I saw the look in his eyes, and I knew there was no other choice. There was no point in even trying to talk him into staying. A huge sense of relief came over me. The last thing in the world that I ever would want to happen was happening, but thank God he was walking away, because as much as this was going to hurt, the relief of not having to deal with the drama on a day-to-day basis would be greater than the self-imposed pain and suffering.
Lindy was concerned with the sold-out venue. Finally, we got John to agree to play the show before he got on a plane to go home. It was the most horrible show ever. Every single note, every single word, hurt, knowing that we were no longer a band. I kept looking over at John and seeing this dead statue of disdain. In some ways, I wish we would have canceled the show and returned everyone’s money rather than have them witness this display of twisted energy. And that night John disappeared from the topsy-turvy world of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Chapter 11
Warped
While we were still in Japan, we came up with a plan. We would go on to Australia, where we’d meet up with our friend Zander Schloss, who was going to take John’s place. Zander was a talented guitar player who could read and write music, a quick study with a zany, soulful, comic sensibility. We had seven days to teach him enough songs to rock out Australia.
Zander met us in Sydney, and we started intensive two-a-day rehearsals. But after four days, it was clear to Flea and me that this wasn’t happening. Zander was playing the songs, but it didn’t feel like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. At that point, we decided we’d rather cancel the dates than present a half-assed version of ourselves.
When we told Zander, he was devastated. You’d have thought he was in the band for four years instead of four days. “Oh my God, I just went from having the richest, most incredible future to not only being where I started from but being eight thousand miles from home,” Zander said. “Am I going to get a ticket back?”
We assured him we weren’t going to strand him, and we all stayed in Australia for a few more days and enjoyed the gorgeous weather and the beautiful girls.
I was friendly with Greer Gavorko, a New Zealander who was one of our crew members. When he showed me pictures from a recent trip he’d taken to Thailand, I thought, “I’m in Australia, which is nowhere near Hollywood. I have no idea what’s going to happen with my future, because we’re now limping through life as a band. My left nut, in the person of John Frusciante, has just departed my testicle sack. So why don’t I just go to Thailand by myself?”
Greer recommended some islands in the Gulf of Siam. So I flew to Bangkok, stayed the night in a hotel airport, and then flew to the south and got on a boat to Ko Samui. It was a beautiful island, and the weather was incredible, but the place was teeming with Eurotrash party animals. It was coke, bad music, and half-naked beautiful women all high on Ecstasy. I hadn’t come to Thailand to immerse myself in a techno-fantasy world, so I traveled to the next island, Ko Pha Ngan. It was a little more laid-back and beautiful, but I was still discontented, so I got a recommendation from some Thai natives to go to Ko Tao, a small island with no hotels.
Ko Tao was exactly what I had been dreaming of. I rented a little house from a Thai family and stayed for a week, going scuba diving every day. I left the island feeling recharged and cleansed, and more prepared to deal with John being gone. As soon as I got back, Flea and I went to the drawing board. We were familiar with an L.A. band called Marshall Law, which consisted of two brothers, Lonnie Marshall on bass and Arik Marshall on guitar. Both of these guys were funky, freaky oddball prodigies on their instruments. They were from South Central, and they were half black and half Jewish, the old Blewish thing. I had seen them a number of times, and Arik’s guitar playing, especially, had blown me away. It was funky but also hard-rocking and inventive.
We auditioned a few other people, including this guy called Buckethead, who would play his whole set with a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head while encased in a chicken coop. When Arik jammed with us, it was fun and inspiring, so we ended up hiring him, and he was thrust into the insanity of our world. Even though we had just lost John, who was such a fundamental element of our huge success with Blood Sugar, the promoters and MTV and the whole music industry didn’t perceive us as being finished, because nothing was stopping. We were offered to headline Lollapalooza, the biggest tour in America that summer. Lindy had booked some huge European festivals for us in June as well.
