Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kerrang! May, 2006
“YOU LIMEY bitch!” Flea, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist, is storming around a suite in Claridges Hotel throwing insults at me.
“Cocksucker! You can suck my fucking dick, Limey bitch.”
He’s just hurled a bottle of water at my head. It narrowly missed and exploded against the wall, careering into a bowl of fruit.
“This is fucking bullshit,” he shouts as I try to speak. “Shut the fuck up! Fuck you!”
Then he stomps out of the room, slamming the door. Outside in the corridor he’s still shouting, “Fuck him, fuck him”.
I’ve just asked him if he’s hurt that people are already calling the Chili’s new double album “John’s album”. It would seem a reasonable question. The album, ‘Stadium Arcadium’, comes stamped with John Frusciante’s screaming guitars all over it and, from an outsider’s perspective, it would seem that he’s taken a certain amount of control.
There have also been stories that Frusciante and Flea have fallen out, that Flea wanted to leave the band and that the image of the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a band of brothers was, in fact, untrue.
Before his tantrum, Flea has hardly poured water on these claims, saying that Frusciante, “thought his opinion was more important than mine. His opinion has never been more important than mine, it’s not more important than mine and whenever he thought it was, he was wrong every time.”
Meanwhile, in separate interviews, the band’s singer Anthony Kiedis said, “Whoever said a band was supposed to this perfectly functioning unit? We’re dysfunctional.” Drummer Chad Smith added, “There has always been a creative power-struggle. John’s kind of the catalyst in the band. Flea probably felt he had to be on his toes.” While John Frusciante said, “Ever since I joined this band, it’s been bandied about that we’re a four-man gang, that we love each other and that we’re a tight unit. It’s never been that way.”
What on earth has been happening to the world’s biggest rock band?
THE RED Hot Chili Peppers prefer to be interviewed individually. John Frusciante is the first to walk into the room. He looks a little lost, confused almost, and his hair is long, dishevelled and still wet from the shower. He looks anywhere but your in your eyes when he’s talking to you, his sentences rolling on interminably until you’re forced to interrupt him.
Since joining the band as a 17-year-old in 1988, he’s had turbulent history. He says his childhood revolved around, “being alone and practising the guitar. When I was around people I was usually pretending, putting on a show. I would put on a mask.”
He also found success hard. When the album ‘BloodSugarSexMagik’ made the Red Hot Chili Peppers superstars, they all embraced it except Frusciante.
“I didn’t know how to be successful,” he says. “It was very rare that it meant anything to me if someone complimented me. I gradually started having very little concern for the rest of the band’s feelings. I just cared about my own life. I really didn’t care how that fitted with them. They weren’t any more considerate of me either.”
So he left the band while they were on tour in Japan in 1992 and dedicated himself to painting, playing guitar and trying to be, “as creative and beautiful as possible.” Mostly, though, he shot heroin.
The evidence of those years is still with him today. When he rolls back his shirt sleeves, his pockmarked, burnt forearm is revealed – the result of setting himself on fire while freebasing. Perhaps surprisingly, he doesn’t regret the six years he spent doing drugs away from the band.
“People think that was a dark period,” he says. “I don’t look at it like that. That was the period that I learned, when I got my mind straight about everything that I needed to know. I really value that period of time.”
He’s aware that drugs still hold a strong power over his life, that there’s chance he’ll revert to his old ways. “Yes, it’s a possibility but it’s one that I won’t succumb to. I have an addictive part of me and a disciplined part of me. I just have to make the disciplined side stronger.”
Ask him when was the last time he took drugs and he says, “I’m not going to talk about it.”
It’s music that truly motivates him now. Since rejoining the band in 1998 this is what he’s immersed himself in, this is his life, and this might be the only thing he truly understands. “Now I’m into Jimi Hendrix, Tony Iommi, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton,” he says of his inspirations for ‘Stadium Arcadium’.
It’s an album that howls, shrieks and judders with his guitar. Was it his album?
“It was like that on ‘By The Way’,” he admits. “It’s more of a band now. I don’t force my ideas on people as much as I did then. I care more about what everybody thinks now.”
There were major problems between him and Flea during the recording of the last album. He says that the pair have always been competitive, “But in a healthy way. On ‘By The Way’ that competitiveness turned into a bad vibe. I knew it was a bad vibe but I didn’t care. I was not being honest enough with myself and I wasn’t looking at what I was doing wrong. I didn’t put any pressure on myself to change. I felt I was perfectly in the right and following my artistic path. Something comes out in music when everyone feels free and the band is a true democracy. That’s something I’d lost sight of.”
