DAVE NAVARRO: It was really awkward at first to join a pre-existing band like that. I tried to make that clear to them, and they tried to understand, but it wasn’t until Flea joined Jane’s Addiction [the Relapse Tour] in ’97 that he took me aside and said, “How on earth did you handle joining the Chili Peppers? This is so stressful.”
FLEA: I just don’t think Dave ever really felt comfortable in the Chili Peppers. He just didn’t really feel that he could be himself and be completely happy with us.
DAVE NAVARRO: I got a lot of online hate mail from [Chili Peppers’] fans. Those were the most fun to respond to. Like, I’d say, “Don’t forget who hired me! If you have a problem, take it up with Anthony, Flea, and Chad. Talk to my employers.”
JOHNNY NAVARRO: [One Hot Minute] is really a great record but it didn’t catch on with a lot of the Peppers’ fans. I think over the long haul it will be rediscovered, reappraised artistically and finally recognized.
DAVE NAVARRO: I’ve been asked, “How do you feel about making one of the least successful Chili Peppers records?” [1995’s One Hot Minute] And my answer has always been, “Not only do I love that record, but it is, to this day, the most successful record that I have ever been a part of, commercial-wise.” When I listen to that record, I hear myself growing as a musician and I couldn’t have had a better group of guys to learn from.
JOHNNY NAVARRO: When Dave walks out and John comes back in and they sell more records than they’ve ever sold in their life, that sets up a certain dynamic with Dave’s head. All he wanted to do was sell more copies than fucking Blood Sugar did and that just didn’t happen. Dave thinks about that stuff. It weighs upon him.
DAVE NAVARRO: We had finished an album, we’d finished the touring cycle, and we had just finished a Jane’s Addiction tour with Flea taking Eric’s place. If there was ever a time to part ways, that was the time. Flea had never seen that kind of chaos coming from me. I don’t think I was in a position to go back and I don’t think they were in a position to have me back.126
FLEA: We were playing at the Olympic Auditorium [in Los Angeles] when I was playing bass in Jane’s a few years later, and all of a sudden, I felt this amazing energy coming out of Dave. He was on fire. Just going crazy and playing his ass off. Completely putting his whole heart and soul into it, and I realized I never felt that from him in the Chili Peppers. He couldn’t let loose with us because Jane’s was really his home.
DAVE NAVARRO: Stephen and Eric are such a different rhythm section than Flea and Chad. Eric and Stephen are like a combination of Led Zeppelin and Joy Division. And the Chili Peppers are more hard-edged funk rock, Funkadelic goes Bad Brains. We were very fluctuating in our timing in Jane’s Addiction, but the Chili Peppers are very precise.
FLEA: I consider Stephen Perkins and Chad two of the best rock drummers in the world. Both are phenomenal, but so different. Stephen is more ornate and precious—more involved in beautiful, pretty little things. Chad is stronger. Hits a lot harder. His meter is steadier. Stephen has a tendency to speed up and slow down in really great ways [that] make you breathe with the music. Stephen’s a vegetarian pothead and Chad’s a beer-drinking steak eater. Chad is more John Bonham-style smashing with a more simple setup, Stephen has all these little drums, bells and chimes and zingers and ziggers and African testicle-skin pebbly things. I have to think a little more with Steve.127
DAVE MARRIES RHIAN GITTINS ON AN IMPULSE
Circa September-October 1994
RHIAN GITTINS: Dave had just joined the Chili Peppers when we were introduced through a mutual friend at the Whisky in Los Angeles. We went on a date a few days later and three weeks later we were married. He swept me off my feet. [Our courting] was like a chess game. He would make a move and I’d match it. It was like pushing the envelope and pushing boundaries.
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Dave was two years clean when he married Rhian Gittins [October 15, 1994]. They married legally in Las Vegas and he called me that day and said, “Dude, I just got married.”
