Back in the studio, things were going well, but the one song that was so important to me was less important to everybody else. That was “Californication.” Every time I’d bring it up, everyone would go, “We’ve got twenty-five other songs recorded. We don’t need another one.”
“No, we have to have this,” I urged. “This is the anchor of the whole record. It’s as good a lyric as I’ve written in a long time. It has to be a song.” I was not letting go. I kept telling John that we had to finish it. Meanwhile, the session was winding down, and we had only a few days of basic track recording left. In the last moments of recording, John came running into the studio with his new thirty-thousand-dollar White Falcon hollow-body guitar. He said, “I’ve got it! I’ve got ‘Californication’!” He sat down and plucked this incredibly sparse yet haunting combination of notes. It was so different from any other approach that we’d taken for the song that I didn’t quite hear it. Then he started singing it, and it was at the high end of my range, but it was doable.
He taught it to Flea and Chad, and we rehearsed it a couple of times and recorded it. It was such a sensation of relief and gratification, to know that the song didn’t end up in the same trash bin as “Quixotic Elixir” and a number of other songs that I had high hopes for.
“Californication”
Psychic spies from China
Try to steal your mind’s elation
Little girls from Sweden
Dream of silver screen quotations
And if you want these kind of dreams
It’s Californication
It’s the edge of the world
And all of Western civilization
The sun may rise in the East
At least it settles in the final location
It’s understood that Hollywood
Sells Californication
Pay your surgeon very well
To break the spell of aging
Celebrity skin is this your chin
Or is that war you’re waging
Firstborn unicorn
Hard core soft porn
Dream of Californication
Dream of Californication
Marry me girl be my fairy to the world
Be my very own constellation
A teenage bride with a baby inside
Getting high on information
And buy me a star on the boulevard
It’s Californication
Space may be the final frontier
But it’s made in a Hollywood basement
Cobain can you hear the spheres
Singing songs off station to station
And Alderon’s not far away
It’s Californication
Born and raised by those who praise
Control of population
Everybody’s been there and
I don’t mean on vacation
Firstborn unicorn
Hard core soft porn
Dream of Californication
Dream of Californication
Destruction leads to a very rough road
But it also breeds creation
And earthquakes are to a girl’s guitar
They’re just another good vibration
And tidal waves couldn’t save the world
From Californication
Pay your surgeon very well
To break the spell of aging
Sicker than the rest
There is no test
But this is what you’re craving
Firstborn unicorn
Hard core soft porn
Dream of Californication
Dream of Californication
One of the reasons I was able to sing “Californication” with little trouble was that I’d been taking vocal lessons with an amazing teacher named Ron Anderson. Over the years I’d tried a number of vocal coaches. Before Mother’s Milk, I took lessons from a white-haired crazy lady from Austria, whose claim to fame was that she had worked with Axl Rose before Appetite for Destruction. Her whole thing was to stand in one place and press your belly a certain way, which didn’t resonate with me, since I was ragdolling all over the stage.
Around Blood Sugar, I took some lessons with Michael Jackson’s vocal coach, but I didn’t like him much and bailed out after two sessions. For One Hot Minute, I took lessons with a pleasant fellow who played piano and sang in bars for tips. I don’t know if I improved my vocalizing abilities, but it was a lot of fun. Instead of doing scales, we’d get out one of his hundreds of songbooks and sing Beatles songs. Then I found Ron Anderson, who was a classical teacher possessed of an operatic voice. It wasn’t fun to sit there and sing scales, but I could feel immediate results and had much more control over my voice. I worked with him every day during the recording of the album, which we ultimately called Californication. My biggest mistake was not to continue working in his style, so I’d lose my voice a lot when I was out on the road. It reached a breaking point while we were on tour in New York. Ron flew out and worked with me all day, and I was well enough to make the gig. He gave me a strict regimen of warming up my voice, which I do religiously to this day.
