Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
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.
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
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 told 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 p
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.