RHIAN GITTINS: I was going to Vegas to see Nine Inch Nails and Dave said, “We’re going to get married if we go to Vegas” and I said, “That’s fine by me” so we went to Vegas and got married. I had a cubic zirconium gold-plated ring. I still have it somewhere. It was very passionate, quick . . . very romantic, especially for a young girl from Canada with a sparkle in her eyes. I was twenty-four then, or had just turned twenty-five. He was twenty-six or twenty-seven.
The honeymoon couple. Dave and Rhian Gittins. (Courtesy Rhian Gittins)
JOHNNY NAVARRO: I was having a barbecue at my house and Dave’s ex-girlfriend Pinky who he was supposed to marry is also at that barbecue. I’m looking at her outside my bedroom window while I’m talking on the phone. I knew she’d be devastated. He calls to tell me he’d married someone he’d known for like one week. He goes, “You’re not saying anything, what do you think?” And I go, “To be honest, dude, I’m getting sick to my stomach.” I wish I could have just rolled with it, but at that moment I was so close to Pinky because he had been with her for so long and we just all loved her so much. I just thought he belonged with Pinky. She was perfect for him.
RHIAN GITTINS: The summer before I met him was when he went to testify against his mother’s killer. It was a really tough time. It affected him very deeply. I couldn’t even begin to talk about it because I would never know what it was like. It was a fantastic amount of hurt, just endless grand canyons of pain.
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Rhian was very impulsive. Dave was very impulsive. Their whole relationship was like that. If Dave’s really into you or into something like an idea or something, that’s it. He will convince you. Dave could score heroin in the middle of a snowstorm. He was with her almost every day. When he gets this drive, you cannot divert him from his goal. He went after her with that appetite and she kind of matched that.
RHIAN GITTINS: We didn’t live together. I loved him 100 percent. It was a crazy, silly thing to do and it had repercussions that neither of us realized at the time. His managers and lawyers freaked out the next day. They thought I wanted his money. I never wanted his money. I never took any when we got divorced. We broke up after a few months and I asked Dave for a divorce and he said, “OK” and sent me over the papers. I signed them and that was that. I didn’t want anything. That wasn’t what it was for. It was all for love and passion.
JOHNNY NAVARRO: After Dave and Rhian broke up, but they were still legally married, she hooked up with this guy Christian Stone from the band Campfire Girls who’d become buds with Dave. Dave had a lot of bad feeling toward that. When Christian ended up fucking Dave’s wife, that caused this major rift between everybody in that circle. Dave freaked out and cut everybody off and felt horribly betrayed. They’d [already] officially split. He just didn’t expect one of his closest friends would fuck his wife. It really hurt.
RHIAN GITTINS: My father is extremely angry about it to this day for not involving him [in my wedding] and he was angry at Dave for hurting me. He was obviously put out because he didn’t get to walk me down the aisle. When a fire burns so brightly, so quickly, of course it’s going to burn out just as fast. . . .
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Dave ended up producing a record around it, a solo effort called Rhimorse. Some of the songs eventually ended up on his solo album. This horrible pain he experienced, he ended up putting into the music. That record never got released, he just did it on his own and cut like 1,000 CDs.
RHIAN GITTINS: He recorded the Rhimorse record after our breakup.
ALAN DI PERNA (journalist, biographer): He explained [during an interview I did with him for Guitar World magazine] that he’d made the record in his home studio and that it was very personal and painful. Kind of a catharsis or therapy. His way of talking about it was very strange, like he was reluctant to discuss something so “private” but at the same time he needed to “confess.” He had a bunch of copies in a cardboard box with the cover art depicting his ex-wife’s hand carving her name into his chest, with blood dr
ipping from the letters. On the inside, there was a photo of the blood-splattered marriage certificate. I assumed he was giving me a copy, but he quickly took the disc out of my hand and said “Oh, no . . . you can’t keep that.”