We were all thrilled when we finished work on the album. We felt like a forest that had burned to the ground and then new trees had sprouted from the ashes. Flea was still in his emotional wringer, but John and I and even Chad had been through our own wringers, so there was a real bond between us, and seeing this project through was a real unifying process. Having gone through it all had changed our outlooks. You can’t be as much of a bitch as you were before, you can’t be as much of an egomaniac, you can’t feel as much like the world owed you something, you can’t be the “where’s mine?” guy. The “where’s mine?” was that I was alive and getting the opportunity to play music with the people I most like to play music with. One of the most mystifying aspects of this era of our band was that we were as enthusiastic as we were when we started, if not more so. And when we started, we had cornered the market on enthusiasm.
We mixed the record, and people started coming by to hear it, and we were over the moon with the reactions. Things were going well on the home front, too. I was going back and forth to New York to visit Claire, who was now the Sober Girl. She wanted to go back to school, so I’d set her up at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and she was doing well. The light in her eyes was back, and we were getting along spectacularly.
The only snafu the band ran into was when we played the finished album for our new management team. Cliff and Peter flew to L.A., sat in the studio, listened, and were so unimpressed we couldn’t believe it. We played them “Scar Tissue” and “Otherside” and “Californication,” and they sat there saying, “Okay. We might be able to work with that one. I don’t know about the other one. It’s not a home run, but we might be able to get on base with that.” They’re still like that, they still underreact to things. We found it almost humorous that they were receiving the fruits of our labor with such a low-key reaction. We weren’t worried about it. We believed in the record, and we loved it and wanted to share it, but we weren’t anticipating its reception so much as we were just pleased with what we made.
Cliff decided that we should lead with “Scar Tissue” as the single and the first video. We decided to do a special small tour to unveil the album. Since it was being released in June, my friend Chris Rock suggested we play proms around the country to promote it. That got me thinking about my high school days and how exciting it was to turn out to see bands that came through, so we decided to do a bunch of free shows for high school students. Then Columbine happened, and a firestorm of fear swept over all these high schools. We felt it was more important than ever to do the shows, so we came up with the idea of having high school students write essays on how they could make their schools better, safer, happier, more rocking places, so that they didn’t have to go to school afraid. If you wrote the essay, you got a free ticket to the show. We went out in May and played, and it was an absolutely magical grouping of shows, be
cause they were small and for kids who clearly wanted to be there, who had taken the time to write the compositions. There was so much love coming off these kids, we couldn’t have asked for a better reception.
We knew that the album was connecting with a lot of people when we went on a European press tour in June. We were in Italy, and John and I were riding in the back of a Mercedes with the window open. A scooter with two Italian guys on it pulled up next to us. They looked inside the car and started screaming, “Hey, Californication, Californication!” then started singing “Scar Tissue.” The record had been out for five days. Everywhere we went, every shop was playing our record. Italy had caught fire. We went from selling a handful of records to selling more records than anyone that year in Italy. How does an entire country decide to start loving you in one day?
In July we began a series of huge shows. In the short amount of time since our record came out, there had been a huge buzz all over the world. The record was getting received in a much larger and warmer way than we ever expected. Somewhere along the way, we were asked to close Woodstock ’99. That was perfect, because we had been asked to play an outdoor show on Younge Street in Toronto the day before. It was supposed to be a low-key show, but the whole town turned out. This massive expanse of humanity filled the street and every building and rooftop. It was another indicator that the world was with us and that we had reawakened the sleeping Red Hot fans from their Rip Van Winkleism. They all came out of the woodwork to rock with us for this record.
The next day we went to Woodstock. We planned to fly in, get on a bus, get to the venue an hour before our set, get focused, play, and get the hell out of Dodge before the mass exodus began. Before we got there, we’d heard reports that this event was less organized and the crowds were getting out of control. When we pulled onto this old military base way up in upstate New York, it was clear that this situation had nothing to do with Woodstock anymore. It wasn’t symbolic of peace and love, but of greed and cashing in. The little dove with the flower in its mouth was saying, “How much can we overcharge the kids for this T-shirt and get away with it?”
