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 i
njustice. 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.
As political as these lyrics seemed to be, I never once considered the Red Hot Chili Peppers a sociopolitical outfit like, say, the Dead Kennedys. I just felt that we were there to create beauty, induce joy, and make people laugh, and if the lyrics happened to include political or social commentary, then so be it. But it was never our responsibility to go out and be the U2 of our generation.
Even though we were a band now, Flea would still go off to rehearse with Fear, and Hillel and Jack would go off to rehearse with What Is This, and there was never any conflict about any of that. We saw playing our songs as a fun thing to do, not as a career move. None of these guys was thinking of quitting their day jobs to do the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I was fine with that. I was just happy to be planning for our next show, because each one was monumental to me. I couldn’t sleep the night before. I’d lie there in bed and think about the performance. And if I did fall asleep, I’d instantly start dreaming about the show. When I got up, the first thing on my mind was “It’s show night! There’s a show tonight!” and the whole day would revolve around the buildup to the gig.
Soon after Flea and Hillel and I moved in together, Hillel fell in love with a new lady. When Hillel fell in love, he disappeared. He’s your best friend, he’s with you day and night, he falls in love, see you next year. So Flea and I were out running around to clubs, and we’d always wind up at the Zero, which had moved from Cahuenga to a great new location at Wilcox and Hollywood Boulevard. One particular night, Flea and I acquired a small quantity of China White and a quaalude. We did the drugs, and it was a unique combination. They let us into the Zero, and I started feeling really good and really confident. It was early in the evening, and not many people were in the club, but this redhead with alabaster skin and blue eyes kept walking back and forth in front of me. She was wearing an old pair of overalls with no shirt underneath, so her tits were visible from most angles. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and I stumbled right up to her with the assurance of those chemicals racing through my brain and said, “Hi!” And she said, “Hi” and started rubbing on me like a cat in heat. We immediately walked over to the stairs and made our way toward the roof, but we never even got that far.
She unsnapped her clothes, and they dropped to the floor, and we started making out. I didn’t even know her name, but I knew she wanted to fuck, so I was all ready to launch into that when she turned around, took my dick, and went straight to the ass. It wasn’t a porno situation, she was being very gentle about it, but that was where she wanted it. We were enjoying this for a few minutes when this huge moron of a bouncer came marching up the stairs and flipped out. I think she later told me that he was overreacting because he liked her and she never gave him the time of day, but whatever the reason, he threw us off the stairs.
She suggested we go to her house, which was two blocks away. By then she had told me her name was Germaine and that she lived in an old seven-story apartment building. When we got in the elevator, instead of going to her apartment, we went straight up to the roof, where we had sex all night long. I was still high on the heroin, so all this time I wasn’t able to come. When the sun began to come up, she sat down on top of the archaic elevator machinery, and we started having another round of intercourse. I was going and going and got another rhythm up and the sun started shining and she started screaming and just then somebody hit the elevator button and electricity started arcing across this old machinery and gears started engaging and motors rumbled and I finally came. It was a dramatic ending to a surreal night. I said good night to her and ran through the dawn all the way home, convinced that life was good. And even though that asshole bouncer tried to eighty-six me from the club, the owner, John Pochna, set him straight and I spent many enjoyable nights there in the future, as I did with Germaine.
A couple of months after our band started performing, we decided to make a demo tape of our songs. We got Spit Stix, the drummer from Fear, to be our recording engineer, and we rented out three hours of time at a hole-in-the-wall recording studio on Hollywood Boulevard. To give you an idea of the level of professionalism we’re talking about here, the entire budget came to three hundred dollars, which included the studio time, the engineer, and the tape. For some reason, I was the only one with money that week, so I gladly gave it up for the cause.
Those demo sessions were by far the most productive and inspired recording that we’ve ever done. In the last twenty years, we’ve never once hit a moment when there was as much magic and oneness happening. We were in the zone. Everything was recorded in one take, and everything was perfect. We finished our six songs so fast that we had enough time left to record the a cappella ditties, something we hadn’t planned on doing.
We walked out of there with a master tape and a few small cassette dubs. When we got home and listened to the music, we were in awe. People had always said that we were a live act that could never translate to record, but now we had the proof—that was bullshit. Flea and I took the cassettes, wrote our names on the plastic boxes, and began to hit the pavement to try and get bookings. We weren’t even thinking of getting a record deal. For me, this whole process was a two-part thing. You wrote and practiced the songs, and then you played shows. And we wanted to play bigger and bigger shows.
We also wanted to spread Chili Pepperdom to New York. About a week after we made that tape, our friend Pete Weiss offered to take us there. Pete was a native Los Angelean who had met Flea on the movie set of Suburbia, a film about the punk-rock scene in L.A. that Flea had acted in. Pete was a boom-mike operator and a musician and an all-around Renaissance man who was about a year and half older than we were. He had a basement apartment in Hollywood that became a clubhouse for us. He also had a beautiful classic old American car that we’d drive down to the beach or cruise around in, smoking pot and chasing girls.
Pete worked for the screenwriter Paul Schrader, who was moving to New York and had enlisted Pete to drive a huge Ryder truck packed with his belongings to his new Fifth Avenue pad. Flea and I jumped on the chance to go to New York. We had our secret weapon, our cassette, and we had visions of playing it for people in New York. When they heard its brilliance, doors were going to open, seas were going to part, and people would be dancing in the streets. There was no doubt in our minds that we’d be booked into every club in New York.
Our good friend Fab also climbed aboard for the journey, whi
ch was great for me, because somewhere out in the California desert, he came to me on the sly and told me that he had a small quantity of heroin. So we sniffed that China White and got really high. Except for a few run-ins with some crazy-assed truckers, the drive was pretty uneventful. Pete dropped us off in SoHo and then headed back up Fifth Avenue to unload Paul’s stuff. Flea and I had the tape burning a hole in our pocket, but we also had the business of survival at hand. We didn’t have a place to stay, but Fab knew two models who lived on Broome Street, so we went by their building. “I’m going to stay with these two models, but I can’t exactly bring you guys,” he said.
“Okay, but how about if we go in and maybe wash up or something?” I suggested.
We went up to their place and completely moved in. For four days these beautiful models were constantly kicking Flea and me out of their beds and bedrooms. We were leeches.
We set about the business of playing our demo tape for different club people. Of course, we had no contacts or tactics. We’d go to a club and ask for the manager. They’d point out his office, and we’d go back there, pop in our cassette tape, and do a wild dance to our own music, trying to sell ourselves. Only problem was, nobody was buying it. We got the warmest reception from this cigar-smoking Italian stallion who ran the Peppermint Lounge. He gave us a few minutes. Most people showed us the door and said, “Get the fuck out of here with your cassette tape.” After a few rejections, I could tell that this wasn’t the way to go about getting booked into a club.