DAVE NAVARRO: That record’s filled with a lot of hate and bitterness. Not a very positive energy to put out there. My initial intent was to leave stacks of them for free at record stores. Just put them up at the register, and if anybody was interested, they could have it.128
RHIAN GITTINS: Some of the lyrics and even the title were bizarre. It was a pun on my name, spelled Rhimorse. Dave’s a very funny person, but I don’t think he meant it to be funny.
DAVE NAVARRO: It was potentially very hurtful to my ex-wife. And it gives away some pretty heavy secrets of mine. By the time I had the discs printed up, I’d decided I didn’t want them out there.129
JOHNNY NAVARRO: There was a lot of spiteful shit in there. In the end he just kept them and never released them. Later on, he made peace with Rhian and Christian. Years later, they all made peace.
RHIAN GITTINS: I hold him very fondly in my heart and we’re friendly now.
JOHNNY NAVARRO: Dave’s not a mean guy, he’s not spiteful. He finally came around [to thinking] “Hey, I had already broken up with her and I was probably banging three or four other girls at the same time anyway, so why should I care?” [He thought] if you’re a guy’s friend, you usually don’t sleep with either his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend or his ex-wife, unless you’re clear with him first. That’s kind of the unwritten code and Christian did not adhere to that code.
ALAN DI PERNA: My assignment for Guitar World magazine was to discuss Dave’s role in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ One Hot Minute album and so an interview and photo shoot was set up at Dave’s house in Hollywood.
TWIGGY RAMIREZ (musician, member of Marilyn Manson, A Perfect Circle): Dave was still in the Peppers when I first met him. We became friends afterward. We never really hung out too much because he was on the straight and narrow. That was the ’90s and at the time I sure as hell wasn’t. Our friendship really blossomed after we spent a straight summer together—we would play a lot in his house.
ALAN DI PERNA: Dave’s pad was macabre all right, but also still and beautiful, with lots of heavy velvet drapery in burgundy, magenta, black . . . heaps of religious artifacts, crucifixes and Pagan icons were everywhere, way before that goth rococo bordello look became such a big design cliché. There was also a prie-dieu from a Catholic church with a cushion for kneeling, and a rail to rest your arms, and a big silver cross facing it with statuettes of Pan and skulls all over the mantel-piece. A Warhol Electric Chair print was hanging over the mantel. The living room coffee table was a real coffin; the entire wall of the dining room was covered in a huge blow-up of that famous photograph from the Vietnam War, where a prisoner is about to be executed. The gun is right up to the guy’s head and he looks terrified. I asked him what was inside the coffin and he said, “Nothing. But a lot of stuff took place inside it. I can tell you that.”
TWIGGY RAMIREZ: It sounds creepier and crazier than it really was. I guess I was desensitized to it after you see it for the first time. It was just a coffee table to me. I saw so much weird shit with Manson that something like that was no big deal.
ALAN DI PERNA: The bedroom downstairs was also lots of velvet. This divan had a human skeleton on it. Another skeleton was hanging by the bed. It was all so carefully and painstakingly arranged. Like an art installation. There was a photographer and many female assistants. Dave had a house full of women, so he was definitely “on” peacocking around shirtless in leather pants, showing off the “nipple rings and buff pecs” thing. He was also wearing quite a bit of makeup. When you’re interviewing a male, presumably hetero, or bisexual rock star, the presence of women is a mixed blessing. On one hand it brings out this demonstrative, flirtatious “rooster” behavior on the guy’s part, which can lend a lot of color to the piece you’re writing, but at the same time it distracts your subject from focusing on the interview.
TWIGGY RAMIREZ: Dave had a shotgun. There were some accidents a few times that it went off when people were there. There was a hole blown into his wall. We’re all just lucky to be alive.