We got backstage and were all hell-bent on getting straight into our rituals—the physical warm-ups, the stretching, the meditating, the finger exercises, the vocal warm-ups. It was about seven, so we would be taking the stage during an explosive and dramatic upstate New York sunset. We hadn’t heard any reports about people getting abused or raped or anything like that. It just seemed to us like another big rock festival, with no particularly evil elements about it.
Our sacred hour of preparation was interrupted when Jimi Hendrix’s sister came backstage and pleaded with us to do a song by her brother. It seemed that an all-star Hendrix tribute had fallen apart, and she was mortified that Woodstock would forget him. It had been a long time since we played a Hendrix song, so our first inclination was to say no. But she kept telling us how much it would mean to her, so ten minutes before we were to go onstage, we decided to do “Fire.”
I reviewed the lyrics, and John reacquainted himself with the chords. Right before we were due onstage, Flea came to me and said, “I’m thinking of doing the show naked. What do you think?”
“If that’s what you’re thinking, then don’t even question it. Go let your freak flag fly, brother,” I said. In that setting, it seemed natural for him to be naked, and no one let it be a distraction. We played a fluid, dynamic show.
As night fell, we saw this giant column of fire far back in the audience. We’d been through tons of festivals where bonfires had been started, so this one didn’t seem out of the ordinary. When it was time for our encore, we started into “Fire,” not because there were fires raging, but as a palliative for poor Jimi’s sister. And the old shoe fit. Then we ran offstage, drove to the plane, landed in Manhattan, and checked in to our home away from home, the Mercer Hotel. It was only midnight, but we started hearing this ruckus about the riots and the rapes and the fires raging at Woodstock. That was so weird, because to us, it had seemed like a normal rock-and-roll show.
But we woke up to papers and radio stations vilifying us for inciting the crowd by playing “Fire.” We ignored these ridiculous charges, though it did turn out that the promoters were assholes and it had not been a user-friendly environment. We should have paid closer attention to that and not been so isolated from the fan’s point of view. I guess it was irresponsible to just show up, play, and leave, without taking a closer look at some of the details surrounding the show.
Now it was time to go to Europe to play. Q-Prime was ideologically built on touring. Their basic philosophy was that after you put out a record, you had to crisscross the globe ten times if you wanted it to do well. We were used to touring, but not to that degree. The longer you’ve been in a band and the more times you’ve toured, the more difficult it becomes to say “I’m going on tour for two years and I’m going to sleep in a different bed every night and be in buses, trains, cars, taxis, shuttling and shifting and pushing and pulling and not eating normally and not sleeping normally and not being around loved ones.” Flea had a young daughter, which made it even harder. But Q-Prime were very into it, and it had been a long time since we’d been there, so we were a bit more willing to hit the road incessantly than we would be in the future.
We started by doing a free show in Moscow on August 14, 1999. As part of Russia’s glasnost awakening, they’d embraced MTV, and we were tapped to inaugurate MTV’s Russian debut with a huge free concert in Red Square. The first problem was that John had to be talked down from his concern that we might be kidnap victims, because next to Colombia, Russia had become the kidnap capital of the world. After getting assurances for our personal safety, and getting assigned a contingent of security personnel, we agreed to do the show.
You’d expect that Moscow, Russia’s biggest city, would be run efficiently, maybe even in a military fashion, but that wasn’t the case. There was no order at all, and shakedowns were the norm. The cops, the military, the airport personnel, everybody wanted our rubles. It was the first time any of us had been to Russia, and we did feel a little unsafe there. We stayed at the Kempinski Hotel, a five-star gaudy, gilded, marbled oasis in the middle of a strikingly poor economy. Everything in Moscow was gray, gray, gray. The sky was gray, the buildings were gray, the streets were gray, the bushes were gray. There was this heavy cloud of Stalinesque gravity that suffocated the place.