This realisation seems to have sparked a new sense of unity in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “This is the best we’ve ever gotten along. This is the most we’ve been on the same page,” he says before our time draws to a close.
ANTHONY KIEDIS is looking sharp in a three-piece suit. His hair is long again, a curl hanging down over his left eye. Less tall than you might think, there is nonetheless something intimidating about him. He surveys you with a suspicious look, one that’s both guarded and in control.
He starts by rambling about the new album, about how proud of it he is, how he felt so fulfilled as they were writing each of the 38 songs that they whittled down into the 28 that are on the album. Kiedis’s lyrics, according to Flea were so “meaningful with great melodies. He did incredibly.”
“I work off the music that’s created by my band,” he shrugs. “They give me a great wall of sound to draw from in terms of lyrical ideas, melodic ideas, textural ideas and rhythmic ideas.”
He’s cagey about his inspirations though. Ask him if his lyrics came from a certain amount of self-examination and he replies, “I don’t know. I’ve never been a very accurate self-analyst.”
He also refuses to be drawn too far into talking about the problems between Flea and Frusciante. “Well it wasn’t that I didn’t notice the friction,” he says. “But I had no idea Flea was feeling so creatively stymied. After ‘By The Way’ there was a certain amount of disconnected behaviour but not to the point of death. Sometimes people just go their own ways for a while.”
Flea has recently admitted that he wanted to leave the band during that period, something he didn’t confide to his longest friend, Kiedis, until recently.
“I was actually glad he hadn’t told me,” says Kiedis. “Sometimes things like that are a personal struggle. If he had told me when he was going through it, it probably would just have freaked me out.”
His unwillingness to talk too frankly makes him sound like a man who plays his cards close to his chest. That’s not necessarily so. In 2004 he published his autobiography ‘Scar Tissue’. In that book he talked in great detail about his drug use, his relationship with his drug-dealing, womanising father and about his own relationships. He also revealed a lot about the workings of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and its members. Surely that caused some problems in the band?
“No,” he says firmly. “John seems to love the fact that I wrote it. He’s always talking about how it was a profound influence on me writing so many songs for ‘Stadium Arcadium’. He thinks it was an unblocking process.”
Some might feel worried about putting themselves out there as openly as the book did. Not Kiedis.
“I’d be much more worried about not putting myself out there. Secrets have been the death of me in the past. It feels good to get it out, to discard it and move on.”
He’s frank about his drug use in the book too but although he now says he’s been clean for, “five years and four months,” heroin still plays on his mind.
“But being a drug addict in recovery is actually a great place to be because you’re forced to look at the rancid layers of the onion that you’ve been carrying around for a lifetime. I’m actually grateful for it.”
He could still go back to using drugs, though. “Well sure I could,” he says. “Today, I’m not interested in it though.” What he’s more interested in is starting a family. Flea has a new child and seems ecstatically happy with his wife, Frusciante is in love with his 25-year-old girlfriend, while Chad Smith and his wife have a new one-year-old baby. Kiedis has never been able to settle with a woman though.
“Well, yeah. I don’t know what that’s about,” he says. “I think kids are very impressionable and, whether you like it or not, you become impressed upon by your parents. My father was very flower to flower in his nature. Although I never wanted to be like that, sometimes you end up that way anyway. Really I want something different. I think that kind of lifestyle ends up being quite lonely in the end. Today, I feel like I’d like to get married and have a family. More so than ever. I really don’t think I was capable of being that guy until about two months ago.”
Why so?
“Because a bomb went off inside me a few months ago. I broke up with a girl that I was really into. I started really wondering why the break-up happened and I realised it was because of some of my own character defects – the feeling of wanting things you don’t have.
“The minute I started seeing how these defects of character were controlling and dominating my life, they vanished. Suddenly I didn’t think the grass was going to be greener, I didn’t feel like I wanted something that I didn’t have. I actually went back to that girl and patiently waited to see if she was willing to give it another go. Now I’m quite content to marry this girl and have a family – if that’s something she’s into as well.”
THE FIRST thing that strikes you about Chad Smith is his size. The man is immense but he’s enormously affable too. He has a slow Midwest drawl, words creep slowly from his lips as if deeply considered. Sometimes it seems he’s simply given up half way through a sentence, so planetary are the pauses between his thoughts.
He also has a reputation for being the ordinary person in the band. He doesn’t seem to mind that people always think of the band as, “three new-age weirdoes and one normal guy. I don’t mind being the guy in the back. I’m less interesting, I don’t have the drug problems…”
It means that he’s seen as the anchor – both in terms of his rhythms and as a rock for the rest of the band to cling to in times of trouble. “There’s some truth in that,” he says. “They do look to me as somewhat of a stable element. Maybe that’s just the kind of person I am. I’m just myself, I do my thing.”
