“Blackbird, don’t burn down my house,” I said. “It’s a band decision. It didn’t work out. It’s not us or you. It’s just the situation.”
“All right, all right. I accept,” Blackbird said. “Just so long as you can accept that I’m going to burn down your house.”
That was the end of our conversation. I was a motherfucker, and he was going to burn down my house.
Not everything made perfect sense for us the minute John joined the band. But what did instantly change was the chemistry. There was a wholeness to the love of being in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which we hadn’t felt for a long time. Here was this young man who had dedicated every waking moment in his young life to music, and you could feel that. As inexperienced as John was, we were getting everything he had to offer. It was just better chemistry. D.H. and John were friends. We now had a group in which we were coming from the same place and wanted to go to the same place. It was pretty exciting, but it would still take a long time to gel.
Instead of trying to make a record immediately, we decided we should just play for a while, write some songs and rehearse some old ones, take time to become a real band. We ran into some obstacles. D.H. was an unbridled wild mustang of enthusiasm, but Flea was a perfectionist for accuracy and diligence when it came to learning songs. D.H.’s forte was not necessarily that. Flea was riding D.H. pretty hard, being sort of a dictator when it came to that, which he was no stranger to because he had been the dictator in other configurations of the band. It was “Come on, let’s make sure we get this done. Don’t be lazy, and don’t forget to do your homework, and make sure you learn your parts.”
Some tensions developed between D.H. and me as well. Once I got sober, I had the audacity to think that everyone else should follow my lead. “Okay, world, the party’s over. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m sober now, so close up Bolivia, and everyone put down their drugs and alcohol.” My controlling nature and my insecurities continued, so my ability to make other people feel bad in order to deal with my own not feeling good continued. On some level, D.H. must have realized that his drinking and using could become an issue. He started showing up late, and not always in the clearest frame of mind. My level of tolerance and patience and acceptance of another man’s difficulties was not a flourishing element in my own personality then, unfortunately. I wasn’t exactly clashing with D.H., but I was brooding that now I had somebody else’s unmanageable behavior in my band.
While we were rehearsing, I started a cautionary song called “Knock Me Down.” It was a song that described what it was like to be a drug addict, to have that ego and to think you were impenetrable and impervious to the forces of nature and life. But it also was a love song for Hillel. I had pages and pages of verses but no melody or organization. John had come to me right after he joined the band and told me that I could show him anything and we could write together. One of the first things I showed John was “Knock Me Down.” I warned him that it was very verbose.
“Oh, that’s okay. I’ve been working on this really verbose melody, and I can see how it’s going to apply exactly to these words,” he said. He sat there, studied the lyrics, and started smushing them into his melody. It was uncanny. In a few minutes, he had a complete verse melody. This was a real epiphany: “Okay, here’s another way songs can be written.” Even when Hillel was there, everything we wrote was in a group context. Flea and I had written songs together, but it was different on the bass. Now I felt that I could write anything—a melody, a rhythm, a lyric—and go to this new friend of mine and sit down, and when we left that session, we’d have a song. I felt like anything was possible with this kid. I could show him my most sentimental writings, and he didn’t stop to judge them once. There was no moment when he read the lyrics to see if he liked them or if they were something he wanted to do. Whatever I’d written had to be a song. Now I didn’t have to second-guess myself or be afraid to show something or try something new, which opened up the avenue for writing songs and making cool music.
John and I started to slowly but surely become the kind of friends who would spend every single day together and then go home and call each other to say good night before going to bed. When we woke up, it was “Good morning, what are we doing today?” After a while we didn’t go anywhere or do anything without doing it together, which is a rare and valuable but sometimes too intense experience. Though John had gone through a period of cocaine and alcohol abuse, he was clearly willing to sacrifice getting loaded to focus on being in the band.
He was living near Canter’s with his girlfriend, but when we went out to parties and clubs, she started resenting that this guy in the new band was whisking him away from the routine of their relationship. Ione had no problem with that, she was doing great, working a lot. But John ended up breaking up with his girlfriend shortly after he joined the band.