Luckily for us, Arik was an incredibly fast study. He could hear a song on the radio and, within sixty seconds, play it with the same vibe and spirit of the original. But going to Belgium a few weeks into his tenure in the Chili Peppers before seventy thousand people was truly a baptism by fire. He was petrified. Arik had hardly ever left L.A. County, and now he was in an exotic country in Northern Europe where they speak three languages.
Arik was extremely introverted, so he dealt with all this pressure by sleeping. The motherfucker would sleep all day and all night, then get in the van on the way to the show and sleep some more. But he never let us down in concert. He just stood up there and played his ass off.
Headlining Lollapalooza was a pretty big-ass deal for us. It was the second year of that festival, and the idea of traveling across the country with a bunch of like-minded maniacs appealed to us. Anytime you’re part of a festival, the pressure is cut in half. Even if you’re the headliner, you don’t have to carry the weight of the whole show. Since this was a tough time in the life of our band, thank God the shows were not all about us. Plus, you get to meet some interesting performers whom you might never encounter if not for this. I was never a fan of Ministry, but they wound up blowing me away every night. I didn’t know how they could be so fucked up on booze and heroin and coke and whippets and go out there and crush it.
After a few shows into the tour, everybody started jamming with everybody else. Ice Cube was rocking the house, and Flea and I used to go onstage for a song. We danced, happy to be part of his flag-waving posse. Then he joined us on “Higher Ground.” Eddie Vedder, who was there with Pearl Jam, would sing backup for Soundgarden, but in keeping with his humble-servant-of-music attitude, he’d stand way off by the back of the stage. Chad played drums on one of Ministry’s songs. The whole show was a lovefest except for the Jesus and Mary Chain, this British group, who were just bitter. They’d polish off a giant bottle of booze by two in the afternoon and curse and put everyone down. One time they went too far with the guys from Ice Cube’s band, and they got themselves a beating.
I bonded with these giant gangster Samoans called the Boo-Yaa Tribe, who were playing on the secondary stage. I was enthralled, listening to their stories of gang warfare in East L.A. They told me that their friends would get shot and not even know it because they were so big, so they’d walk around for a couple of days with bullets in them. By the end of the tour, I got one of the Boo-Yaa guys to come onstage during “Higher Ground,” and he put out his arm, picked me up, and perched me on his forearm. I rocked the whole song sitting like a puppet on his arm.
We added some special elements for our Lollapalooza shows. We built a giant psychedelic Twilight Zone–looking spiraling wheel that we placed in the center of the stage for hypnotic purposes. But the ultimate touch was the fire helmets that we wore for our encore. Whenever I think of performing, fire comes to my mind—it’s such a visual thing, and it goes so well with music. I wasn’t thinking in the grand pyrotechnical arena of bands like Kiss or the Who. I just thought it would be great if we wore helmets that belched fire. So we went to a prop designer Lindy knew, and he came up with a silver construction helmet that had a spigot sticking out of the top and a tube that ran from the spigot to a can of propane housed on a waist belt. We each had a valve at our side so we could control the intensity of the flame.
But when you’re dealing with fire and a delivery system, there are bound to be some screwups. We’d be able to spew out a good three-foot plume of fire, but on some nights, someone wouldn’t hit
the valve right, or the propane can would be nearly empty, and there’d be three guys with raging volcano heads and one guy with a three-inch Bic lighter coming out of his head, only he had no idea his flame was so small. It was very emasculating. Flame envy.
At several venues, fire marshals tried to stop the show. Lindy used to have to carry extra cash, and when the marshal told him that we could be fined if we lit up those helmets, Lindy pulled out his wad and asked, “How much?” In another city, the fire marshals required our roadies to wear firemen’s outfits, complete with helmets, when they lit us up. Mark Johnson, our tour manager, was, in some ways, the original Homer Simpson, so just imagine Homer with a full fire-retardant outfit trying to get it together to turn the right knobs and light the fire. It’s amazing we got through that tour alive.
