The Red Hot Chilli Peppers

In honour of the new RHCP doc, which is focused on Hillel Slovak, their tragically-died-young guitarist, and in further honour of Flea's jazz album, here are some writhings about the band. 

Whose second album Freaky Styley I bought with faint hope after reading about them (slim pickings that year) only to be insufficiently whelmed. 

They were apparently huge postpunk fans (something shown by the footage in the doc of their precursor bands, who are very Anglophile). 

Green Gartside told me that at some music biz award ceremony, they came up to him burbling about the early Scritti stuff (I imagine what turned them on were the funky-slinky "PAs' and the other 4 A-Sides tunes rather than "OPEC-Immac).... 

Keith Levene claimed that Flea auditioned to be in PiL after he, Levene, left, and was most disappointed that Levene was no longer in the band, since that was the prime reason he wanted to join.... and he did in fact contribute to Keith Levene's Violent Opposition, if I recall right ...  

And obviously they got Andy Gill to produce their debut. 

Which I have never thought to listen to until seeing this doc. 

Although more voluminous than I remembered, the below are not the complete collation of my writhings about Red Hot Chilli Peppers.... on some other occasion, I did opine that the wordless vocalese in the middle of "Under the Bridge" were the most unpleasant recorded sounds emitted by a human throat in the entire 1990s. 

I will say, Flea does seem like a a truly sweet geezer.  But yeah... if the group did start with postpunk,  you would have to say that not every pathway from a golden origin is a fruitful one.

The Red Hot Chilli Peppers

The Clarendon, Hammersmith, London

Melody Maker, March 5 1988

So the Clarendon faces closure, and yes it's a sad day for rock, another step in the drawn-out death of the London gig circuit, and where will the Buttholes and Bad Brains of this world play – but, here, tonight, sauna-sweltering in this rank sty of Grebo flesh, this post-punk meets pre-punk sewer, such a closure can only feel like an elementary and overdue sanitary measure.

This is The Red Hot Chilli Peppers' constituency, for sure. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers read like a good idea: an alliance of funk and metal, the best of both worlds, a doubling of pleasures (what drug experts call "potentiation"). But then look what happens when you mix funk and jazz – separately two of the finest things in life. Each undermines the other, mutes and dampens their respective effects.

The problem for the Chilli Peppers is that funk and metal are further away than ever, much further than in the age of funkadelia they hark back to. Metal has become monolithic, no longer beastly but cruelly hygienic, the proverbial sonic abattoir. And funk – who plays funk, these days? Modern black dance is assembled in the studio. This Organic Anti-Beatbox Band inevitably comes over a little dated.

The giveaway is their overbearing penchant for ye olde slap-bass. Once, around 1981, the sound of slap-bass was for me and all the other white-dopes-on-funk the very definition of ecstasy. Now slap-bass strikes me as lost, Claptonesque craft that should be allowed to slip quietly into disuse. After all, few black musicians play in that style anymore...

The Red Hot Chilli Peppers come across as a kind of National Lampoon's Gang Of Four. Body paint making them look like fluorescent salamanders, they have that generic hardcore look, neanderthal features combined with Bullworker-bodies, and they see their lame buffoonery as a major service to us and to the world. Like so many of these "wackeee" US bands, they combine sexism with a fervent loathing for racism. (All of them seem to have written at least one song about the genocide of the Red Indians.)

At their best, they're like a lumpen, sub-virtuoso approximation of Hendrix, funk fluency combined with rock's serrated edges. At their worst, they're like late Zappa, or a yob version of Firehose. This "funk" is too clenched, too trammeled by hardcore dynamics to approach maggot-brain diuretic gross-out.

There are some fab moments, like the great nervous tic of a chorus in 'Me And My Friends', rising up to buffet you in the face like surf. And the forthcoming LP is extremely fine*. Live, though, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers are too curvaceous and wriggly to be speed-metal, but too hasty and hamfisted to shimmy and wiggle like funk. They are neither carnal nor apocalyptic, neither swagger nor hurtle. It feels forced, albeit at times almost interestingly wrong.

