Red Hot Chili Peppers

by The Red Hot Chili Peppers

  Right after we started the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea and I went to New York for a CMJ Music Convention. We were amped on self-promotion; we were basically fans of ourselves at that point. We truly believed in ourselves and we wanted to spread the good word. “You’ve got to check us out man; we’ve got a funky thing happening and you never heard this before.” The place was jammed and people were moving all around, and we got shoved into an elevator and I looked up and it was motherfucking James Brown in the elevator with me! I was wearing my own band’s T-shirt that had graphics of us making funny faces.

  “James Brown!” I said. He grunted a response. “Can you sign my shirt?”

  And he signed my shirt and I saved it forever until I lost it. That was really the only time that I ever, of my own volition, decided I needed to ask somebody for an autograph. That was the one and only truly fan moment I had and I was excited all day long that I got to stand next to James Brown, because what I had for him was love, pure love. Now, if I had run into him a few years later, I wouldn’t have asked him for an autograph, because my idea of showing love is to give him his space. I might give him a smile, I might just say, “Thank you.” But I wouldn’t ask him for anything, he’s already given me too much, more than I’ve ever given him. How can I say, “Oh, could you give me a little bit more?” The guy changed my life, how could I ask him for more?

  In June of 2004, we had four big shows to play in England, two shows in Manchester and two shows in London. Our agents said, “Who do you want to play these shows?”

  The Roxy in Los Angeles, 2011

  “Well, can it be anybody?”

  “Name it, anybody, and we will get them.”

  “James Brown,” I said.

  “Done, we will get him.”

  Now James was older, he was over seventy by then. He showed up and played those four shows with us, full band, fully rehearsed, fully intact, fully rocking. It was a complete and utter James Brown throwdown.

  Again, I didn’t want to get in his face, I didn’t want to ask him for anything, but I did tell his people if there was ever a time when James was comfortable with me spending a little bit of time with him in his dressing room area, I would take that opportunity. If not, don’t sweat it. Don’t go over there and tell the guy I need to hang out with him, but let him know that if he is into it, I would love the chance. If not, thank you for being here and playing these shows. Well, it wasn’t the first two shows; it was the third show, his handlers came to me and said, “Do you want to go hang out with James?” “Yes I do.” I grabbed John Frusciante and we went. We quietly sat down, we were going to let James do his thing, because he was preparing. He just started engaging, as he was getting ready. He was getting his hair done by a hair girl; he was getting his nails done by himself; he was getting primped and preened and ready; and he just started telling us stories about his upbringing. “You know, I can croon with the best of them. I can do Sam Cooke; that is not a problem for me. I just didn’t want to be a crooner,” he told us. And then he started crooning for us. “I can do this; that would have been nothing. I just didn’t want to do it, I had something else I wanted to do. People think I can’t croon. I can croon.”

  It was magical. I got my twenty minutes with James Brown. I got to be around him; I got to see him as he really was. And he was in good shape. He wasn’t the lost and troubled James Brown of maybe ten years earlier. He was matured and older and just centered in his body. And then two years later on Christmas morning, I woke up and got the news. James Brown had passed. And I cried my eyes out.

  Now back to when we were just starting out, our first performance, which consisted of one song, was so exhilarating that the high just lasted for days and days. We got asked to come back the next week to play two songs, so Flea and I made some flyers and we decided it was time to let the world know that the world’s new greatest band was now in existence. There was absolutely no shame in our game and we didn’t care that we were self-promoting with the most grandiose and kind of arrogantly egomaniacal, obnoxious attitude, because A) We were twenty and B) we were nothing. So it was okay to promote nothing like it was the greatest and C) we actually believed that we had stumbled upon and tapped into a great motherload of music that we had been loving but not necessarily creating. Flea was in a punk rock band and a new wave band; Hillel was in the same band; Jack was in the band. But we all had love for jazz and we had love for painfully hardcore funk. We had love for dancing and we had love for sexual energy and hilarious energy and devious energy and Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. Even though Funkadelic was a great funk rock band, they weren’t punk rockers from Hollywood. So when we did that first performance, we really felt like we found something that we didn’t even know we were looking for, but when we found it, we realized we had been looking for that.

