Scar Tissue (38 page)
Rick’s emphasis on the mechanics of songwriting led to a tradition that we still use to this day, called “face-offs.” Let’s say we’re working on a song, and we have the verse and the chorus, but we need a bridge, and there’s no piece of music we have that works there. John and Flea will unplug their guitars, run up to each other in the rehearsal space, and get in each other’s faces. Then one of them will go into the parking lot, and the other will go out into a hallway, and they’ll each have five minutes to come up with an idea. They’ll both come back, and we’ll all listen fairly and objectively and decide which part serves the song best. We’ve never had a major disagreement with one of the guys holding out for his idea. Face-offs are a fantastic tool for developing a part, because they’re spontaneous and creative. The idea appears competitive on the surface, but it’s all playful and very much in the spirit of serving the song rather than an individual. By the time that part gets put through the process of Chad doing his thing to it, and either John or Flea putting his part to it, we all own that little piece of music equally.
After that long, long period of rehearsal and songwriting and incubating ideas, we were ready to record the album. Rick suggested that we consider recording in an unorthodox setting. He turned up this amazing, huge, empty, historically landmarked Mediterranean haunted mansion a stone’s throw from where we all lived. Then he hired some guys from Canada to come down and set up a studio in the rambling house. There was a beautiful wood-paneled library in the house that connected by a window to the giant Mediterranean living room, which worked out great for us, because they built the control room in the library and set up the drums and the guitars in the huge living room, putting the bass amps and the guitar amps in separate rooms to get all the sounds just so. As we walked around the house, we spontaneously decided to live there for the duration of the recording, so we all chose our bedrooms in different wings of the house.
John had his own stairway that went up to one single room, which was quite modest. That was where he would dwell in his own soup of weirdness for months on end, painting and recording and reading and listening to music. Flea’s little daughter, Clara, had done some nice drawings for him on the wall of his bedroom. I was on the far and opposite side of the house, with a lot more space, and I’d end up recording all of my vocals from my bedroom. We set up a microphone with a cord that wound through the house and down into the control studio, and I’d stand at the window that overlooked a hill and the moon, and sing. Flea went all the way up to the third floor and occupied a room that was tiled as if it were a steam room. Chad bowed out. We had heard that the property was haunted by a woman who was murdered there in the ’30s, and that didn’t set well with him, so he opted to ride his motorcycle home each night.
We hired Brendan O’Brian to engineer the record, which was a coup, because he was the best engineer around. He’d go on to produce many, many important multiplatinum albums. Brendan was a whiz at getting the right drum sounds; plus, he was a great musician in his own right. He wound up playing on the album and was a big part of both the sound of that album and creating a fun-loving atmosphere every day.
We decided to document the recording process, so we hired Gavin Bowden, whom we had met in England when Flea and I went on our trip to Europe before our first record. Gavin had emigrated to America, and ironically, he wound up marrying Flea’s sister. One of the requirements for the cameraman of the film was that he be completely invisible during this process, and Gavin was just the guy to do that, because he was mild-mannered and English. He could blend in, and he was someone you felt comfortable performing around. He was a one-man band, crawling on the floor, hunched over backward, working his ass off to document everything from the basic tracks to the control room to me singing up in my bedroom. He also interviewed all of us and put together a nice piece that was released as
Funky Monks
.
Soon we realized that we needed someone to answer the phone, because we’d be trying to record, and the phone kept ringing off the hook. We also needed someone to get us whatever we needed, as soon as we needed it, so we wound up hiring a kid named Louis Mathieu who used to work for our friends Bob and Pete with Thelonious Monster. Louie came over at a moment’s notice and assumed his duties, and that would be the beginning of a long road with him. He went from secretary to drum tech to assistant road manager to caretaker/personal assistant to John and ultimately tour manager.
