We ended up playing basically a free show in a big outdoor place in flooded conditions where you had to go through streets that had turned into deep rivers to get to the show. I feel like they’ll never forget us for that; we’ll always be the band that came to play a free show in the flood. We realized that there was a lot of love coming from that country. I feel like the goodwill has just snowballed continuously since then and we’ve also been to Peru, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Then there are our Japanese fans. We got our first call to play Japan in the late ’80s. It was shortly after Hillel Slovak had died and John Frusciante had joined the band and we wrote and recorded Mother’s Milk. Our manager at the time, Lindy Goetz, said, “We’ve got some gigs in Japan. They are not big gigs, basically little club gigs in Osaka, Nagoya, and Tokyo.” At the time, the word on the street was that you would be dismayed at the lack of reaction by Japanese fans. They would treat you like you are a ballet performance. They would sit down. They are by nature so polite that they would not want to raise their voice to interfere with the performance. They would wait until the song is completely and utterly finished before giving you a little, gloved clapping. And then they would all stop simultaneously and wait for you to proceed, so don’t plan on getting your energy from the crowd. And we’re like, “Whatever, it’s time to go to Japan.” It seemed so exotic and we had read books and we wanted to see the geisha culture and Tokyo. Back then, post-Internet globalization hadn’t brought all of that to your doorstep, so it really was going to the unknown.
We’re like, “Fuck that, we’re in South America. They want to come see us, we want to play for them. Let’s just go and play.”
So the first stop was Nagoya, the smallest of the three towns. When we got to the hotel there was a fan waiting to meet us, which was kind of an unusual thing for us; at that point in time we did not have fans waiting to meet us in hotels. He was a teenage boy, extremely sullen with sort of a non-expression on his face and he was carrying all kinds of items. He did not speak English, but he had a little translation book that he was clutching in his hand like it was his life support system. And he started thrusting drawings at us. One was a very recognizable portrait of Hillel Slovak. Then the boy started weeping uncontrollably as he gave us a picture of Hillel. So we’re like, “Whoa, this guy is a real fan. He loves Hillel, he’s like a little teenage fan guy.” And we quickly embraced him and said, “Hey, man, it’s okay, don’t cry. Hillel is okay. He had a great life.”
He met us all and he told us that his name was Kenji, and that he was getting his foot in the door. For the next fifteen to twenty years, we would have something to do with this guy every single time we went to Japan and it was an absolute roller coaster. He could have fixated on John, the new guitar player; he could have fixated on Flea, the wild and crazy personality of the band; he could have fixated on the lead singer; but instead he fixated on Chad Smith, the big rock city, blue-eyed drummer from Michigan. And we instantly hooked him up with tickets for the show, which was happening the next day. We took him under our wing and basically said, “Hey, do you want to join us for dinner, do you want to hang out, you want to come to the show? It’s all good. We don’t know anybody here in town.”
Kenji took those offers as though he was expecting that to happen and he became hyper-possessive of us. Whenever girls would come around he would stand within inches of us with this look of disapproval on his face. Like, “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare infiltrate my special circle that I have now with these boys.” We were kind of like, “Kenji, it’s all good, everything is good.” And then he ran away and he came back with gifts. It’s a very Japanese thing for a fan to present their persons of admiration with gifts. But he made the hierarchy of his fanship clear with his gifts. Flea was very low and I want to say he got like a pencil. I was maybe next in line and I got something like a scarf. John was probably next in line and he got something a little bit nicer. But Chad, who was clearly the top of the order, got a beautiful electronic piece of equipment. So it was his way of letting us know like, “Yup, like, like, like, love.”
He followed us around for the next few days. You’ll find in the Japanese train stations that the more obsessive fans somehow get your travel information and they’ll be waiting for you on the loading dock for the trains. It becomes a bit chaotic, because they’ve got the gifts, they’ve got the cameras, they want a little love and attention, and they’re all on the platform waiting. And again Kenji was very aggressive and very cocksure of his place as our number-one fan, and he was kind of pushing other people out of the way. We had to tell him to chill out a few times.
He ended up following us to Tokyo where, after our show, sometime in the very middle of the night, Chad was raising a little hell in the hallways of the hotel. There may have been some other female Japanese people involved in the hallway antics. And Kenji, in no uncertain terms, did all he could to send all of the other fans home at that point. And then he went through a very emotional period of trying to explain to Chad, with the translation book, that he wanted to be Chad’s man. I don’t even know if Kenji was gay or straight, or a little bit of everything, but he was so enamored with Chad that at that moment, he expressed his deep and carnal love for Chad Smith. And even though he behaved very poorly and almost violently toward these other people, we couldn’t let him go. He had touched us with his early portrait of Hillel and his tears and his dedication, so we didn’t discard him even for his irresponsible behavior. And he became a bit of a mascot, not in the condescending way, but like, “When we’re in town, you’re around. You’re our buddy; we’ll hook you up with the tickets.”