  Live at the Troubadour, 2011

  When we started to promote, we would go from bar to bar, from club to club and Flea and I would belly up to the bar, next to strangers, usually female strangers. We’d present them with the flyer and we would look at them and say, “If you want the greatest musical experience of your life, be here next Wednesday night at eight o’clock.” And people would look at us like we were crazy, but that’s what we had to do, we wanted people to show up.

  When we started playing these tiny shows all through Hollywood, half of the audience would be our very good friends. And the other half would be friends of those people. So when we would look out at these people that were taking a very initial interest in us, they were people we knew. Our fans were the girl that we were hanging out with, the girl that had the barbecue the day before, and they were lovely people. It was a really magical group that we hung out with. So often it would just be those faces that we saw. “Oh yeah, there’s my dad; there’s the girl I’m dating; there are her friends; there are the other guys we hang out with.”

  Our fans were the girl that we were hanging out with, the girl that had the barbecue the day before, and they were lovely people. It was a really magical group that we hung out with.

  Friends and family. But it didn’t stop us from feeling very consumed with this new passion that we had found, just because it wasn’t commercially viable and it grew quite fast, in our opinion. I think because it was such an accidental experience, we never really had time to think “Well, we’ve got to get on the radio; we’ve got to become famous.” Really to us, the end goal was just to dominate the Hollywood club scene. That seemed like the top of the ladder. Where is there to go from there? Because we weren’t looking at the spectrum along the lines of a Van Halen success or anything else that was happening and it really stayed quite underground for a very long time. We had a great little following, wherever we would go to these clubs, they would be sold out, but that’s because the club held 150 people. And sometimes there would be a little line outside and we’d show up and be like, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, there’s a line!” But again, the audience was still mostly friends and other bands that we knew.

  I got my first real fan at our fourth show. We were playing at a beautiful venue called Cathay de Grande, a low-ceilinged, nowhere-to-run, nowhere-to-hide, piss-stained punk rock venue in Hollywood. The stage was a foot and a half off the ground, so you were almost eye level with the audience. It was sparsely attended, maybe thirty people, but we were performing as though it was a packed house. We felt the energy of a packed house and we played maybe four or five songs that we really loved at the time, like “Green Heaven” and “Get Up and Jump.” And it was a really good show for us; we were feeling it. And then afterward I walked to the side of the stage where my father was, and he congratulated me, but then there was this exquisitely beautiful, older woman, to me because she was probably twenty-nine or thirty and I was maybe twenty or twenty-one. She had this crazy thick accent and she was all colorful and she kind of embraced me and said, “That was a great show. Let me be the first to tell you that you are going to be huge around the world.” That was her wild Nostradamus moment. An
d it was Nina Hagen. She was so beautiful and so exotic-looking. She had her colorful, alien, superfreak look, but beyond that she was just very East German. Overbite, high cheek bones, just a radiant lady and I fell in love with her at that moment. But she truly believed, in her heart, what she said. She’s like, “I’m calling it first. You all are going to be loved around the world.” Mind you, it wasn’t until almost ten years later that that was the truth, but she felt it in her bones and she really laid this kind of unsolicited adoration on what we were doing, I think more energetically than anything else. It wasn’t like we were writing songs you could sing along with, or anything like that.

  Checking out the local vintage shops in Zagreb.