We decided that it would be a good idea to break in the new band at obscure, off-the-beaten-path venues, so Lindy booked a tour that we called the Turd Town Tour. It was a disaster. We played holes in the wall in cow towns in Wyoming and northern Colorado and Utah. Nobody in these Turd Towns cared enough about us to show up, and when they did, it was a real rodeo crowd. Unfortunately, D.H., bless his heart—sweetest guy in the universe—was drinking quite heavily, and he wasn’t at his sharpest for these shows.
One night on that tour, D.H. was dropping the beat, forgetting parts, not so clear on the songs. After the show, he and I had a huge confrontation.
“Look, if you want to be in this band, you’re going to have to do something about your condition. It’s either do something or bow out,” I told him. Flea and John were both backing off, going, “We’re not sure what to do here. Anthony’s being kind of a jerk, but the fact is, D.H. is fucked up, and he isn’t really carrying his weight in the band.” They didn’t want to side with me because I was being such a teetotaling killjoy, but they knew it wasn’t working out with D.H., either.
When we got home, it went from bad to worse. He started to miss rehearsals, and his addiction started consuming him. Every other time we’d fired someone, with the exception of that bizarre Hillel thing, it had always been obvious and necessary, and without a doubt for the betterment of the band. But D.H. was our friend whom we loved and cared about and didn’t want to see anything bad happen to. Still, it wasn’t salvageable. Unluckily for Flea, it was his turn to do the firing. It was worse than we could have imagined. Flea had to stay in bed for days after firing D.H. The only beautiful thing about it was, years later, I got to be a huge part of D.H.’s sobriety and his rebirth into the universe as a human, because from the moment he was fired, he went on a crash course of deceleration into a whole other level of unbelievable abuse.
By now we had moved into a rehearsal space in Glendale. It was there that we began the process of auditioning drummers. We assumed that all of the greatest drummers in the land would come marching in from near and far to have this opportunity. Looking back, it wasn’t as brilliant an opportunity as we saw it. Everybody and his grandmother did start coming through that door with a set of drums, but not too many of them were any good. During the process, a friend of ours, Denise Zoom, called up Flea and told him that she had a drummer for us. According to her, this guy Chad Smith was the best drummer she’d ever heard, and he ate drums for breakfast. Anytime someone calls you up out of the blue talking about some dildo from the Midwest who eats drums for breakfast, you’re like “Save me the time, please.”
But we let this guy come down and audition. We were waiting and waiting for him to show up, and he was late. I went outside to see if anyone was there, and I spied this big lummox walking down the street with a really bad Guns N’ Roses hairdo and some clothes that were not screaming “I’ve got style.” I had already decided against the guy, based on how he looked, but he came in and we were all business. “There are the drums. Get ready to play. You’ve got ten minutes. We’re going to jam for five, and then we’re going to try a song or two for five.” Chad w
as not in the least bit intimidated by all this attitude we were giving him. Every other poor bastard who had sat down at the drums would look over at Flea, who would launch into an aggressive, hard-core, slapping funk-rock bass line, and the drummer would fall over himself trying to follow. Flea would wash them away with his intensity.
Flea started playing something hard, complicated, fast, and awkward to see if the guy could follow. Chad instantly not only matched him but started leading him and taking him for a ride. He overaggressed Flea, and did it with finesse, and did it some more and some more and some more. We couldn’t believe what was happening. I was so turned around from my initial impression of this guy that I started laughing hysterically. Now Flea was looking at him like “Whoa, what do I do? Where do I go? What the hell’s happening here?” Chad wasn’t stopping for a second to let Flea catch up and figure it out. He was screaming like Art Blakey did behind the drums, when you’re getting your gusto up for the moment, because there was a lot of energy being released at that moment between Flea and him.
It was a big eruption of sound and energy, and all I could do was laugh hysterically, howling at this fucking guy with the bandanna and the puffy hair-spray hair and the bad Venice Beach muscleman shorts, thinking how funny was this that the goofiest guy we’d ever seen blew all of us away right in our own rehearsal studio. It was genius, and everyone loved it.