So we moved into the house and made the record. Flea and John and I stayed in the house for over thirty days without even leaving to go to a restaurant. While we were cloistered, there were rumors that John had an experience with a succubus up in his room, but in reality, we were getting nocturnal visits from a more tangible entity. We all knew this girl who worked on Melrose Avenue and was a supporter of the band. While we were in the house, she’d come over and visit. At night it was just the three of us, there was no security in the house at all. And like in some weird scene out of a movie set in a castle in the countryside of England, this very young, very self-assured girl would come and spend time with each of us, one by one. She was getting sexed in every room she visited, but it wasn’t purely sexual; she’d hang out and talk and spend time with each of us.
She’d visit me, then Flea, and then John last, because they were better friends. It was nice to put in a full day’s work on the album and then have this girl come and be so loving and so unaffected by the experience of having three different men in one night. It didn’t seem that she was engaging in this activity because she had low self-esteem or she just wanted to fuck. At that point, John had become a much different person sexually, not at all interested in abusing resources that were available to him because of his status, so I don’t think he would have done it if he thought it was causing her any pain or discomfort. It all worked out for everybody. It was nice and cozy and warm, and we even had a name for her visits, depending on the day of the week. If it was a Wednesday and we were feeling randy, someone would say, “Hey, isn’t it wacky Wednesday?” Or “By George, this is freaky Friday. Get her on the phone.”
Being confined to the house was good for me, because I had a lot of lyrics to finish during the basic recording process, and there were few distractions. But then it was time for me to step up to the plate and do my vocals. I still wasn’t comfortable singing. I was comfortable making noise with my mouth, I was comfortable writing songs and knowing in my head how they were supposed to be sung, but the actual execution seemed like this out-of-control animal that sometimes I could rein in and find a way to tame, and sometimes I couldn’t. One of the reasons I set up my room so far away from everyone was so I didn’t have to feel the eyes on me, I could be by myself when I was recording.
My level of discomfort depended on the song. I remember going up to sing “Under the Bridge” and just feeling “Oh my God, I can’t believe I have to sing this.” But Brendan made it as comfortable as humanly possible. I would be all serious and on edge and insecure, trying to let the spirits flow through me, and I had Brendan on the other end of the headphones busting jokes, laughing at me, laughing at himself, laughing about the song. He was remarkable, the perfect voice to have in your ear, reminding you not to take yourself too seriously and also knowing that you would get it when you got it. He’d say things like “I’ve heard you sing it, I know it’s there, we’ll find it. Don’t worry about it, take your time.”
Even still, three days before it was my turn to be the focus of recording, my lower back flew the coop. I’m sure it was all emotional, but my formerly broken back went kablooey, and Flea turned me on to an old Chinese acupuncturist named Zion. He not only fixed my back, he gave me a new exercise regimen—swimming—that I’d stick with up to the present day.
I don’t want to give the impression that we were monks the whole time we recorded. We’d often invite friends up to the house and have these elaborate dinner parties. One of the people who was around then was the actor River Phoenix. I met River through Ione, who’d done a film with him. John and River had jammed at a party that we all attended, and they got close. I don’t want to go off on River’s trip, because his family is excruciatingly sensitive about it, but since I’d known him, he had drunk heavily and used cocaine heavily, and it was no secret to me or anybody who knew him that he was quite out of control with this stuff and it would be just a matter of time before bad things started to add up. River was around a lot during the writing and recording of our album. He was a big supporter of our band, and I even wrote a whole verse about him in “Give It Away”: “There’s a river, born to be a giver, keep you warm, won’t let you shiver/His heart is never going to wither, come on everybody, time to deliver.”
After two months, we were finished with the recording. Flea and John had managed to stay cloistered the entire time, but after six weeks, Rick and I started making some forays into the outside world. It was a strange feeling to reenter the atmosphere of Hollywood after being so completely single-minded and focused for so long. But the whole time we were in that house, we all knew we were doing our best work yet, and that we had created something that was real and strong and beautiful, something I couldn’t wait to share with everyone around me. This album was a real step forward for everybody. John defined his playing for the first time and created a whole new approach for the guitar that became his signature. From that point on, guitar players around the world would look at him as a major player.
