So Flea and I spent a day sightseeing. We went up to Central Park and sat down on a bench, put our tape in the boom box, and blasted our music. We wanted someone to know that we had made this fucking tape. We got a lot of scornful looks from people who thought we were obnoxious to play such loud music, but amazingly, every kid who came within earshot completely rocked out to it. That was interesting. When we got back to L.A., we wrote a song called “Baby Appeal,” and that became a staple of our early act.
Shortly after we got back from New York, Hillel moved out to live with his girlfriend. Rent was due, and Flea and I had about two hundred bucks each. We had the option of scraping together enough money to pay another month’s rent, or going out and buying some high-quality leather jackets, the absolutely de rigueur possession of every self-respecting punk. So we headed to Melrose Avenue, which was becoming a center for cool vintage clothing. There was a guy from New York named Danny who had recently opened up a small shop with a bunch of great vintage James Dean leather jackets.
Flea and I picked out the perfect leathers, but when we went to buy them, Danny’s prices were astronomical, at least a hundred dollars more than what we each had.
“Listen, I’ve got a hundred and fifty, and my friend here has a hundred and seventy, so why don’t you just give us the jackets for that?” I suggested.
“Are you crazy? Get out of my shop,” he yelled.
But having seen these jackets, we couldn’t conceive of not owning them, so I came up with the idea of picketing the store. We made up some signs that said UNFAIR BUSINESS PRACTICES. DANNY IS A GREEDY MONSTER. I figured he’d be amused by the lengths we’d go to get these jackets. We started marching around in front of his store with our signs, and Danny came running out.
“What the fuck are you little punks doing? Get out of here before I break these signs over your head,” he screamed.
I thought I detected a modicum of amusement in his voice, so I came up with another plan. We would stage a hunger strike in front of his store until he agreed to sell us our jackets. We went back and plunked down on the sidewalk.
Danny ran out to confront us. “What now?”
“It’s a hunger strike. We’re not moving or eating or drinking until you give us those jackets,” I said.
“Jesus Christ, you guys. How much money do you have?” he said.
We finally had him. He took us inside and tried to steer us to some lower-priced leathers, but we held out and gave him all our money for the two fine jackets.
Later that same day, we were parading down Hollywood Boulevard in our brand-new vintage jackets, not realizing the irony that we were in the hottest punk-funk band in L.A. with no place to live and no money, when this kooky mop-topped, bespectacled, bookwormy-looking punker in a funny jacket came up to us. “Hey, you guys are in the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” he said. He had met Flea one night when he was a DJ at a club and spinning a Defunkt record. Flea had vaulted over into his booth and turned the record over, because he thought this guy was playing the wrong side.
His name was Bob Forrest, and besides the occasional DJ job, he also ran the Sunday Club, which was one of the hottest live venues around. Bob asked us what was up, and we told him our woeful tale of new jackets but no home.
“That’s so crazy. A half an hour ago my wife left me for good,” he said. “If you guys want, you can crash at my place.”
Forrest lived on the third floor of a classic apartment building called La Leyenda, which had seen better times, especially before the influx of punk rockers. He had a one-bedroom apartment filled to the brim with tons of books and records. Flea set up shop in the living room, and I took over the breakfast nook.
Bob had gone to college for a few years before he dropped out. He was working at a bookstore when we met him, probably for minimum wage, but his job became a great source of income for us because they bought used books. Flea and I would go out and heist books from personal collections or libraries. A stack of books meant ten dollars, and ten dollars meant we could buy drugs and shoot them and get high. We’d usually buy coke, which was a bad drug to be doing when you didn’t have a lot of money, because the minute it’s gone, you want more. But we’d get it and run back to Bob’s house and dump it into a martini glass, put in the right amount of water, and stick our syringes in there and shoot the liquefied coke. We’d do that a couple of times until it was gone, then we’d bum out and feel raw and violated and run down to the Zero to drink off the pain, find a girl to take away the pain, or find more coke.