We all knew that Chad was the guy, and now we wanted to see what his level of commitment was. We also wanted him to change his look. We said to him, “Okay, you’re good. You can be in the band if you shave your head today. Show up later at Canter’s with your head shaved, and you have the job.” Chad said, “Whoa, whoa, a shaved head. I don’t know.”
“The choice is yours. Shave your head and be in the band. Don’t shave your head and don’t be in the band.” And we went to Canter’s and waited for him. He showed up with the same bandanna and stupid hair.
“Dude, do you want this job or not?” we asked.
“Yeah, I’m going to play in the band, but I’m keeping the hair,” he insisted, and we conceded. We realized that anybody who was bold enough to stand his ground in the face of all that pressure was not going to be a bitch. Later on, we found out that the real reason he didn’t want to shave his head was because his hair was receding and he was hiding that behind the bandanna. Either way, it was another important day in our history, because now we had a drummer who was reliable and an awesome person to jam with. Now we could get down to work.
Chapter 9
Refourming
Because John was so young and inexperienced, he came in for a lot of good-natured ribbing. He was a kid who’d spent most of his young life holed away in his room, practicing his guitar, so everything about being in a rock band was new to him. Flea and I used to continually tease him, calling him “Greenie” or “The Green Man” or “The Green Hornet.” Years later, John confessed to me that all this ribbing made him incredibly self-conscious, but at the time, we had no idea of the effect we were having on him.
Flea and I didn’t consciously want to make him feel bummed out or insecure; that was just the playing ground of our comedy. The litany of green names spoke of something else—a huge sign of affection. You’re in our graces and in our hearts if you have more than one nickname. All that Green stuff was because we loved this kid and we were so happy to have his creative energy in our lives. If we did it with a smirk and a poke, maybe it was just to not show how much we cared about him. If you look at it like “Whose phone number are you dialing the most and whose house are you going over to the most and who are you sharing the most experiences with,” it was clear I was completely in admiration of this young man.
John and I recently talked about the fact that when things wouldn’t go my way, I’d ignore him. “Okay, this guy’s acting in a way that I can’t appreciate and, without him having any idea, affecting my sense of well-being, so I’ll ignore him until the feeling goes away.” It wasn’t a healthy or communicative way of dealing with stuff, but you have to remember that John went from being a seventeen-year-old unrecognizable kid to being in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He was equally, if not more, abusive to the people around him. He was a pretty crass fellow for about a year there. I had people coming to me constantly, going, “Your guitar player is a fucking dick. He fucked this girl and then threw her out in the street in the middle of the night and told her to never come back.” I never saw him acting like that, so I defended him. I was willing to accept the fucked-up aspects of his personality because he was young and going through a rough transition.
Chad wasn’t getting renamed every day because we weren’t as close to him. He stayed very much a man unto himself within this band. He had a whole different way of dealing with being the new guy, and that was “I don’t need them, I don’t want them, I’ve got my own life.” He never showed any signs of needing to be in our inner circle. He would rather run with his own kind, which was a different breed of person than either Flea or me. Chad showed us very little of who he was and where he was coming from and what he was thinking. Just to give an example, he’s been in this band since 1988, and it wasn’t until the end of 2003 that I found out when Chad left Michigan to come to L.A., he was heading to Hollywood to become a handsome leading man. We never sat down and had the heart-to-heart of what his hopes or dreams or fantasies were. Chad shows up to do his job, he’s friendly and personable. I considered him one of the weird pillars that held up our fortress when times got rough.
When it came to clothes, his sensibilities were way different from ours, and I used to tease him about it all the time. He’d show up in ’80s-looking purple double-breasted suits, and I’d say, “Did you raid Arsenio’s closet for that?” He thankfully stopped teasing his hair when he joined the band, but instead of hanging out at a punk-rock dive like Small’s with Flea and me, he’d go to the Mötley Crüe bar and wear funny jeans with belts and cowboy boots and play pool and go after rock chicks. People would see him and report to me that he had his hair teased up higher than a girl’s, but the next day he’d come to rehearsal wearing a baseball cap. It wasn’t that he was a chameleon by nature, he just wouldn’t show off all his colors around us.