Flea also went in a completely new direction. Everything up to that point had been based on slapping and plucking and popping, and he abandoned that. There were only a couple of songs on the album based on the popping format; everything else was finger-plucked, which was a big departure for a guy who had became known as the crazy popping bass player. Chad also stepped up and made his mark as one of the premier rock drummers. It was also a new thing for Rick; he had never made a record like ours. He’d made hip-hop records, hard-core metal records, but never a record that had so many varied styles going on. He and Brendan actually did, in some ways for the first time, capture the essence of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Part of our live energy and our individual personalities were captured and allowed to breathe and exist on the album, and that was something we had struggled to do in the past. Rick found a way to let that happen in unconventional surroundings.
Now that the recording was finished, it was time to come up with a name. One day I was in Rick’s car, and we started throwing out titles, but whenever you do that, you’re going to come up with shit. Conversely, whenever a title just comes to you, it’s going to be great. Finally, Rick said, “I don’t know why we’re even having this conversation. Clearly the best title we have now is ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik’” (which was a song that was partly an homage to my incredible sexual encounters with Carmen). I couldn’t argue with him, and that was when we realized that even though it wasn’t necessarily the featured song or the single song or the song we wanted people to pay more attention to, it did somehow encompass the record’s entire vibe.
With the album in the can, it was time to shoot a video for the first single, which was “Give It Away.” I knew we’d have the support of our record company, so I started viewing reels and reels and reels of video directors, but nothing looked good to me. Everything was the same, boring, homogenized, contrived shit. Finally, I came across a video for a French band made by a director named Stephane Sednaoui. I was blown away by this video, which looked like nothing else. It was slower and poetic, shot in black and white. It seemed like authentic art, not something done for MTV. But when Warner’s followed up, they told me to forget it, this guy was 100 percent booked up. I couldn’t accept that, so I called him up and cajoled him to come out for a meeting.
He agreed, and we met at Flea’s house and spoke for hours about our favorite photographers and our favorite colors and we all concurred on a silver theme. We set up a video shoot out in the desert, where all good videos are made. Stephane brought an entire crew of French people: designers, stylists, makeup people, hair people, caterers, AD’s, all French. We spent two solid days out in the desert, and we were all on a creative roll, everyone stepping up to the plate and feeling great about the song. Chad was glad to dress up in his red devil horns. I was worried that when Stephane told John he was going to cavort with a dancing ribbon, he’d say, “Fuck you and take that dancing ribbon and shove it up your French ass, buddy,” but he gladly went off and made love to the air with this dancing ribbon. He would have danced around for hours with that thing.
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
was released on September 24, 1991. “Give It Away” was the first single, but the number one radio station that Warner’s wanted to break the song on, a station out of Texas, told them to “come back to us when you have a melody in your song.” That was bad news, since the conventional wisdom was that this station dictated what America was going to hear. Of course, “Give It Away” was never about melody. It was a party song.
When the album was about to be released, John and I made a trip to Europe to promote it. Flea decided against making the trip. I was surprised that John was willing to take one for the team and go on this torturous trip where you march around from city to city and talk for hours and hours to every silly publication imaginable, which is enough to drive anybody crazy. Well, it did John.
Of all of us, I think John had the hardest time readjusting to life outside of the
Blood Sugar
house. He had such an outpouring of creativity while we were making that album that I think he really didn’t know how to live life in tandem with that creativity. It got to a point where he wouldn’t want to see a billboard for, say,
The Arsenio Hall Show,
or an advertisement for lipstick. He wanted to be in a world that was a beautiful manifestation of his own creation. You’re not going to find that on a promo tour. All of the interviewers’ questions seemed to be coming from the wrong angle for John, so he became a dark, angry, resentful “I’m too cool for this school” guy. The only thing that I imagine could have made him comfortable was to be back in L.A. with his new girlfriend, Toni.