Over the years, our trips to Japan would always be colored with a variety of different Kenji appearances. And they were never predictable and sometimes they were downright ludicrous and edgy. I think the very next time we came he had undergone a testosterone-fueled growth spurt and he was bigger and stronger and a little bit more whiskery and acne-ridden and he was clearly in his angst years. And I don’t know if we accidentally overlooked him in some way, but he basically broke into our show (which was still at a smaller venue), ran up to the merchandise booth, grabbed everything he could get his arms around, and bolted for the door. It was almost like some shocking display of his need for attention at all costs. And he was fuming mad the whole time, smoke coming out of his ears. I don’t know if he was caught, but we weren’t going to prosecute Kenji. We wanted to confront him and say, “What’s going on, what’s the matter?” and talk. And time went by and all was forgiven and we ran into him on a train. He might have even gone a little bit Rasta, like complete mellow peace vibes later on. I don’t know where he’s at today, but I have faith that he is in a good place.
A little guitar jam before the show in Alabama.
Going back to our first trip to Japan, our first show was in a tiny theater and the kids got up to dance, moved by the spirit of the music, and they were not out of control or violent or anything, they just got up to dance, which was a very pleasant surprise. We were like, “Yeah, we got them up and moving” at which point the cops showed up and wanted to shut down the show, calling it a riot. Their idea of a riot was kids getting out of their chairs to dance at a rock show. And at one point they did shut down the show and Lindy Goetz, our manager, showed his best Jewish Brooklyn accent to talk to these Japanese-speaking cops like, “What’s the problem here officer?” We finished as much of that show as we could, but I will say that the next couple of shows we did see slightly more tame behavior than we were familiar with.
If we played the Ritz in New York City, people would be jumping off the balconies. The dance floor would look like a whirlpool, filled with body parts, when we played the Cheetah Club in Tokyo the first time around, people were moving and grooving, but there was that sense that they did not want to be seen acting too crazy. The minute the music stopped, they were right back to crossing their arms and clapping and containing themselves. But over the years, this whole kin
d of stigma of the Japanese being too tame has really gone away with the globalization of mankind.
When we go to Japan now and we play a festival at Mt. Fuji or something like that, it’s absolute mayhem, chaos, but in a beautiful way. People are going completely bonkers and becoming one with the mountain and the music. So we definitely saw that, from 1989 to current times, the Japanese have caught up with the rest of the world as far as being exuberant, dancing, jumping, shouting, wild things.
The Sea Shepherd team toured with the band, setting up at each venue.
On any given night, any given country can explode. Minus Turkey. Flea and I definitely have an argument going about this. We played Istanbul for the first time on our last tour. It is without question one of the greatest cities on Planet Earth. That place is like New York City in the ’80s on a creative level, but it looks like San Francisco times fifty in terms of size and population. And it’s right on the Bosphorus strait, which separates the continents of Europe and Asia. So the amount of energy and life in the air is just off the charts—the food and the style and the behavior of the people, it’s alive. So I was expecting our audience to reflect all that energy that I felt in the city, because I walked everywhere. It’s hilly, it’s old, it’s groovy, there are cafés, and the people are smart and communicative and they dance well. I was like, “This is going to be one for the ages here.”
But the audience was like Japan in the ’80s. They didn’t dance; they didn’t go nuts; they had the appreciation factor of a jazz audience. They had the intellectual connection, but they just didn’t cut loose. Now Flea says it was because the place had lost its liquor license and he contends that every other audience that we’ve had for the last three hundred shows had to have been intoxicated to act the way they did. I just don’t buy that argument.
On a few occasions we’ve played in places where the people were under the yoke of the government, and that’s always an interesting experience. We played Russia in 1999 when things were just beginning to turn, but the problem was that we played Red Square. It was a free show for all of Moscow and I think because it was a very oppressive government, they were terrified at possibly losing control of the situation. So they brought out the Russian army, which is no joke. There is no humanitarian give with those guys at all. They didn’t get to be the Russian army by having humanitarian give. It was just black and white. They were like, “If you do something that we told you were not allowed to do, we will shut you down with brute force, including the back of our rifles.”
So we played the show, hundreds of thousands of people as far as the eye could see, it’s free, they’re curious, they are not necessarily even Red Hot Chili Peppers fans—maybe some of them are. But really it’s just Russians wanting to go out and do something different. And it got very out of hand quickly with the army. The army got very brutal on the crowd, who was doing nothing more than dancing. Watching this from the stage we were like, “Help, please, let’s not have a scene here.” It was our Altamont moment. Normally we would have control over this, because it was our security guards. And even if it was the Orlando police, I spoke their language and I could tell them from the stage, “Let’s keep it peaceful. These people are okay; we got your back. It’s all good; we are here to have fun.” The Russian army was not trying to hear any of that, especially in English. So that was a very discouraging experience, to see fans get hurt.
We went back twelve years later with Josh and played St. Petersburg and Moscow. And before we got there, there was a YouTube video circulating where some Russian fans had done an incredible self-made video to our song “Look Around,” where they were basically asking us to come to Russia and telling us that they could not wait until we got there. It was just beautiful—the faces, the emotion; they were dancing, it was choreographed.
