The Organic Anti-Beat Box Band 6 страница

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 ac 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 LA. with his new girlfriend, Toni.

John started to dabble in using heroin. When you first start doing it and then you walk away from it and you're not feeling great, it's something that weighs heavy on your mind, like "Whoa, there's a girl and a fucking dope dealer waiting for me at home. I could live without the German weather and the food." John may have acted like a prick, but it's not difficult to imagine why someone gets that way in the middle of twelve interviews, because sometimes the interviewers are decent and thoughtful and considerate and interested in music, but sometimes they're abominable, and you want to slap them and tell them to leave because they're so thoughtless and small-minded and the things they want to talk about are rude.

I remember being in Belgium with John at a really cool old boutique-style hotel. We were checking out in the morning, but he didn't look so good. Then the guy at the front desk told him, "And that's two thousand dollars for the phone bill." He had been on the phone with Toni in L.A. for six hours. By the time we got to London, he came to me and apologized: "I'm sorry to do this, but I really want to leave badly. Can you finish this by yourself?" and frantically rushed to get the next plane back home.

In France we met with record-company people, and Lindy and I got to see the "Give It Away" video for the first time. I was more hysterically ecstatic about that piece of visual footage than any we've ever done. But the record execs had reservations about it, worried that it was too weird to get played on television. The first two salvos from "Give It Away" had now been met with reactions that didn't suggest we'd be getting much radio or TV play. But the tide turned around when K-Rock in L.A. started playing "Give It Away" all the time. That was the beginning of the infusion of those songs into mass consciousness.

The Blood Sugar Sex Magik tour seemed to augur a changing of the musical guard. There was definitely a sense at that time that the whole late '80s musical mentality was dying out. Cheesy pop-metal bands like Warrant and Poison and Skid Row were finished; cheesy family sitcoms like The Cosby Show were on their way out. There was something new in the air. I remember getting a tape of a new album by a band called Nirvana and driving around the valley in my Camaro with the top down and marveling about where these guys had come from, the songs were so out of this world. We were getting ready for our tour, and one night I saw a video on MTV from a band called the Smashing Pumpkins. The song was "Gish," and it was a really beautiful song, with a different texture and energy from the usual trash on MTV. So I called Lindy and told him to get the Pumpkins for our tour.

Then Jack Irons called us up out of the blue while we were at Lindy's office, listening to tapes of bands to figure out who else to take out on tour with us. Jack asked that, as a favor, we listen to a tape by a new band, whose singer, Eddie Vedder, was a friend of Jack's. Jack had met Eddie when Eddie was in a Chili Peppers cover band, basically doing an imitation of me. Apparently, Eddie had also worked as tech for us when we played the San Diego area. Eddie's new group was called Pearl Jam. We listened to the tape, and it wasn't our cup of tea, we were such musical snobs at that point. But these kids sounded real and genuine, and we were happy to do Jack a solid, so Pearl Jam was booked as the opening band.

We began the tour at the Oscar Meyer Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin. Pearl Jam opened, and when they played their first single, "Alive," at the end of their set, I realized that Vedder had an incredible voice and they had a pop smash on their hands. Backstage, we made friends with the Smashing Pumpkins, and it turned out they were way weirder than we could have imagined. I met D'Arcy, their bass player, and thought she was cute in a weird Gothy way. James, the guitar player, was super-shy and mellow, and Billy Corgan, the leader of the band, was jovial and approachable. But after their set, D'Arcy got hammered on vodka and whippets. She was high as a kite. If this was the way she was starting out a tour, imagine what she'd be like by the end of it. Finally, we went out and played a lot of songs off of Blood Sugar. We tried to play "Breaking the Girl," and it fell apart, but the rest of the show went well.

As the tour progressed, we got closer with both of the opening bands. Most people will tell you that Billy Corgan is the most difficult and unhappy human in the world, but my experience with him was completely different. I found him very intelligent and sensitive, with a keen sense of irony. His e-mail address used to be "blackcloud @ blah, blah, blah." He was also a remarkably talented basketball player. We were playing backstage at a Shriner's Club gig in Milwaukee during a sound check, and my immediate read on Billy was "tall, gangly, musical, nerdy intellectual," not "ballplayer." But we started shooting around, and Billy stepped up and started draining outside shots.

