addiction.
“I was reaching a demoralizing low, just kind of hanging out on the streets and doing my thing and not much else, sadly to say,” Kiedis explains in a subdued, slightly gravelly voice quite unlike his aggro-stud stage bark. “I ran into some fairly unscrupulous characters involved with miniature Mafioso drug rings, and the hangout for one of these gangs was this particular location under a bridge. I ended up going there with this gang member, and the only way that I was allowed to go under this bridge was for him to tell everybody else that I was getting married to his sister. You had to be family to go there.
“That was one of just hundreds of predicaments that I found myself in, the kind that only drug addiction can bring about,” Kiedis says with a shrug. “It’s not that that one place was more insidious than other places. But that’s just one day that sticks very vividly in my memory. Like, how could I let myself get to that point?”
Kiedis, a muscular young buck with ruggedly handsome features and long, ironing-board-flat hair, had been clean for some time — since August 1st, 1988 — when he turned that memory into song during preproduction for the Chili Peppers’ latest album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Except he was suffering from another kind of withdrawal. “I was driving away from the rehearsal studio and thinking how I just wasn’t making any connection with my friends or family, I didn’t have a girlfriend, and Hillel wasn’t there,” he says soberly, referring to Hillel Slovak, the band’s original guitarist and a close friend since high school, who died of a heroin overdose in June 1988.
“The only thing I could grasp was this city,” Kiedis says. “I grew up here for the last twenty years, and it was L.A. – the hills, the buildings, the people in it as a whole — that seemed to be looking out for me more than any human being. I just started singing this little song to myself: ‘Sometimes I feel/Like I don’t have a partner….’
“When I got home that day, I started thinking about my life and how sad it was right now. But no matter how sad or lonely I got, things were a million percent better than they were two years earlier when I was using drugs all the time. There was no comparison. I was reminding myself, ‘Okay, things might feel fucked up right now, but I don’t ever want to feel like I did two years ago.’
“In the end it wasn’t like I was writing in any sort of pop-song format,” says Kiedis. “I just started writing about the bridge — and the things that occurred under the bridge.”
Fortune had been smiling broadly on Kiedis and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thanks to “Under the Bridge,” Kiedis, drummer Chad Smith, guitarist John Frusciante and bassist Michael Balzary — who is better known by his longtime nom de punk, Flea — were enjoying the mainstream success that had eluded the band through nine years, five albums, one EP, two record labels, several personnel changes, Hillel Slovak’s death and Kiedis’s near self-destruction. Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the Chili Peppers’ Warner Bros. debut, was over the million-selling mark, while the band’s EMI catalog, including the 1989 gold album Mother’s Milk, was kicking up shelf dust. This summer the Chili Peppers were to seal their chart victory by topping the bill over Ice Cube, Ministry, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam on the 1992 edition of Perry Farrell’s traveling mosh & roll festival, Lollapalooza.
Then in Japan on May 7th, four shows into an extensive Far East tour, Frusciante abruptly quit the group, forcing the band to abort two more Japanese shows as well as a major swing through Australia and New Zealand. Kiedis was on the phone in his hotel room, talking to a reporter in New Zealand, when Flea came in and dropped the bomb. “Flea looked at me with this completely puzzled and surreal, sad face,” Kiedis says a few days later. “He said, ‘John wants to quit the band and go home right now.’ It stunned me and it shattered me because things had been going so well.”
When the whole band sat down to talk it out, it was apparent that the guitarist was not playing mind games. “I could tell by the look in his eye that he was really serious,” Kiedis says. “He said: ‘I can’t stay in the band anymore. I’ve reached a state where I can’t do justice to what we’ve created, because of stress and fatigue. I can’t give what it takes to be in this band anymore.’ ”
There had been warning signs. General on-tour morale had been rocky over the past year, but Frusciante, especially, “didn’t seem happy on the road,” Kiedis says. “We could tell there was an unpleasant tension with him.”
