3/28/2023 0 Comments Red hot chili peppers by the wayAnd then he turns to us and goes: ‘I’m really happy for you guys.’ What a class act.” There was a silver lining for the sacked guitarist: eight days later, Eddie Vedder rang Klinghoffer and asked him to join Pearl Jam’s touring band.įrusciante back in the fold was, in some ways, a risk. Josh sat there, the rug pulled out from under him. We love you, but we feel like there’s unfinished business,’” says Smith of that meeting. “Flea was like: ‘We’re gonna have John back. He would later tell Rolling Stone that “it truly felt like a death”. When he arrived, the band was waiting in the back yard, ready to deliver the bad news: he was out. Klinghoffer got a text from Flea, calling him over to his house. There was only one problem: the Chilis already had a guitarist, Josh Klinghoffer, who had replaced Frusciante in 2009. “I can’t think of another musical connection I’ve seen that’s as strong as theirs,” Rick Rubin, their long-serving producer, who is back again on Unlimited Love, once said. Smith never considered that he would come back: “I thought that ship had sailed.”īut in late 2019, Flea and Frusciante started jamming together. My take is that he wanted to do his own thing, where you didn’t have to compromise and photoshoots and interviews.” Indeed, he seems to have rejoined on the proviso that he doesn’t have to do much of the latter, and isn’t available for this piece. “It was a lot.” Frusciante’s second exit was different. The guitarist had joined the band at 18, “and by the time he was 21, we went from this little club band to Under the Bridge,” says Smith. The Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1988 … (from left) Anthony Kiedis, John Frusciante, Flea and DH Peligro. “I thought we’d implode at some point, like most bands do,” says Smith. There is a new album, Unlimited Love, their 12th – significant because it’s the first in nearly two decades with guitarist John Frusciante back in the fold, but also because the band has survived for 39 years without resorting to a breakup and reunion. It’s not quite the meet-cute I had imagined, then, when I finally see them in the pixellated flesh on separate Zooms and one phone call: drummer Chad Smith in his home office, bassist Flea in his home cinema and frontman Kiedis dialling in from the warehouse where the band is rehearsing for a stadium tour. I half expect Flea and Anthony Kiedis to wander in, long-haired and bare-chested those teenagers who ended up in one of the world’s most enduring bands. In a bodega on Melrose Avenue, amid the lingerie shops and trash-filled lots, the city’s unofficial theme tune wafts out of the speakers: “First born unicorn / Hardcore soft porn / Dream of Californ-i-cay-tioooon”. Here in Los Angeles, they are everywhere. I f there was any doubt to how massive the Red Hot Chili Peppers still are, last month they got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, on the very streets they used to stalk as teenage punks.
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