We went on a lot of multiband outings that tour, going to movies, and I always found Billy supportive and never competitive or weirdly jealous. But he clearly was the boss of Smashing Pumpkins, and the rest of them were pretty much under his thumb. D'Arcy was really sweet, but she seemed to be an accident waiting to happen. James wasn't as much a loose wire as D'Arcy, but their drummer, Jimmy Chamberlain, was a monster. Thank God I was sober that tour, because if I hadn't been, he would have been my running partner, and we both would have been dead. He drank and used and caroused like a fucking gorilla with a huge heart. I remember going out to clubs after these shows, especially in New York, and he'd be at the bar in a trench coat, feeling the joy of his own success in this band, touring the world for the first time and drinking with a pocketful of this and a pocketful of that and some girls nearby. He was a real Chicago Polack with a lot of musical talent and no rules whatsoever. He's doing all right now, but he had his escapades with the dark side.

We hung out with Eddie and Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam quite a bit. Stone was cool; he was the shy distant fellow. Eddie and I became equal friends, there was never any of that saccharine idolatry of "Oh, I've been into you guys for so long." We were on an even playing field from day one, and there was no ego interfering with our friendship.

By the time we got to Boston, the buzz and the hype and the attention Pearl Jam were getting was phenomenal. Normally, a small arena show is empty when the first act goes on, but our audiences were filling up for Pearl Jam, and it was exciting. At that time in his life, Eddie was so happy to be playing music, and he was humble and loving and went out of his way to make friends with everyone. He went and cold my mom what a great kid she had, and he bonded with Blackie.

Meanwhile, our record started taking off. For the first time, we were getting heavy radio play and regular rotation on MTV. So both Pearl Jam and our band were skyrocketing to a new stratosphere at the same time. All of this was making John miserable. He began to lose all of the manic, happy-go-lucky, fun aspects of his personality. Even onstage, there was a much more serious energy around him. It was disconcerting to see how sullen his approach to being an artist was getting. What I didn't know till later was that John was ambivalent about even being in the band then.

In his interior dialogue, John figured that quitting the band right after completing a successful album would put him in a mysterious place where he'd have the opportunity to do other projects and not be part of the star-making machinery. John felt that touring would sap the amazing creativity that he was experiencing. Of course, we didn't know any of this, because John was rapidly pulling away from the rest of the band. He brought Toni on tour with him, and they cocooned all the time.

Warner's was thrilled with the initial reaction to the album, and they immediately began discussing a second single and video. We were about halfway through our U.S. tour, playing in the Midwest, and some record-company people came to the show to discuss the possibility of releasing "Under the Bridge" as our next single. That was a song that had been hit or miss for me as a vocalist; sometimes I could get through it, and other times I couldn't sing it in tune. That night we had a huge audience, and it came time for "Under the Bridge," and John started the opening chords, but I missed my cue. Suddenly, the entire audience started singing the song at the spot where I was supposed to have come in. At first I was mortified that I had fucked up in front of the Warner's people, who were there to hear me sing that song, but it turned out that they were way more impressed with the audience singing it than they ever would have been if I was singing it. I apologized for fucking up, but they said, "Fucking up? Are you kidding me? When every single kid at the show sings a song, that's our next single."

I saw our newfound success as a monumental blessing. It wasn't that I thought we were greater than we used to be - it was more that we were the same guys, but we were singing to a lot more ears and a lot more eyes and a lot more hearts. I felt we should be respectful of this gift, this incredible stroke of good fortune. We didn't sell out, we didn't change what we believed in to reach more people, we just did it. John, however, saw our newfound popularity as a bad thing. We used to have these raging backstage discussions.

"We're too popular. I don't need to be at this level of success. I would just be proud to be playing this music in clubs like you guys were doing two years ago," John would say.

"It is not a bad thing that these kids showed up," I'd argue. "Let's fucking be there for them. We don't have to hate ourselves and be mad at them because this is what happened."

He'd be all pissed off and hide and pout and not do what I wanted him to do, which was my huge mistake, wanting everyone to react to this new situation the same way I had. John had made up his mind about what was credible and what was cool, and playing for an arena full of kids stopped being cool for him. He would rather be home listening to Captain Beefheart and painting. John was reading a lot of William Burroughs then, and his view, from Burroughs, was that every true artist is at war with the world. Ironically, the more disdain he developed for our success, the more popular we became. The more he would stomp his feet, the more records we would sell; the more disenchanted he became with the number of people who walked through the door, the more people would walk through the door. I thought it was the most beautiful thing that we had created something special, put it out to the world, and this was how the world was responding.