A wiry, spaced ranger of twenty-two, Frusciante was not your archetypal gonzo Chili Pepper, at least in conversation. During a recent interview, he sat in his Hollywood living room with the troubled air of someone beamed in from a parallel universe against his will. He was suspicious and painfully withdrawn, wincing at most questions and snapping back impatiently at others. It was easy, though, to understand his discomfort. Only eighteen when he joined the band shortly after Slovak’s death, Frusciante quickly went from being a bedroom guitar prodigy and staunch Chili Peppers fan to playing on the band’s first hit record, Mother’s Milk. But the pressures, it appears, mounted rapidly over the past year.
“We kept a positive face on the operation,” Kiedis says, “hoping that it was going to work out. He’s one of the most deeply soulful guitar players that we’ve ever been connected with. Also, he’s a good friend, and we had something going that was cosmic and special. And we’re going to have to find that elsewhere.”
The Chili Peppers will have a new guitarist in time for the mid-July opening date of the Lollapalooza Tour. Yet Kiedis admits to having mixed feelings about the excursion — in particular, the Chili Peppers’ lack of creative input, even as headliners, on the package. “If I didn’t get off on it so heavily last year, I wouldn’t have been so inclined to be a part of it this year,” Kiedis insists. But the ’92 lineup, he says, is “way too male” and “way too guitar-oriented” for his tastes. “I wanted [the all-female band] L7 on the bill, and everybody in the agency just scoffed. They said, ‘They don’t mean anything.’ What do you mean? They rock, and they’re girls.”
Kiedis has also been frustrated by his inability to speak with Perry Farrell personally about the tour. Kiedis claims that when he tried to get Farrell’s phone number so he could call him directly, he was instructed to fax Farrell in care of the booking agency. “It was kind of upsetting to me,” Kiedis says.
He agrees nonetheless that Lollapalooza’s success — along with that of Nirvana, their Seattle–Sub Pop brethren, and the Chili Peppers themselves — is emblematic of a healthy and vital discontent revitalizing rock & roll: “The world at large is just completely bored with mainstream bullshit. They want something that not only has a hardcore edge but that is real music, written by real people who wake up and have the unignorable need to create music.”
Even by Top Forty’s post-Nirvana standards, “Under the Bridge” is an impressive fluke. Gently anchored by a lilting, skeletal guitar riff that faintly echoes Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” the song is light on radio-friendly pomp and direct in its confessional detail (“Under the bridge downtown/Is where I drew some blood…. Under the bridge downtown/I gave my life away”). “It doesn’t really have a hook,” admits Chad Smith. “And not to take away from Anthony, but he’s not the greatest singer in the world. It’s just cool and soulful. It’s not like the guy who wins all the awards, Michael Bolton.” He punctuates the name with a pig-snort laugh. “But maybe that’s why it’s so great.”
“Under the Bridge” also flouts the long-standing school of thought on the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Loved and scorned in equal measure as tattooed punk-funk loons obsessed with the horizontal rumba, the Chili Peppers are skateboard-culture heroes, recognized even by their detractors as early pioneers of the mosh-pit marriage of funk, rap and thrash that Living Colour and Faith No More took to the bank. The band members are notorious as well for the horny deviltry of songs like “Party on Your Pussy” and their socks-on-cocks stage gag — coming on buck naked except for a strategically placed white tube sock. They’ve also made headlines because of legal problems in Virginia, where Kiedis was convicted of indecent exposure and sexual battery after exposing himself to a woman following a 1989 show, and in Daytona Beach, Florida, where Flea and Chad Smith were arrested following an incident with a young woman during the filming of an MTV Spring Break performance in 1990.
Yet the Chili Peppers have finally scored commercially with a nervy slice of melancholia that is streets away from mosh-ville, locker-room chuckles and, much to Flea’s relief, the watered-down bubblegum-Peppers act of the young MTV oiks in Ugly Kid Joe.
