Scar Tissue (15 page)

We showed up to the Rhythm Lounge, and there were about thirty people in the club, all there to see Neighbor’s Voices. I was wearing a paisley corduroy three-quarter-length robe and a fluorescent orange hunting cap. Oddly enough, I was totally sober. I had no idea how performing was going to make me feel; all I knew was that as we got up onstage, there was this weird sense of a force field traveling among us. I had seen Flea and Hillel and Jack play a million times, but I’d never seen so much intensity in their faces or purpose in their body language. Flea looked like a cylinder of glowing energy. Unbeknownst to me, he’d been snorting heroin before the show.

The stage was microscopic. I could have reached out in either direction and touched Hillel or Flea. We didn’t even get a proper introduction, but people started to take notice as we were plugging in. All the anticipation of the moment hit me, and I instinctively knew that the miracle of manipulating energy and tapping into an infinite source of power and harnessing it in a small space with your friends was what I had been put on this earth to do.

And then Jack Irons, bless his heart, cocked his neck back and hit his sticks together and counted off “One, two, three, four.” When the music started, I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I had so much juice flowing through me that I did a flip in that tight space and nailed it. And we all just erupted. We had no idea what we were about until that moment, but right into the song, we realized that we were about exploding and killing it with everything we had. As we performed, everybody who was in that room who hadn’t been paying attention zombied all the way up to the stage. When we finished, the audience was completely stunned and speechless, frozen in their tracks.

Solomon, the French guy who was promoting that show, rushed out of his DJ booth and, with typically passionate French body language, touched me and said, “Can you please come back and play next week at my club? Maybe you could have two songs by then?” Although we hadn’t planned on playing again, I said, “Of course, we’ll be here next week, and we’ll have another song for you.” We were so high off of that show that the idea of playing the next week seemed totally natural.

We got together during the week and wrote a song called “Get Up and Jump.” Flea had been working for a long time on a bass part that was syncopated and intertwined and complicated, combining picking and slapping in a strange and beautifully funky way. I had to write lyrics, so I came up with some more that were character-based. I took the theme of jumping and wrote verses about different cartoony versions of jumping—jumping rope, Mexican jumping beans. But the most memorable line in that song was about Rona Frumpkin, a girl Hillel had a crush on.

One of Hillel’s more outstanding characteristics was his big red nut sack, which he was very proud of and which he would put on display with hardly any urging. We used to joke about Hillel’s package, because when he would put his dick and nut sack together, he’d form a pumpkin shape in his trousers, which would become a lot more pronounced when he was around Rona. So I wrote a verse that included “Hillel be jumping on that little baby Frumpkin/Say what, you got a pumpkin in your pants?”

We decided we were going to get theatrical for show number two, so we choreographed a funny dance to the popular song “Pac Jam.” The night of the show, the club was packed to the rafters, so we began our performance by marching in the front door and pushing our way through the crowd with “Pac Jam” blasting out of a boom box. When we got to the stage, we started in on this retarded robotic dance. Jack couldn’t get the synchronized moves together, so we abandoned the dance halfway through and went right into “Out in L.A.” and then “Get Up and Jump.”

I guess my Frumpkin lyrics worked, because she was in the audience, and later that night, Hillel finally was able to hook up with her. So whenever anybody in the band was having trouble scoring with a certain girl, I’d insert her name, and boom, it was like clockwork, twenty-four hours would not pass without that girl falling under the spell.

After the second show, we realized this was too much fun to give up. At last, I had something to do that had meaning and purpose. I felt I could put every idea and stupid little philosophy that I had into a song. One indication that we were getting serious was that we felt we had to come up with a name for the group. We started going through these huge laundry lists of idiotic, meaningless, boring names. To this day, both Tree and Flea claim they came up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It’s a derivation of a classic old-school Americana blues or jazz name. There was Louis Armstrong with his Hot Five, and also other bands that had “Red Hot” this or “Chili” that. There was even an English band that was called Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers, who later thought we had stolen their name. But no one had ever been the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a name that would forever be a blessing and curse. If you think of Red Hot Chili Peppers in terms of a feeling, a sensation, or an energy, it makes perfect sense for our band, but if you think of it in terms of a vegetable, it takes on all these hokey connotations. There’s a restaurant chain named after the vegetable, and chili peppers have been merchandised in everything from home-decoration hangings to Christmas-tree ornaments. Suffice to say that we were weirded out when people started bringing chili peppers to our shows as some kind of offering.

Around this time, Hillel, Flea, and I combined resources and found an incredibly inexpensive three-bedroom house on an infamous street called Leland Way, which was a one-block street that was also known as Pot Alley because the Mexican mafia dealt pot on that street. It was a dangerous, unsavory neighborhood filled with drug dealers and bums, but we didn’t care. In fact, it gave me material for our songs. Every night I’d stare outside my bedroom window and watch the LAPD helicopters circling and hovering over our block, shining their lights down onto this maelstrom of pot-dealing activity.

From “Police Helicopter”

Police Helicopter sharking through the sky

Police Helicopter landin’ on my eye

Police Helicopter takes a nosedive

Police Helicopter no he ain’t shy

That house became a beehive of musical activity. Hillel would always be playing his guitar. I’d come home, and Flea would be out on the porch playing. He probably should have been practicing his downstrokes with a pick, for Fear, but instead he’d be coming up with these soulful and emotional funk grooves. I’d sit there and listen and interject, “Yeah, that’s the one! I can work with that,” and I’d run into my room and get my pad of paper and we’d write a song. It’s the same formula that we use today to write songs, which is no formula. We just show up and start improvising, and I start collecting notes. That’s what separates us from a lot of other bands, because with us, all things are born from the jam. We go in and start wailing and see what works.