That summer we made a reliable speed connection, a Middle Eastern guy who ran a rehearsal studio. So we started shooting speed, which is a lot different than shooting coke. Cocaine is a clean ultra-euphoric too-good-to-be-true feeling that lasts for about three minutes. Your ears ring and your jaw opens up and for those three minutes you feel totally at one with the universe. Speed is a lot dirtier and less euphoric and a bit more physical. Every inch of your skin starts to tingle and turns into chicken skin.
We started going on these three-man speed binges and we’d stay up for days on end, playing cribbage. We even started a band together, the La Leyenda Tweakers. Unfortunately, we decided to perform outside of our apartment, and we did a show so stoned on speed that we resembled three mental patients. The L.A. Weekly gave us our first bad review. We knew that we were wreaking havoc with our bodies, but we were so delusional that we thought that if we just ate watermelon, it would cleanse both our bodies and our souls of this heinous chemical torture that we were incapable of stopping. We’d buy the watermelons in vast quantities and go back to the house and cut up each one into three parts. Once we’d finished the watermelon, we’d march up to the roof of La Leyenda and have the ceremonial throw-offs of these big watermelon rinds and watch them explode in the parking lot below. That would be the end of a vicious speed run. Then we’d go and try to get some sleep before we woke up and started the cycle all over again.
Sometime in the middle of July, we were able to get it together to play what would become a legendary Chili Pepper gig. We got a job to headline the Kit Kat Club, which was a classic strip club that had been putting on rock shows. All four of us worked real hard to prepare for the show. At Hillel’s request, we even learned to cover Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire.” We got to the club that night, and they gave us a huge dressing room that must have normally been used by the strippers. I made sure the lyrics were together, and then I wrote out the set list, which was a responsibility that I’d taken on early in the band’s life. We had an extra-special surprise that night. Since we were playing at a strip club and the girls would be dancing onstage with us, we decided that the appropriate encore would be for us to come out naked, except for long athletic socks that we’d wear over our stuff. We had already been playing shirtless, and we realized the power and beauty of nudity onstage.
I’d come up with the idea of using socks, because back when I was living with Donde Bastone, he had a pot customer who developed a serious crush on me. She was cute, but I kept resisting her advances, which included sending me gag greeting cards with foldout rulers to measure the size of your dick, and even photos of herself blowing some sailor. One day she showed up to the house, and I decided to answer the door buck naked except for a sock wrapped around my dick and balls.
We were jazzed to play. Our interaction had gotten better and better. Before, our shows were one big finale of fireworks from beginning to end; now we had started to develop differing dynamics onstage. About ten minutes before we were scheduled to play, someone broke out a joint. We had never smoked weed before a show, but we all passed it around and took a hit, even Jack. As soon as the weed hit me, I become paranoid and terrified that all of this hard work and this perfect feeling were about to be ruined by being stoned on pot. Hillel and Flea started feeling the same way. I went for a run around the block to clear my head, and it worked.
We had to follow a fantastic performance by an anarchistic outfit of eccentric masterminds called Roid Rogers and the
Whirling Butt Cherries. But that only served to pump me up higher, because I wanted to show everyone that we were stronger. So we hit the stage that night and we just wailed. Jack and Flea were incredibly tight, and Hillel was in another dimension. I had a great vocal monitor, so I heard myself fine, which wasn’t always the case at our shows. We finished the set and ran backstage, and we were all in a frizzle tizzy. Jack was cackling, because when he gets nervous, he just starts laughing.
When we walked back onstage wearing only the socks, the crowd audibly gasped. We weren’t deterred for one moment by the collective state of shock that the audience was experiencing. We started rocking “Fire,” and our friend Alison Po Po had shoved her way to the front row and she started taking swoops at my sock. I was focused on the song and my performance, but another part of my brain started telling me how many inches I had between my sock and her farthest reach. As I watched a bunch of our friends who had all rushed the stage and were grabbing for the socks, I had a totally liberating and empowering feeling. You’re young and you’re not jaded yet and so the idea of being naked and playing this beautiful music with your best friends and generating so much energy and color and love in a moment of being nude is great. But you’re not only nude, you’ve also got this giant image of a phallus going for you. These were long socks. Usually, when you’re playing, your dick goes into protection mode, so you’re not loose and relaxed and elongated, you’re more compact, like you’re in a boxing match. So to have this added appendage was a great feeling. But we never figured that the socks were going to become an iconic image associated with us. We never thought that down the line, we’d do it again and promoters would want to add riders to our contracts to ensure that we’d do it on their stage. It left a more lasting impression than we ever intended for it.