* Is it though? Was it, though? 

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS 

PSYCHEDELIC SEXFUNK LIVE FROM HEAVEN video

Melody Maker 1990?

     "Whoopee!", I exclaimed, on being presented "PSYCHEDELIC SEXFUNK LIVE FROM  HEAVEN" (Picture Music International, œˆ9-99), "a chance to relive the third worst night of my life!". 

This was back in 1988 when the intolerably zany Red Hot Chili Peppers played the intolerably humid Clarendon (now deceased, doubtless as a sanitary precaution). This video is thankfully not a document of that hellish night, but consists of live excerpts from a gig at Long Beach Arena, intercut with "behind the scenes mayhem".  The press release claims that these are so untamed and licentious that the video was awarded a 15 certificate, but the grainy shots of dressing room antics, Chad taking a shit, the drummer putting an Elastoplast on his chafed thumb, and the band gathering in a circle for a pre-match pow-wow session, hardly qualify as "Hammer Of The Gods" material. 

But then the Peppers are clean-cut, cleaned-up sorts these days. Music for them is a kind of sporting activity, a "healthy release of energy", and underneath the wacky hairdos they look like GI's. Onstage, they present a spectacle of taut, glistening musculature and relentless hyperactivity.  Red Hot Chilli Peppers version of funk allows no scope for languor or "lazy carnality". If it's seldom flagrantly sexist  "Stone Cold Bush", with its "she blows more than my mind" refrain is a notable exception), the Peppers' athletic sexuality is totally masculine, all thrust and pummel, exertion and "performance".

     The music too is all prowess and overkill, a sub-Hendrix muso-flash blur of slap-bass and finickity riffs. The unfavourable comparisons with Hendrix are compounded by their spoof trumpet version of "The Star Spangled Banner" - only twenty years too late.

Village Voice has a good term for the Chilli Peppers/Faith No More/Urban Dance Squad/Electric Boys blend of rock and funk that neither grooves nor slams: "runk". It sounds like an unpleasant residue left behind by food processing. This video only confirms what I've known ever since that night at The Clarendon: runk is rank.

                                                 

METAL BREAKDOWN: The Funk-Metal phenomenon
20/20, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

When it comes to the USA’s current birth explosion of funk-metal groups, all paternity suits should be filed with the Red Hot Chili Peppers: a “seminal” band in all senses of the word. Five years ago this Los Angeles group’s Freaky Styley LP coined a sound, an attitude and an onstage dementia that has since inspired an entire genre.

First there was Faith No More from Northern California, with their torrid, overwrought fusion of metal, rap and funk, and their morbid fixation on the darker side of life. Faith No More rapidly overtook the Chili Peppers, and last year cracked the MTV mainstream with their Top Ten hit “Epic”, an anthem-like encapsulation of their cartoon Nietzsche world-view.

In 1990, the funk-metal floodgates opened. Most of the time, the names tell you everything you need to know: Psychofunkapus, Scatterbrain, Limbomaniacs, Mindfunk, Sprawl, Sweet Lizard Illtet, Moneyspank, Electric Boys, Spin Doctors. All these bands are loosely aligned to the P-funk creed originally formulated by George Clinton and Bootsy Collins (“a creative nuisance… the recognition of stupidity as a positive force”) as reactivated and reinterpreted by the Chili Peppers with their combination of zany antics, horny-like-a-mutha lyrics and elasticated funk-rock.

How is it that a generation of metalheads reared on Black Sabbath, Led Zep and Aerosmith have suddenly become turned on to Funkadelic, James Brown and Sly Stone? One reason for the shift towards funk was a reaction against the sterile impasse that metal had reached by the late Eighties. Heavy metal had undergone a striking regeneration during the Eighties, reforming its worst abuses and trimming off its flabby excesses. It even achieved a degree of raised consciousness with the apocalyptic protest of groups like Metallica and Anthrax.