“Our music is so much heavier than that,” Flea states indignantly, the intense stare of his striking aqua blue eyes heightened by the turquoise tint of his close-cropped hair. “I just know where their music is coming from — copping us, copping Faith No More, copping Pop-Rock Band No. 17B. We’re coming from listening to Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, De-funkt, Funkadelic, the Meters, James Brown, the real shit. And it’s coming from jamming, playing a billion hours of shit that no one will hear, getting cosmic in a darkened room and developing musical telepathy.
“All we ever want to do is play music that comes from our hearts,” Flea insists. “All the other shit comes from having fun. Like me and Hillel and Anthony used to live together in this house. People would come over, we’d hang out, smoke pot and drink beer, put socks on our dicks and run around. It was kids living together, having fun.”
Kiedis and Flea — who founded the Chili Peppers in 1983 with Slovak and drummer Jack Irons — are no longer kids. They’re both twenty-nine (they were born just twelve days apart), and what started as a joke band, meant to play one song at a single club gig, has become a career. What’s more, the sock routine has been semire-tired from the stage show, pulled out (so to speak) only on special occasions. Kiedis freely admits that, with and without the socks, the Chili Peppers are “complete punk-rock knuckleheads who love what we do, and hopefully, we’ll always have it that way.” The problem, as Flea sees it, is getting people to understand that digging sex, being a knucklehead and making music of some enduring worth are not wholly exclusive pursuits.
“We’ve felt trapped,” Flea says angrily, “we’ve felt cheated. When the third record, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, came out, I thought artistically that was a cool record. And it was getting no play at all. ‘Here’s the nutty, zany guys, they’re at it again, they want to “Party on Your Pussy.” ‘ Which was one song on one album.”
The Chili Peppers are hardly one-trick ponies. When they drop out of party-animal gear, they are capable of spacey acid-rock grace (“Behind the Sun,” on The Uplift Mofo Party Plan) and ragged lovesick poignancy (“Breaking the Girl,” the eerie waltz with Mellotron on Blood Sugar). In funkier moods they boast a variety of black-music influences, most vividly in Flea’s broiling, subterranean bass propulsion: the fluid, bare-bones grooving of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys, the rattling syncopation of the Meters and the lascivious rhythm mischief of classic P-Funk. (P-Funk boss George Clinton returned the compliment by producing the band’s second LP, 1985’s Freaky Styley.) The dedication of Blood Sugar to bassist Mike Watt, late of the Minutemen and currently with FIREHOSE, is not only a bow to “a fucking cool guy,” as Flea puts it, but a grateful declaration of the Chili Peppers’ big debt of inspiration to the Minutemen and other L.A. punk mutineers of the late Seventies, such as Black Flag, the Screamers, the Weirdos and the Germs. (Flea, by the way, was a featured player in Penelope Spheeris’s 1983 punk docudrama Suburbia.)
And Anthony Kiedis is no simple crotch-grabbing fool. “Under the Bridge” is persuasive enough on that score. But Kiedis has also taken cracks at social and environmental ills in “Green Heaven” (on the band’s 1984 debut, The Red Hot Chili Peppers) and the persecution of indigenous peoples in “Johnny, Kick a Hole in the Sky” (Mother’s Milk). The aching hole that Slovak’s death left in the band, and in Kiedis’s life, has been a recurring theme in songs like “Knock Me Down” (Mother’s Milk) and “My Lovely Man” (Blood Sugar).
Still, Kiedis writes a lot about sex because, well, it’s there. “It seems like perfect material for art,” he says with a twinge of impatience, “like death and every other fundamental aspect of existence. It’s right up there with the biggies as far as I can tell.
“What kills me is that there are so many people getting into ‘Under the Bridge’ across America who have no idea what the Chili Peppers are like. Take a group of Kansas housewives who turn on the radio and say: ‘Oh, I like that sweet, sentimental song. Honey, would you go out and get me this record?’ They get the record, and there’s ‘Sir Psycho Sexy’ and ‘The Power of Equality.’ They are going to have their little world turned upside down.
“I have this wonderful image of this lady washing the dishes in her little home in Kansas with her little tape deck,” Kiedis says with a roguish smirk, “popping this in and taking off her clothing, running into the back yard and getting loosened up a bit.”
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