We took a couple of days to decompress and tour the city. The day before the show, by some horrible stroke of fate, I wrecked, wracked, twisted, turned, sliced, and diced my back. I saw a physical therapist, but it did no good. I could see the enormous stage they had built from my hotel window, and I was bummed at the prospect of playing before all of Russia on MTV with a whack back.
The day of the show, Red Square was so filled with wall-to-wall Russians that we needed a police escort to get near the stage. By the time we went on, my back was still not happening, even though it was better than the day before. Still, I was able to stand up straight and present the songs. Nothing buck wild, no ability to do my song-and-dance thing, but we made the best of it. Then we hightailed it out of Russia, but we got pulled over and extorted by the police on the way to the airport. As a final indignity, Chad got shaken down for all the money he had on him right before boarding.
I’d never really liked Austria, mainly because the people I met there were so arrogant and pompous, but when we stepped off the plane in Vienna after a week in Russia, it was like going to Disneyland for the first time as a kid. The sun came out, the clouds opened, you could smell flowers, there was snow on the mountains, it was just heaven. However, the rest of this leg of the European tour was not my shining moment. It’s difficult to keep a relationship prospering when you’re in Europe and your girlfriend is in America and you’re both relatively newly sober and you haven’t worked through a lot of control issues and jealousy issues and insecurity issues and dependency issues. There was a lot of emotional frying going on.
It w
as hard being gone for months at a time, and so far away that the time difference became a huge obstacle. You want to communicate, but then you aren’t able to, and days go by. You get mad and try to call her and you can’t find her and then you finally do catch her and she’s been out doing something stupid that she shouldn’t have been doing, because she should’ve been there waiting for your phone call, but she blew you off and then she starts to get suspicious and “Who’s that girl’s voice in the background?” “Oh, that’s my masseuse or my friend or whatever.” I wasn’t good at it, and Claire was no better, and together we equaled stubborn. These things always took a lot of repairing, and we’d have to wait until I got home.
The band worked our asses off touring that year. Claire finished school, and we decided that it would be a good idea for her to move to L.A., which meant I’d have to get a place to live. I’d always fancied a gorgeous old building in West Hollywood called the Colonial House, which was a stone’s throw from the Chateau Marmont. When Jennifer Lopez moved out of the penthouse, I grabbed it. Claire moved to L.A. in September 1999. She had the use of my nice new Cadillac Esplanade and all her expenses paid, but she didn’t have a job, and she didn’t know that many people, and I was about to leave again for Europe.
On the way to Europe, the band stopped in New York and did a gig at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center for K-Rock radio contest winners. The show was lively and energetic, but the sound system was horrific: All I heard were drums and guitar and no vocals for the entire show. I ended up screaming my lungs out and losing my voice, which was a drag.
We flew to Finland and began crisscrossing Europe. When we got to Spain, Claire decided to come out for the last week of the tour. I loved the girl, I was happy to see her, happy to have my woman in my bed, in my arms, but she was hard to get along with on a daily basis, as was I. She never did come to a comfortable understanding that a lot of the people who were fans of the band happened to be girls, and for some reason, she held me responsible. There were times when we played shows and I’d be with her and we’d have to walk from the arena to wherever the car was, and frenzied people would charge me. A lot of times they were girls, and there were crazy screamings of “I love you, I love you, I want to be with you, please hug me.” I have no reason to be mean to these people or to explain to them, “I have a girlfriend, you must not approach me with such sentiments.” Their interaction with me is just an illusion. I’m like “Thank you very much, hello, good-bye, God bless, enjoy the night, carry on.” If I was with Claire, she’d say, “No, you can’t let those girls come up and say those things to you. They have to know that I’m your girlfriend.”
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