DAVE NAVARRO: My shotgun went off and I shot a hole in the floor. I was really fucked up. I could have killed myself.130
ALAN DI PERNA: Dave appeared with this huge shotgun and started waving it around. He opened it up to show it wasn’t loaded. But it was still disturbing when he pointed it right at me. He wanted to be photographed with it, along with his guitar, but the photographer was concerned that the magazine wouldn’t dig something like that—that the shotgun would send the wrong message to Guitar World’s impressionable, adolescent, metalhead readers. But Dave insisted. I can’t remember if the photos were used or not.
TEETH
PERRY FARRELL: I started this website called TEETH. Initially we were asking people for money. So they wanted to read exactly what we were going to do. Thank God, it didn’t work out. I just said I’d rather spend my own money and not know what I’m going to do. It’s so much more fun with a person on the street, say, who asks, “Can I have five bucks?” And I say, “Well, I’ll give you five bucks, but I want you to come into my website and tell me about life and do something on the computer—even though you’ve never worked with it. Do something artistic.” And I’ll put that up for the day. I could never have story-boarded that, because I didn’t know there would be a man waiting for me asking for five dollars. Presupposition . . . forget about it. I’m not interested. It’s a bore. There’s no room for miracles.131
PAUL V.: TEETH was the beginning of the end of my working with Perry. They had an office set up in Venice where a lot of talking took place and I went there a few times. Lots of money was spent, lots of talking, but no concrete results really came of it. Perry was constantly hallucinating people. He was in total panic one time, yelling, “Get a gun! There’s people on my roof! Stop them! They’re trying to break in!” Perry would often spend a month at a hotel. One time he knocked a hole in the wall because he thought people were inside the wall of his room at the Mondrian. So he kicked the wall in to get at them. When cops came up they found a gun on him. This was also the Kim Leung period, his girlfriend Kim of the time, this Asian girl who had a child named Donovan, not by Perry. Perry loved that kid. Kim when she was sort of sober was nice and sweet but, oh my god, what a tragic mess on drugs, what a casualty. . . .
PORNO FOR PYROS
Circa Spring-Summer 1992
PERRY FARRELL: The industry was constantly changing during the Porno for Pyros era. It was the end of the classic epoch era for the record business. Our beloved WB—the class act of the industry was crumbling around us. Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker were eventually let go, which symbolized to many the ethnic cleansing of music people from the corporate music world which was hijacked by lawyers, accountants, and various other manicured Wall Street criminals during the 80s and 90s. It was great fun to watch if you were a fan of trainwreck mega-corporate blundering. But, unfortunately, I was standing right underneath this . . . my ass was roarin’ in the thick of it.
PETER DI STEFANO: I met Perry through Eric’s friend Greg Lampkin. We went on a surf trip to Mexico and I shared a cabana with Perry and he heard me play some classical guitar, finger pickings and he was like wow, that’s great, you should jam with me and Perk when we get back.
STEPHEN PERKINS: The first Porno for Pyros record was the result of three months of jamming in my garage. We thought, “Should we get a major producer? No, let’s just use what we got, like the Jane’s Triple X record.”
PETER DI STEFANO: I kept saying no to Perry at first, not because I wasn’t into it, anything but. It was because I knew the whole world was going to hate me. Jane’s Addiction was everybody’s favorite band and I knew that Perry wanted to do something different and I knew that I wasn’t going to get a fair chance. They were going to compare me to a band that broke up at their peak. In
the end I did it, put my head down and plowed through.
STEPHEN PERKINS: There are some great songs on that record, but it wasn’t the next Jane’s Addiction. It wasn’t even supposed to be.
PETER DI STEFANO: There were a bunch of guitar players at this audition and everybody was going crazy trying their hardest to impress and I thought, “This is lame,” so I packed up and left and that caught his attention. He goes, “Do you want to jam with Skate Master Tate and I?” So we got together and did “Orgasm,” “Thick Meija,” and “Blood Rag.”
PETE WEISS: The day Martyn [Le Noble] got into Porno for Pyros they were having open auditions for a bass player. Casey was at the sign-in table, and if you looked cool enough—then they’d see if you could play.
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