  That was also the beginning of a romance that sparked up for a little while. She taught me a lot about life at a young, tender age. She instilled in me the idea of giving stuff away, which later would end up in a song in 1991, because I was so poor and so without possession or food or tomorrow’s rent, or anything, that I couldn’t conceive of just giving something away for no reason, because I was in survival mode. One day I went over to her house and she was treating me to breakfast and blow jobs and love, affection, wisdom, and her spiritual awareness. I looked in her closet and I’m like, “Wow, that’s the coolest-looking leather jacket I’ve ever seen.” And she said, “Oh, take it.” “What?” “Yeah, yeah, just take it, you can have it. The only way you’re going to get good energy is by giving it to other people. I can’t keep stuff, because then I’ll lose the energy. If I keep giving it away, then…” I was like, “Really? What a crazy idea.” But that was one of the most profound life lessons I’ve ever gotten. So I basically fell in love with and had sex with my first fan.

  Our first record, which came out in 1984, sold about ten thousand copies at the time. The next album sold maybe five or ten thousand more. But we would still go on tour, and sometimes when we showed up to the clubs, there would be people there to see us. Sometimes they were there because they just happened to be there and had no idea who we were.

  As the years went on, one of the first times I realized that our music had escaped Hollywood somehow and gotten into the hands of people elsewhere was when we’d go to a town and there would be the fan guy who would show up and say, “Hey, I really love your music.” Nobody was looking at us as famous people yet, so they didn’t have that, “Oh, I want to be your friend because you’re famous” vibe. It was more like “because my sister plays your record in the basement” or “I saw you guys playing a show in a parking lot.” At the beginning it was rare to have a reoccurring guest in a town that liked us, so we did befriend them.

  There was this guy in San Francisco called Butch and he wore dreadlocks. He was a little bit older and had some weird connection to Jimi Hendrix when Hendrix was hanging out in San Francisco years earlier. So Butch became our fan/friend. Every single time that we’d play San Francisco, from 1984 until now, he’d be there. And we’d be like, “Yup, let Butch in, let him backstage, he’s our friend,” just because he was there from the beginning with nothing but support.

  We had a lot of these fanbassadors in different cities—fans who knew where the late-night places to eat were or cool places to hear music, and they would shepherd us around their towns. Because we weren’t famous for a very long time, it really was a lot easier to be friends with people that we would meet at our shows. There wasn’t that separation. You would just literally walk off the stage and into the crowd quite often, like, “Let’s go hang out; let’s go get a drink; let’s go get some late-night food; let’s go to the next club or party.” We didn’t feel famous and they didn’t look at us like we were famous. There was energy. They might have been like, “Holy shit, this is fun, I like hanging out with these guys, they’re different.” But we weren’t on TV, we weren’t on the radio, we weren’t on billboards, so there wasn’t that awkwardness like, “Oh, I feel weird, because I think I know this person, but I really don’t” for such a long time. It was actually kind of like gravy hanging out with some of these people. We were young, so we were looking for sex, we were looking for drugs, looking for excitement, and most of the time, that’s what we got.

  The first time that I remember feeling like we had fans all across the country was when we were on tour for Freaky Styley playing a club called Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut. We were walking down the street and we saw some kids who happened to be black, which was extra special because our world then was a little bit white and they started scream/singing:

  “Nevermind the Pac Jam

  Nevermind the Gap Band

  Nevermind the Zap Band

  Nevermind the Funk Scam

  ’Cause we’re Red Hot Chili Peppers”

  They were chanting the chorus from our song “Nevermind.” We’re like, “What the fuck? They know our music. That’s crazy.” It was great to know that we had fans way across the country because when we went on tour in England after our first record, we played a little hole-in-the-wall place called Dingwalls and we had no fans there at all, just people who were visiting the bar and who were going to watch our set, for better or worse.

  They were chanting the chorus from our song “Nevermind.” We’re like, “What the fuck? They know our music? That’s crazy.”

  It wasn’t until our third record that I felt the first moments of “Holy shit, these people in the audience know who we are before we get there.” They were ready for us. They knew our songs, they knew the lyrics, they were our fans. We were playing in Denver, Colorado, at the end of the “Uplift Mofo Party Plan” tour and we had to move the gig to a bigger venue because it had sold out so fast. We played a great set and everyone in the audience was singing along.