My ongoing problems with John were creating huge tensions in the band, which were causing additional anguish for Flea. Flea was in the process of breaking up with his wife, so all this stress led him to take something to go to bed, something to get up, and something for the middle of the day. His brain chemistry was getting perforated by doctors' prescriptions. What could have been the most exciting time of our career ended up being very strange. John was being dark and withdrawn, Flea was under the influence of all kinds of prescribed medications, and I was this high-strung but still-clean weirdo. And Chad was Chad.

My tensions with John came to a boiling point at a show we did in New Orleans. We had a sold-out house and John just stood in the corner, barely playing his guitar. We came offstage, and John and I got into it.

"John, I don't care what you're thinking or where your head's at or where you'd rather be, but when we come to a show and there are this many people who are paying money to see us and care about us and they want to experience these songs with us, the least you can do is fucking show up and play for them," I yelled.

"That's not how I see it. I'd rather be playing for ten people, and blah, blah, blah." The argument just went on and on. Flea was watching us, thinking, "Oh no, this was bound to happen: Control Freak Anthony against Hater of This Experience John, and they're finally having it out." John and I went from fighting to going into a bathroom and trying to get to the bottom of it so we could understand each other. Ultimately, we didn't see eye to eye, but we did come to an understanding and agreed to disagree and accept each other's differing perception of reality.

The longer we toured, the larger the crowds got. By the time we were scheduled to play the West Coast, we had jumped from theaters to full-fledged arenas, so the promoters felt we needed to add another band that was bigger than Pearl Jam. Nirvana's second album, Nevermind, had just exploded, and I was crazy about that record, so I suggested we get Nirvana to take Pearl Jam's place. Eddie and the guys were understanding about it, so Lindy called Nirvana, but their managers told him that they were unavailable. I picked up the phone and called Nirvana's drummer, Dave Grohl, myself.

"Anthony Kiedis! Wow, we love you guys. We grew up listening to you in Seattle," Dave said. He told me they had just come off a huge tour, and Kurt Cobain was pretty worn out, but he'd try to talk him into doing the West Coast shows. And he did. Nirvana joined the bill, but then Billy Corgan pulled the Smashing Pumpkins off the bill. Apparently, he used to go out with Courtney Love, who was then Kurt's girlfriend, so he refused to be on the same bill with Nirvana, let alone open for them. So Pearl Jam was back aboard.

Our first show was at the L.A. Sports Arena, and I was desperately trying to get John excited, telling him what a trip it would be to play with Nirvana, but he was just like "Nirvana, Shirvana, who cares?" Eventually, he would discover Nirvana on his own and became a live concert/obscure B-side devotee, but this time he didn't care - although his ears pricked up when Nirvana opened their show with a cover of a Who song. This was a big deal for us to be back home playing our biggest show ever. Perry Farrell from Jane's Addiction came to the show dressed up like a handsome prince, and to me that was a sign of our newfound status.

That night was the first time I met Kurt Cobain. Before the show, I went back to Kurt's dressing room to say hello, and he was back there with Courtney. He looked torn up, like he had just come off a hard bender. He was wearing a ripped dress, and his skin was bad, and he looked like he hadn't slept for a few days, but he was just so beautiful in a different way I was blown away by his presence and his aura. He seemed really kind. We had a nice chat, and I thanked him for playing these shows, even if going back on tour again was the furthest thing from his mind.

I kept looking over at Courtney, convinced I knew her from somewhere. Then she started yelling at me, "Anthony, don't you remember me? I used to pick you up hitchhiking down Melrose in the middle of the night, when you and Kim Jones were all strung out. I was a dancer back then, and I lent you twenty bucks, and you never paid me back." It was time for Nirvana to play, and Kurt dragged himself up and out of that dressing room, but this guy who looked like death warmed over got onstage and slayed the entire audience, putting on as good a show as you could ever want to see. Their raw energy, their musicality, their song selection, they were like a chain saw cutting through the night.

We'd saved a couple of tricks for our hometown audience. Our show opened with Flea's thunderous bass, but he wasn't onstage, he was attached to a special harness that was propelling him down to the stage from the roof of the arena, upside down, while playing. John was in one of his moods. I don't know if he was secretly terrified to go out there and have that kind of responsibility, or if there was just so much energy going on that maybe it was too much for him to be comfortable facing, but he was very moody and very distant. He played well, but there wasn't a lot of interconnectedness happening among us. For the finale, we donned the socks, an event that was becoming rarer and rarer.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31