The shows went great. There was no violence this time around. But outside of a stadium in Moscow where we played the Russian army did make their presence known. They had their guys on horseback and they just have to show themselves like, “Listen, we run this place, keep things in line and there won’t be a problem.” But at least they have come to a point where they let the people go and have fun.
Back in 1986 we played Northern Ireland with Hillel Slovak. That was a place that did not have a lot of Western visitors then. They were very sequestered; it was a very violent time for Northern Ireland. They were surrounded by the English military, which was made up of babies—eighteen-year-old boys. We pulled up in a little van and they had guys with machine guns and pillboxes pointed at us. And then we looked a little closer and those guys weren’t even shaving yet. Baby-faced, English army kids who had been told that they had to point machine guns at whoever came or went over the border. Very disconcerting, but they realized we were a band and they took their fingers off their triggers and said, “Hey, who are you guys? What’s going on? Hello! What’s happening?”
So we go into Northern Ireland and we play for a packed house of maybe four or five hundred kids and for the longest time, on the Richter scale of audiences, they were, pound for pound, the most intense audience ever. Those five hundred kids were fifty thousand kids in a room because they just didn’t get entertainment over there. It just didn’t happen; they weren’t on the circuit. And the Irish are very profoundly spirited people to begin with, let alone the Northern Irish, let alone kids that were hungry and thirsty for something. They knew that that was their night and they weren’t going to leave anything unturned. So for years to come that was our benchmark of mania. And it was such a good feeling to be in that room, rocking out for these people.
We almost had a chance to play a concert for the oppressed people in Ukraine. Vitali Klitschko, the former WBC heavyweight champion, is one of the voices of the opposition in the Ukraine now. We’re friendly with his brother, Wladimir, the current undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, who’s a big fan of ours. We found out that he would do his ring walk to “Can’t Stop” blasting from the speakers, so we were honored that he would use our song. We met him when we were touring Germany, and he’s very smart and thoughtful, not at all an aloof or arrogant champion. He comes to see us whenever he can and he brings us heartfelt swag like boxing gloves and hoodies, so it’s a real mutual admiration society. There’s a nice picture of us with him in this book.
Wladimir called us out of the blue a few months ago, a couple of weeks before the violence erupted in the Ukraine. He must have sensed that this kind of revolution was about to happen because his brother was so central in the opposition movement. He asked me if we would go to Ukraine and play a show. And he didn’t say what for and I was like, “Okay” and he said, “Yeah, like a peaceful protest.” But I never heard back from him, which was unlike him because he was usually quite punctual and communicative. I wrote him two weeks later and he said, “It’s okay. It’s past that point.” By then his brother had been water-cannoned into a corner at a demonstration, and things quickly took a turn for the worse, and it’s still getting worse every day in that country. So it wasn’t a good time for us to go play there.
As we got more and more popular and famous our relationship to our fans naturally changed. And the whole nature of a fan/star interaction changed, too, with the change in technology. At the beginning of rock and roll nobody knew how to be a fan of rock energy. There was no blueprint for it, like there was no blueprint for a little girl screaming her lungs out at a Beatles show or Chuck Berry show. It wasn’t like today where the Internet kind of dictates this too-much-information about everyone and everything and every place. It takes away the hunt and it also takes away the individualizing of how you identify with a band, whether it was the Ramones or whether it was Buddy Holly or whether it was Devo. If you were a fan of that band, that was kind of your deal and that was something special because you would have to use real mail and real records and you would have to travel distances to go to record stores to get the music and then you would meet other people. And it all still happens, but in a completely different w
ay.
I’m talking about the scourge of selfies, one of the most painful things that an artist has to deal with. Instead of a wonderful human being coming up to you and saying, “Wow, did you hear that new record” or “Did you see that basketball game?” or “How about that sunset?” or whatever, they’re like, “Hey, can I take a picture with you?” This beautiful human walks up to you and you’re like, “That’s some good coffee in here, isn’t it?” They don’t want to talk about the coffee; they don’t want to smile or make a joke; they want a picture. Every human being on Planet Earth now carries around a camera in their phone, and all they want is proof that they saw you so they can put it on their social media outlets, but they don’t want to have any actual loving, warm encounter. I see it all the time with actors that I know who live in Malibu. They just want to cruise, they want to hang out, they want to meet girls, they want to pet dogs. But in today’s society it’s so much more important for people to just have the proof. It doesn’t matter what sort of exchange takes place.
Freak Surf in New Zealand.
The problem with this kind of interaction is that it creates separation. It’s like the fan is saying, “You’re different than me, I’m different than you, but I need a picture of you.” Implicit in that is that we’re not on the same level. That’s just an alienating feeling. If I’m talking to somebody, and they suddenly go, “By the way, I’ve been to twenty of your concerts and I really need you to talk to my wife on the phone right now,” I no longer feel like I’m on the same level with that person and I just want to get away. I know they’re looking at me like something other than just another person.
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