Our third show was pretty memorable. It was at the Cathay de Grande, which, unlike the Rhythm Lounge, was a real-live music venue. The night was promoted by a scenester named Wayzata Camerone, who had offered us two hundred dollars, which was more than double what we had received from our last show. Unfortunately, the place was sparsely populated that night, maybe thirty people, but we had a rooting section. I had been going out with a beautiful French girl named Patricia, who was there, along with Flea’s girlfriend and Tree and my dad, who by then had reconciled with me. The show was as exciting and energetic and explosive and out of control as our first two. We did four songs—the two we already had and two new ones, “Police Helicopter” and “Never Mind.” “Never Mind” was an audacious putdown of a variety of other bands (Gap Band, Duran Duran, Soft Cell, Men at Work, Hall and Oates), telling the world to forget about them, because we were what they were going to be into now.

At some point during that set, I was drinking a beer onstage, and I vaulted onto the near-empty dance floor and started spinning around like a whirling dervish with my beer held out, so anyone who was within ten feet of me got showered. Between songs that night, we performed a few a cappella chants that were derived from school-yard and camp songs. Hillel had introduced us to one named “Stranded,” and we did some simpleton choreography to go with the song: We put our hands in the air as we sang, “Stranded, stranded, stranded on the toilet bowl/What do you do when you’re stranded and there ain’t nothing on the roll?/To prove you’re a man, you must wipe with your hand/Stranded, stranded, stranded on the toilet bowl.”

Even though there weren’t too many people there, everybody loved the show. But at the end of the night, Wayzata was strangely making himself scarce. I located him and attempted to collect our money, but he started hemming and hawing about the small crowd.

“That’s really too bad, but there was a guarantee involved, and as the promoter of a club, that’s the risk you take,” I said.

He reached into his pocket and fished out some money. “Well, here’s forty. Maybe next time we do a show together, we can fix the balance,” he said and ducked into the men’s room to avoid me.

I rushed right in after him and ended up picking him up and plopping him down into the urinal and shaking him down for whatever other cash he had, which didn’t amount to the right sum, but I couldn’t conceive of someone breaking a deal and then trying to weasel out of it.

Another indication that we were making noise on the scene was that we began to get mentioned in the
L.A. Weekly
feature called “L.A. Dee Dah,” which was a social column that chronicled the happenings of the L.A. music scene. Flea and I became stars of this gossip column, not because we were trying to but because we were crazy and high and out every single night until five
A.M.
at every underground club there was. When we started getting a lot of mentions, I was thrilled.

One of my first mentions was a blind item that linked me to a “certain avant-Germanic chanteuse,” Nina Hagen. I didn’t know that much about Nina when I met her at that Cathay show, but I knew she was an alluring German singer who had a local cult following in the Hollywood punk scene. We were still backstage after the show when Nina came into the tiny bathroom/dressing room area and started giving me the crazy eyes. She pulled me aside and started ranting in this thick East German accent about how much she loved our band. It escalated into Nostradamus-like predictions: “Now you are the most beautiful band in the world that I’ve seen, and in five years the rest of the world will know about you, and in seven years you will be the biggest band in the world.” I was thinking, “All right lady, whatever.”

But she had such style and grace and was so overwhelming and alluring that I remember looking over at Patricia, who was bumming that I was getting all this love from this German girl. Nina gave me her phone number, and I quickly jumped ship.

I called her the next day, and she invited me over for breakfast. She had a modest but pretty house with a pool. She also had a beautiful little girl named Cosma Shiva. We ate breakfast, and Nina was definitely into a healthier, more organic cuisine than mine. We talked a lot that day, and Nina told me about her life in East Germany and the different men who had been in her life—the crazy junkie who was the father of her child, and her new boyfriend who was out of town for the month. I found her absolutely intriguing, and she was so loving that we started a hot-and-heavy romance from that day forward. It lasted about a month, but we continued to be good friends, and she continued to be an avid supporter of our music. Right after our romance ended, she asked if Flea and I would write a song for the record she was working on, and we came up with “What It Is.”

Meanwhile, we were continually expanding our own canon of songs. One of the early songs we wrote in the Leland Way house was “Green Heaven.” I had been reading a lot of books about whales and dolphins, and I had always been acutely aware of social injustice. In L.A. in the early ’80s, the police department was rife with corruption. So I started writing a song that would contrast life above the sea and life below the sea—chronicling the excesses of the Reagan years and comparing them to this idyllic Shangri-la that was happening below sea level, with animals that I considered to be of equal brain power.

FROM “Green Heaven”

Here above land man has laid his plan

And yes it does include the Ku Klux Klan

We got a government so twisted and bent

Bombs, tanks and guns is how our money is spent . . .

Time now to take you to a different place

Where peace-loving whales flow through liquid outer space

Groovin’ and glidin’ as graceful as lace

Never losing touch with the ocean’s embrace . . .

Back to the land of the policeman

Where he does whatever he says he can

Including hating you because you’re a Jew

Or beating black ass that’s nothing new

We ended up spending twenty-four hours writing “Green Heaven,” and it became the epic centerpiece of our shows. Hillel would do an amazing talk-box intro for the song: He’d run a big plastic tube out of a guitar box alongside a mike. Then he’d put the tube down his throat and play the guitar. The sounds from the guitar would go into his mouth, and by shaping his lips, he could form words from the guitar sound. It was painfully psychedelic, in the sincere use of that term, not pop psychedelic or misconstrued television-grade psychedelic, but the real heart-and-soul-of-the-cosmic-journey-to-outer-space psychedelic.