In September 1992 we played the MTV awards show and picked up two awards for the “Give It Away” video and the viewer’s choice award for “Under the Bridge.” It must have been awkward for Arik to be onstage accepting awards for work that John had done. We were full of ourselves and obnoxious and loud that night. When we went up to get the breakthrough video award for “Give It Away,” Flea simulated masturbation. I had a list of thirty people I wanted to thank: artists, musicians, filmmakers, scholars—and Satan. Back in Florida, my grandmother, who was a devout Christian, didn’t realize I was joking around and disowned me. A little while later, I asked my mom why I never got any letters anymore from Grandma Kiedis, and she said, “She thinks you’re in league with Satan.” I had to write Granny a postcard on her eightieth birthday, explaining that I wasn’t really a Satanist.
That fall we traveled to Australia and New Zealand to make up the dates we had canceled. Even though we weren’t on an arena level yet, since this was the first time we’d ever played there, the audiences were amazingly responsive. As soon as we set foot in New Zealand, I fell in love with the place. It seemed like a home away from home. There was more plant life than I’d ever seen, and towering majestic mountains and very few people. After our shows, everyone raced back home, but I decided to stay and explore the country.
I got a room in a cool art deco hotel in downtown Auckland and hung out with Greer, who was a native Kiwi. One night we were playing pool when a longhaired brunette goddess out of a Kiwi fairy tale walked into the room. She stood at the bar and watched me, and I got up the courage to approach her.
“What are you doing here?” I said, since she was out of place in the seedy bar.
“I came to find you,” she explained. “I heard you were in town, and I’ve come to get you.”
Julie got me, all right. We spent the rest of my stay together. We took a trip to the Rotorua, and checked out the giant hot mineral lakes and the mud pits. We broke into a national park and made love at the edge of a mud pit that was a big bubbling cauldron of steam and mud. On November 1, we celebrated my thirtieth birthday at the seaside home of Mr. and Mrs. Murdoch, who owned Warner Bros. records in New Zealand. They organized a beautiful picnic on the beach for me. It was a bittersweet milestone. I was far from home, surrounded by relative strangers. The band was doing great, but it also was not right. Ever since John left, we had kept forging on without stopping to look at the lack of perfection, just moving forward to try to keep it alive.
I was also lonely without a true love in my life. A lot of my close friendships had unraveled. John was out of the picture. Flea and I had been growing apart. Bob Forrest was deep into the exploration of his own drug abuse. I felt like a man alone.
With nothing compelling me to return home, I decided to go on an adventure to Borneo. Even as a kid, I was always reading about the most remote tropical jungle locations in the world, and of all the places I’d ever read about, from Mongolia to Papua New Guinea to Tuva, Borneo always struck me as the most remote, the least Westernized: a place where you could go back in time and see what life was like before industry and creature comforts.
On our visits to Amsterdam, I had befriended an amazing tattoo artist named Hank Schiffmacher. Hank, also known as Henky Penky, was an icon of his country—an underground philosopher, artist, Hell’s Angels associate, booze hound, drug hound, girl hound, an absolute rapscallion of Dutch proportions. Over the years, Hank had injected much ink into my skin, and in the process, we’d become close. So when Hank suggested that we travel to Borneo to search out primitive tattooing techniques and replicate the crossing of the Borneo rain forest by a nineteenth-century Dutch explorer, I was all for it. I had visions of being Mowgli from The Jungle Book, hanging out with orangutans and swinging from vines over rivers and eating berries and meeting naked native girls and being a tough nature fella. It didn’t turn out quite that way.
We put aside a month for the trip. At first I thought it would be Hank and me traveling to the land of the Punandaya tribe, who had practiced cannibalism, according to some reports, as late as the 1960s. But Hank brought a photojournalist who thought getting his pictures was more important than the humanity or the dignity of the foreign culture. Hank also brought a Caspar Milquetoast of a kid who had wandered into his tattoo shop, a bank employee who’d never been outside of Holland.
So we were a motley crew when we met up in Jakarta, Indonesia, to plan out our journey. I didn’t like Jakarta, a third-world megalopolis saturated with trash and pollution and teeming with a fundamentalist energy that didn’t make us the most welcome guys in town. We were a long way from Kansas, but every time we went to a bazaar or a marketplace, in every shantytown, I’d be surrounded by giggling Indonesian girls. They were selling bootleg Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirts in every stall. It was surreal.