But the thrash/speedmetal boom rapidly hit a dead end. With its high-velocity blur and self-flagellating S/M aesthetic, thrash was about as sexless and ungroovy as rock music can get. Light years from rock’s R&B roots, thrash was the ultimate Aryan sublimation of metal. It was almost inevitable there would be a call for a reinfusion of ‘blackness’, a return to syncopation. Even mainstream metal groups have been lubricating their sound with a bit of funk fluency (Poison’s “Unskinny Bop”, Extreme’s “Get the Funk out”).

Another factor was the influence of rap: hip hop has set the agenda for US pop in much the same way that house has completely overhauled British chart pop. In particular, it was Def Jam’s rap/metal phase (Run DMC, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J) that opened a lot of headbangers’ ears. Also part of the ‘crosstown traffic’ of the late Eighties was the rise of black rock. Groups like Living Colour, 24-7 Spyz and Fishbone, coming from the opposite direction, have run head-first into the funk-metallers.

This connects with another reason for the rise of funk-metal: musicians’ tendency to get bored easily. Mixing genres allows the muso to show off. Once upon a time, it was the blues solo that provided the pretext for exhibitionist feats of dexterity: with the funk-metallers, it’s slap bass. In both cases, white musicians colonized a style that its black originators had almost unanimously left for dead. Contemporary black dance (house, swingbeat, rap) is technophile, happy to engage with state-of-the-art equipment. Funk-metal generally displays a Luddite techno-fear, following the Chili Peppers’ “organic anti-beatbox” creed, which declares that audience pleasure is in direct ratio to the amount of flailing energy expended by the band.

Body-awareness is at the core of funk-metal. In part this is a reaction against the chaste, fleshless aura of most metal. Death metal, for instance, is carnographic rather than pornographic. Its histrionic crescendos are more nuclear detonations than orgasms. And partly it’s that George Clinton’s lewd and lubricious bad-ass persona somehow seems a more acceptable role model for the male libido than trad metal’s penile dementia.

But funk-metal comprehends a range of contradictory attitudes to the body. On one hand, there’s the West Coast’s health-and-efficiency ethos--muscle-bound athleticism and the hardcore punk philosophy of straight-edge (no drink or drugs). Sweet Lizard Illtet sing of positive energy, rail against “merry-go round thrills” and aspire to the “honest bodily togetherness” of Afro-American culture. Other groups aspire to the debauchery and excess of a different West Coast culture. There’s the apocalyptic aura of decadence entwined around Jane’s Addiction, whose art-rock inflected brand of heavy metal brilliantly melds influences from funk, dub reggae and Eastern music. Or there’s Moneyspank’s pagan/voodoo vibes and sex-and-death lyrics. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ career has included body worshipping (they invariably perform with their shirts off to showcase their muscled physiques) and desecrating their body-temples: guitarist Hillel Slovak died of a drug overdose, while singer Antwan aka Anthony Kiedis cleaned up his act and exchanged over-indulgence for New Age eco-platitudes.

All funk-metal groups agree that one form of self-abuse is still legitimate: moshing, stage-diving and other forms of lemming-like behaviour are de rigeur. Funk-metal gigs seethe with sweaty male bonding. This is the genre’s biggest defect--it’s a boy’s own affair. Not one of the score or more funk-metal bands includes a female musician. Admittedly, examples of outright sexism are surprisingly rare (one exception being Limbomaniacs whose Stinky Grooves LP includes songs like “Butt Funkin’” and “Porno”). But it’s also true that the representation of sex in funk-metal is totally masculine--thrust-orientated, with no place for languor or tenderness. In many ways, it’s an aggregation of the most phallocratic tendencies in the white rock and black funk traditions: Rick James meets Robert Plant.

Still, funk-metal earns a Brownie point for its anti-racist tendencies. Implicit in the musical miscegenation, these are often explicitly articulated in lyrics and interviews. The Chili Peppers even started a fashion for songs about the plight of the Native American with their “American Ghost Dance”. That said, the pro-integration sentiments don’t seem to have had much effect on the racial composition of the audiences or indeed of the bands themselves, who remain almost exclusively “white dopes on funk”.