We found common ground in the music. Even there, his musical sensibility was different, but his energy and passion and the power he had for creating rhythm were unsurpassed. Just about every time we had a rehearsal or a show and he was practicing by himself, I’d rock the mike and sing along, and it always felt exciting and fresh, even when he was playing simple, basic “You’ve heard that beat before” beats. He wasn’t experimental or avant-garde, and he didn’t listen to a super-different variety of music, staying pretty much in the rock and pop genre, but what he did was fulfilling nonetheless. We’d never had a drummer who had a supercharged angst battery that never seemed to run low. I shudder to think that we ever would have made him feel unwelcome or unwanted by giving him the same tough-love, boot-camp-style introduction into the band that we gave John, but we did it because we cared about him, we wanted him to be close to us.
We had our new guys and started working. It was weird and difficult at first to develop songs, more so than ever before. Flea was showing up with parts, and John and Chad were trying to find themselves. Michael Beinhorn was throwing in another wrench. There were a lot of days when we had a lot of good ideas, but we didn’t know how to craft a song out of all this music that was coming up. It was a lot to expect to pick up where Uplift Mofo Party Plan had left off. I think John felt a big responsibility to follow in Hillel’s footsteps, though he wasn’t trying to replicate Hillel’s sound. He had a cleaner, more modern sound. We just needed new songs. When Cliff and Jack Sherman came into the band, we had already written a body of work. Now we had to write an album’s worth of new songs.
Slowly but surely, some pretty different-sounding grooves started to develop. The drums had a new über-intensity. Cliff was artistic and creative and intricate, Jack Irons was very much the metronome, but Chad w
as moving more air than had ever been moved by a drummer, so that was giving us a new vibe. I’d listen to the jams and go home and sit in the kitchen with piles and piles of papers. It never dawned on me that you could write a song with five sentences of lyrics and a chorus. I thought because Flea was busy and the drums were busy and these textures were complicated, I had to do the same thing. When I sat down to write, I wasn’t looking for one or two interesting ideas, I wanted a five-page poem to rap. I’d sit there for eight hours at a time, writing songs like “Good Time Boys” and “Subway to Venus” and “Johnny, Kick a Hole in the Sky,” where the lyrics go on and on and on. Even my tribute to Magic Johnson was constant wordology. Anything that was hard to say, I was happy to write it.
When it came time to record, we began butting heads with Michael Beinhorn. He had an agenda that, unlike Andy Gill’s, had more to do with sound. Michael had a lot of smarts and musical savvy in the studio, but he was also domineering. He wanted John to have a big, crunching, almost metal-sounding guitar tone, whereas before we always had some interesting acid-rock guitar tones, as well as a lot of slinky, sexy, funk guitar tones. John wasn’t into it at the time, so there was a lot of fighting between them over tone and guitar layering. It was not a good time for John; he was wrestling with a lot of different behaviors that were making him tense, and Beinhorn was pushy and manipulative. If it wasn’t for the Traci Lords porn tapes that were constantly on rotation in the lounge, I don’t know if John would have made it through the sessions.
We worked hard on all the songs, but Beinhorn put an extra amount of focus on our cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” Flea had been playing that bass line for years, and John and Chad came up with monster parts for the song. Beinhorn went through hell and high water to get John to play the layered sound on that cut. For me, doing the vocals was totally daunting and frustrating and challenging. A song like that was not my forte, but Beinhorn was sure I could sing it, so he kept pushing and pushing me. I know it sounds like a bullshit whine, but when you’re in front of that damn vocal mike and you’re having a hard time, your insides start to hurt. It took me forever to get that song. But it was well worth it. When we got to the choruses, we called all our friends to come down and had a roomful of twenty-five people singing together. Half of them were competent singers, and the other half weren’t, but it didn’t matter, it still sounded surprisingly good.
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