One person in the audience who was really impressed was a thirtyish talent manager named Lindy Goetz. Lindy used to work as a promotion guy for MCA Records, and he had managed the Ohio Players, one of our favorite groups. Flea and I scraped up enough money to get out to the Valley, where Lindy’s offices were. Lindy was a five-foot-six redheaded, mustachioed Jewish guy from Brooklyn who had somehow found his way to L.A. in the late ’60s. That afternoon we smoked some pot and did a line or two of coke and swapped stories. I don’t think we realized it at the time, but Lindy was on his way down from his high-rolling payola-paying days. He had managed the Ohio Players, but that was when their career was on the downswing.
He were trying to keep face and maintain a facade of having a business, but the bills weren’t getting paid, and the money wasn’t coming in. Lindy seemed like a likable guy, even if he was dishing out some pretty lame one-liners. After our long conversation, Flea and I asked for a minute to confer.
“Let’s ask him if he’ll take us out to lunch,” Flea said. “If he will, he’s got the job.”
We went back in. “Okay, if you take us for Chinese food right now, you can be our manager,” I said.
We got moo shu pork and a new manager. And a meal ticket. For the next few months, we’d wake up and go, “What’s for lunch? Nothing? Let’s go see Lindy.” He lived in a deluxe apartment building in West Hollywood and was married to a girl named Patty, who was from Atlanta. We’d go over to Lindy’s, and she’d cook up the fried chicken, and we’d eat every last bit. On a good night, we’d do a little cocaine and smoke some weed and talk about the future. Lindy told us that his first task was to get us a record deal, which I wasn’t even that concerned with. It seemed like a cool and exciting thing, and I guess that’s what bands do, but I didn’t know anything about making a record.
If we were going to try and get a record deal, we’d need a lawyer. Someone gave us a recommendation for a guy named Eric Greenspan. We went to his law firm, which was in an opulent building on Wilshire Boulevard. When Flea and I walked into the lobby, we thought we were in the Mormon Cathedral. This firm represented the countries of both Israel and Egypt. We took the elevator up to Eric’s floor and then went up to the lady at the reception desk.
“We’re the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and we’re here to see Eric Greenspan,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know, let me . . .” She seemed taken aback.
For some unknown reason, we decided to moon her. We turned around, exclaimed, “We’re the Red Hot Chili Peppers, goddammit, and we want to see Eric,” and we dropped trousers. Just then Eric came running out and took us into his office. He had some great Gary Panter artwork on his wall. He told us that he represented Gary as well as some reggae acts like Burning Spear.
I cut to the chase. “We don’t have a record deal, and we don’t have any money. We just got a manager and we need a lawyer.”
Eric didn’t flinch. “Okay, I’ll be your lawyer, and you don’t have to pay me until you make some real money, and then we can do a standard five percent deal.” So he became our lawyer and never made a penny until we started making real money. He’s still our lawyer today. It’s a pretty rare guy in this business who does that. We didn’t look like a cash cow to anybody at that point. The popular money-making bands at that time were hair bands like Poison, Warrant, and RATT, that’s what was at the cash registers. We were just anti-everything. We were probably anti–making money at that point.
In the space of five months, we had made a dent in the L.A. music scene. We’d gotten written up in the L.A. Times, and we were playing some respectable venues, like the Club Lingerie. The more prominent we became, the more Lee Ving started to sweat Flea about being in two bands. I remember he actually called once and said, “Are you going to be in my band, or are you going to be in that other band?” Flea said, “Well, I was going to be in both, but if you put it that way, I’ll just be in my band.”