Red Hot Chili Peppers

interview 

The Observer, September 29, 1991

One of the most hyperactive rock scenes in the United States is a genre called 'funk-metal' or 'funk 'n' roll'. Groups like Faith No More, Fishbone and Living Color have broken into the charts; scores of funk-metal bands, with names like Scatterbrain and Primus are waiting in the wings.

But the pioneers of funk-metal (a fusion of hard rock aggression and Seventies funk swagger) are the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Back in early Eighties Los Angeles, only they (and the all-black Fishbone) were exploring this currently overcrowded terrain.

The core of the Chili Peppers, Anthony Kiedis and Flea Balzary, were hanging out in the vaguely bohemian milieu around Hollywood Boulevard. Kiedis was a 'nomadic poet'; Balzary played bass for a hardcore punk band called Fear. The duo first turned on to black music when they encountered the 'punk-funk' outfit Defunkt. But Kiedis only considered getting involved in music himself after hearing rap. After forming the Chili Peppers, he developed a drawled vocal style between rap and singing.

"When we started fusing funk and rock, we never intended to spearhead a movement," recalls Kiedis. "It's not as though we're the first to mix funk and rock. Long before us there was Sly Stone and Parliament/Funkadelic. At the early shows, people used to say, ‘you guys are really into P-Funk, right?’

"At that point, we hadn't heard that stuff. But then we really got into it, and eventually we got George Clinton to produce the second album, Freakey Stylee." The album's title captured the flavour of the Chili Peppers' zany on-stage antics, notably their penchant for performing naked (except for socks pulled over their genitals).

By 1987 and their third album. The Uplift Mojo Party Plan, the Chili Peppers were calling themselves the Organic Anti-Beatbox Band, a dig at Eighties black dance genres such as rap and house which rely on hi-tech samplers and sequencers. Pitting themselves against the studio-based, producer-dominated dance pop of the day, the Chili Peppers complained about its sterility, and called for a return to 'dirty' Seventies funk. In interviews, they came over more than a little Luddite.

"We're not against music that depends on technology," clarifies Kiedis. "It's just that we prefer to be an all-live, hands-on band. But my favourite band is Public Enemy and they use samplers and drum machines. There's a lot of rap music that's ridiculously funky. What I don't like is house music – it's the most blasphemous, soulless, cold-blooded noise I ever heard."

With their creed of sweaty exertion, the Chili Peppers inspired heavy metal's rediscovery of 'groove' after the late Eighties, during which metal had become increasingly sclerotic as it lost touch with its roots in R & B, and reached its apotheosis with the sadomasochistic thrills of thrash metal. "That kind of ferocity is one-dimensional," says Kiedis. "It's very male music, but without any sexual energy."

The Chili Peppers' vibe is far from chaste. They once declared that "we want our music to give you an erection." On their fifth album. Blood Sugar Sex Magik, they propound a hazy philosophy in which lusty hedonism and New Age spirituality are conflated. Their back-to-nature rhetoric carries through to an interest in tribalism and an admiration for Native American folkways.

"The album title is an eloquent but abstract description of how we feel," says Kiedis. "We live in a world packed with desensitising forces, that strip the world of magic. And music can help restore a sense of magic. The world is full of negativity, but we fight back with positivity. We're inspired by oceans, forests, animals, Marx Brothers films. We can't help but project uplifting vibrations, because we love each other so much and get off on playing together."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This Kiedis interview done on the phone and I remember him being not exactly friendly. 

Around this time I interviewed Metallica for The Observer, also on the phone (and the drummer I think), although for reasons I can't recollect, this never ran. 

And yet another Observer piece, this time done in person, but with not-the-singer but someone else, was Faith No More. 

Jane's Addiction were also interviewed around this time, for The New York Times, pegged around Lollapalooza.  

I was really doing a sort of run-through a certain type of big-on-MTV but just before grunge type band, I guess.