  After the show, Hillel and I were backstage in our cramped little dressing room and one of our roadies came back. “Hey, this girl wants to show you something. She’s with her boyfriend. Are you cool with that?” I’m like, “Yeah, all right.” And she comes back and she’s young and pretty and she’s with her boyfriend, so I wasn’t trying to mack on her or anything. And all of a sudden, she drops her pants and pulls down her panties and right across her mound she had tattooed “Anthony.” “That’s for you,” she said. And I’m like, “But, that is your boyfriend.” She said, “It doesn’t matter, that’s for you.”

  She actually caught me off guard with that. I didn’t know what to say. But that was a straight-up, hard-core fan move. Nothing happened. She just wanted to say, “I have true admiration for you and this is how I’m showing it.” It was a beautiful scenario because she wasn’t being crazy, sleazy, ho-ey. She’s like, “This is my boyfriend, but I do have to show you what I have done.” Later I looked at Hillel and said, “We must be doing something right.”

  Tattoos are a weird thing, especially when fans get tattoos of me or other members of the band on their body. Tattoos are weird-looking to begin with, so permanent, so it’s almost a little bit painful to look at a tattoo that you’re so personally involved with. Some people get tattoos of our logo or some of our lyrics. Some people have their entire back covered in lyrics. The coolest lyrical tattoo was a friend of mine, who’s not really a fan but he does appreciate our work, and he has a line tattooed across one of his ribs, in typewriter writing that says, “This life is more than just a read-through.” Sometimes they even replicate my own tattoos on their body, including the gigantic back piece. That’s a very creepy feeling. But even weirder and harder to digest are the portraits of band members. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my own portrait but I’ve seen several Fleas and several John Frusciante portraitized on people’s bodies. It’s hard enough to capture someone in a tattoo, so when I see something like that it hurts my heart a little bit. I feel the love but I also feel the pain.

  But the strangest thing I’ve ever seen is this guy from Italy who has the I’m With You Anthony-clone-look down to a tee. It’s like something out of an episode of The Twilight Zone. You don’t want to walk out of a hotel and see yourself. You just don’t. It’s u
psetting the natural order of things. Parallel universes are not supposed to happen in the same place and the same time, but in a different place, same time. So God bless his enthusiasm, I know that he’s coming from a place of love, but it still throws me for a loop.

  Cruising around New Orleans, right before filming the video for “Brendan’s Death Song.”

  Speaking of coming from a place of love, I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss the sexual union of performers and fans. As a young teenager, there is the pursuit of female company and many people get into a band to up their status a bit so that their menu increases. But as our fame increased, I experienced a shift in perception of these matters. The minute that I felt like a girl was interested in me because I was any amount of famous, I was no longer interested. There may have been times when I was fooled and I thought, “Oh, she just likes me for being me.” But whenever I felt that it was, “I want to sleep with this guy because he’s in a band or he’s famous,” that was just the biggest turnoff ever.

  I remember once I was sitting with Rick Rubin and George Drakoulias at the back booth at Damiano’s, an all-night Italian food joint in L.A. It was about 1990 and Mother’s Milk had come out and we were working on Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Some random girl just started throwing herself at me and it was obviously a fame-driven attraction. It wasn’t that I had great morals, the attraction just wasn’t there—“No, that doesn’t turn me on.” If there is no actual spark between people and it’s just based on degree of fame, then I don’t feel it and I haven’t ever since. It’s just an energy thing, which is really contrary to this sort of cliché of what it is to be the guy in a band growing up. But it went the other way for me. The more well-known we became, the more introverted toward the fans I became. Before we were that well-known I was comfortable mingling and just being a worker bee among worker bees. Then the more we were on television, the more we were on the radio, the more introverted I became in dealing with the public in general. It became more about just hanging with my friends, which is not necessarily a healthy thing.