Sometime that August, Flea and I went to a party for an arty magazine at a house in the Hollywood Hills. I had taken to wearing a ripped-up flannel pajama top, and my Mohawk had grown out and fallen over to one side. We were having a decent time hanging out in the backyard when I looked into the house and saw this cosmic creature of a young girl. She was walking like some kind of a princess, in slow motion, with her hands out to the sides. She had on a giant white discus of a hat with these big opalescent jewels going around the crown. She was wearing an ill-fitting futuristic-looking baggy dress made out of paper. She was a little bit chubby, but beautiful.
And she had this absolutely bizarre magnetism, walking around and talking purposefully, but slowly, like she was Alice in Wonderland and the rest of the world wasn’t. But she also had the feel of a punk-rock version of Mae West, giving off that flamboyance and a brassy, sassy, untouchable vibe. Just the kind of girl I liked—the weirdo in the bunch.
I walked into the house and pulled on her ponytail or whatever boys do when they see a girl they like and don’t know how to talk to.
“Oh my, who are you?” she said. We started talking, and she was speaking in riddles, not giving me straight answers. It turned out that her name was Jennifer Bruce, and she was a fashion designer and had designed her Mark of the Zorro hat. Within minutes, I was blown away by her presence, her aura, and her fashion statement. In a city that was rife with people trying to look different and act different and be all this and all that, here was a person who was accomplishing it with ease, because she was a natural-born superfreak whose tendency in life was to look like the inside of an oyster shell.
She wasn’t exactly melting in my arms; she was keeping me at a distance. I don’t think she gave me her phone number, but I kept pressing. “Come on, you don’t have a choice. You’re going to be my girlfriend whether you like it or not,” I said.
She must have felt something, because she was giving me enough to continue the process, but then she disappeared and I went off in a new direction. However, she was thoroughly etched into my consciousness.
I had other things to attend to, one of which was opening up for Oingo Boingo at the Universal Amphitheater. Oingo Boingo had come up from the same club scene we were in, and they’d just kept going. They weren
’t our favorite band in the world, but they had some interesting instrumentation. We knew their trumpet player, and he offered us the opening slot for their big show. Here we were with no record deal, a ten-song repertoire, and we were going from playing in a club before two hundred people to playing to an audience of four thousand.
We went out onstage that night wearing our weirdest clothes. Right in the middle of the first song, Flea broke a bass string. Suddenly, it was crickets time, and I had to talk to the audience while Flea changed his string. Within seconds, the crowd was booing and throwing stuff at us, chanting, “We want Oingo Boingo.” But it was combustible material for getting the energy going. We started in again, and Flea was so wound up that he broke another string. At this point, Danny Elfman, who was the lead singer of Oingo Boingo and also a fan of ours, strolled out onstage wearing a bathrobe and with a face full of shaving cream, as if he was coming straight from his dressing room. He took the mike and told the crowd that he really liked us and they should be respectful, and then he left, but the few unruly guys in the crowd didn’t heed his endorsement. We soldiered on and got cooking, and by the time we finished, I think we let them know that we were for real and that they had just been hit with something they wouldn’t soon forget.
After the show, we were celebrating backstage when Blackie, who had been one of our earliest supporters, came up to Flea and me. He was wearing tight black gloves, and he fanned out a couple of envelopes with plane tickets in them.
“This is for you, Anthony, and I want you to take Flea,” he said.
“Take him where?” I was baffled. I looked in the envelope and saw two round-trip tickets to London, England. It was time for my rite of passage to Europe.
We had a few things to attend to before we left for Europe, one of which was the complications that arose from getting a record deal. We had an inkling that record companies had been snooping around us, especially after our shows at the Lingerie and the Universal Amphitheater and a triumphant return to the Kit Kat Club in September. One executive from EMI/Enigma, Jamie Cohen, was particularly aggressive in going after us. One night Flea and I were hanging out at La Leyenda when we got a call from Lindy. He told us that we had a record deal with EMI/Enigma. I was so excited, the last thing I thought was there might be problems. I remember celebrating and thinking that everything was going according to plan, that we just had to buckle down, be studious, and get to work.
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