From Jakarta, we took a series of small planes to Pontianak, a town on the west coast of Borneo. That was where we’d start our adventure. We planned to cross central Borneo from Pontianak to Samarinda, the trans-Kalimantan tour. It had taken the Dutch ethnographer Nieuwenhuis fifteen months to make this trip in 1894. We gave ourselves four weeks.
We stayed in Pontianak for a day, stocking up on supplies and cigarettes. Then we got on a ferry barge and made our way up the river toward the center of the island. The river started off huge, like the Mississippi, and then kept getting smaller and smaller as we went deeper into the jungle, until it became these raging rapids-type rivers that were capable of quadrupling in size in about ten minutes during flash floods.
Everyone was in fantastic spirits, viewing this beautiful confluence of two rivers, until we saw miles and miles of decimated jungle. The logging industries had infiltrated this ancient civilization and raped the forest. It was as if an area the size of Rhode Island had been shaved clean off the map. After changing to a smaller boat, we reached the fishing village of Putussibau, the last outpost before we were confronted with true wilderness. Putussibau consisted of two main streets, one transvestite, and a Dutch missionary priest who almost gleefully warned us of the dangers that lay ahead, things like malaria and poisonous snakes. According to him, all the anti-malaria pills we’d been taking were completely useless, and if we ended up catching malaria, we were dead meat. Nice.
The next day we set off in our own boat. We stopped after a few hours to explore an authentic longhouse, which was a jungle version of an apartment complex, except it was a commune where everybody lived together, sharing one common porch. Then we went on and on and on, deeper into the jungle. The farther up we got, the faster the water moved, the fewer the villages, and the more difficult passage became in general. Then the rains came. After changing to smaller and smaller boats, we made it to Tong Jang Lokam, the last village before the terrain became too mountainous and too perilous to travel by boat. It was a serene setting before the maze of the jungle, where there was no river or even a path to follow, just an overlap of mountains, forests, and streams.
It was here that we’d hire our guides from the Punans, a nomadic tribe considered the masters of the forest. The local Punans could probably cross the mountains in five days, but there was no telling how long it would take when they were bogged dow
n with four slow white guys. I was uneasy with the guides they were choosing for us, because one was the grandpa of the village, a guy in his seventies, and the others were barely teenagers. I couldn’t figure out if we were getting worthy guides or whichever nomads happened to be in town.
We had a nice day or two of rest in the village, and then we set off on foot. It was a wild landscape, like nothing I’d ever marched through. The density, the heat, the wetness, the noises, all of it evoked a prehistoric feeling, especially when we spotted the giant hornbilled birds flying overhead. This was a different reality. After a day of hiking, we had to come to terms with the fact that there were no paths to follow. It was just wet and mucky terrain.
When nightfall came, we needed to find a dry, level space protected from the inevitable rains. We stumbled upon an old decrepit outpost shack, so instead of building a lean-to out of huge leaves, our guides told us to stay in the shack. It didn’t look inviting—the structure was teeming with insects and covered in spiderwebs, but we lay down in there like sardines, crawled into our sleeping bags, and tried to sleep. I was starting to doze off, half conscious of the spiders dangling over me, when, all of a sudden, my entire skull started to vibrate. It felt like a woodpecker practicing on my skull. I was terrified that I had been bitten by something poisonous and the toxic venom was going to work on my nervous system, so I bolted up and screamed for Hank to help me.
The horrible vibrating noise in my skull was intensifying, and I couldn’t bear one more minute of this agony, so I begged Hank to take out his flashlight and look inside my ear.
“No, I don’t see anything. Everything looks—ARRGGGHH,” he screamed, and dropped the flashlight.
A huge sense of relief came over me, and my head stopped vibrating.
“Oh my God,” Hank said. “Some little animal came scurrying out of your head, man.”
Scar Tissue Page 32