He’s frank about the rift between Flea and Frusciante too. He saw the problem as competitiveness between the pair.
“When we were rehearsing, John would come in, especially after a weekend, with a lot of stuff,” he says. “I don’t know if Flea felt he had to keep up… You know that John’s always going to have a lot of stuff though. He could take a shit and write a fucking album, it’s just coming out of him all the time.”
Things are different now, he adds. The band relationship is harmonic, partly because, “we’re all a little more sensitive now, we’re more capable of correcting things when they go out of whack.”
FLEA WALKS into the room in bare feet, suit trousers and shirt. He’s tired and jetlagged but talks incredibly fast, as if plugged in at the mains. A lot of what he says could be dismissed as hippy nonsense. He talks about love, about surrendering yourself to the power of music, about the universe and about “energy”. At times it’s as if you’re listening to a new age preacher sermonising.
He warily admits, “there’s been a spirit of competition,” between him and Frusciante. “At times it’s been unhealthy but mostly it’s healthy,” he says. “During the making of ‘By The Way’ it just wasn’t a good time for the relationship between John and I. There were things about him that were bothering me and I’m sure there were things about me that were bothering him. Our creative relationship wasn’t good. It became like a constant argument.”
He says he hasn’t ever listened to ‘By The Way’ since recording it because, “there are moments I remember back to that aren’t pleasant to me.” So unpleasant, in fact, that he decided to leave the band, though he didn’t tell anyone about it.
“There were things about the creative process that I didn’t think were healthy. I could specifically go into them but I just don’t think it’s constructive and it’s kind of boring anyway. The band just didn’t feel like a comfortable place to express myself. I just felt tight and tense in the situation. All through the history of this band, no matter what was going on in my life, it was always the place for me to be myself, to express myself and to let go of everything. All of a sudden it didn’t feel like a place where I could be myself. That was really the thing that was completely unacceptable to me.”
He says that he and John talked about their problems, got things straight between them and had “conversations that were really healthy to me”. Still though, people are convinced that Frusciante wrote a great deal of ‘Stadium Arcadium’, that it’s his album. Surely those impressions must hurt?
“No, God no. People can say what they want,” says Flea. “It’s not John’s record, that’s not true. I love John. He’s my favourite musician on earth, my brother, my friend and I love him but this is not John’s record, it’s all of ours.”
I try to ask him how far the relationship between him and Frusciante has improved, whether he feels more creative in the band. It’s not a question he wants to hear. Suddenly he’s ranting. He’s shouting that Frusciante’s opinion has never been more valid than his. “My opinion is as important as anyone’s,” he says as his eyes widen and water.
Then he explodes. “If you really want to fucking get into, I think it’s fucking silly and you’re kind of pissing me off right now. This is fucking bullshit and you fucking English people always do this fucking bullshit. Shut the fuck up, fuck you.”
And then he hurls the bottle of water at my head and storms out, scattering insults in his wake.
MINUTES LATER, he’s back, still screaming. He’s upset that he thought our conversation was concentrating on the negative side of his relationship with Frusciante.
“I opened myself up about the tensions between John and I because we had gone through this process which was hard,” he says, beginning to calm down. “The working through of that process was a very liberating feeling for both of us. It was really tense between John and I but then it got better and there was this incredible sense of release. It’s like exhaling and inhaling. It feels like a rebirth, like the beginning of the band again. That kind of feeling is the best feeling in the world.”
It’s hard to talk about anything else but Frusciante now. Certainly Flea doesn’t seem to want to. In fact, the only other thing he talks about is his anger. “It’s always been part of who I am, especially when I was younger. I had a fucking rage in me that was unbelievable,” he says. He talks about jazz for a few minutes then stops.
“Did I scare you when I got mad? Did you think I was going to smack you or something? I’m sorry if I scared you. I’ve never hit anyone in my life. I never would hit anyone. You might have hit me back really hard. I apologise if I scared you.”
We leave the room together, travelling in the hotel lift up to where the photo-shoot will take place. He apologises to me again, leaning over and hugging me tightly.
It seems this is a recurrent theme in both Flea’s and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ existence at the moment – arguments and reconciliation.
“That’s the give and go of life,” he says. “You’ve got to love the dark side as well as the light side.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
“Cocksucker! You can suck my fucking dick, Limey bitch.”
He’s just hurled a bottle of water at my head. It narrowly missed and exploded against the wall, careering into a bowl of fruit.
“This is fucking bullshit,” he shouts as I try to speak. “Shut the fuck up! Fuck you!”
Then he stomps out of the room, slamming the door. Outside in the corridor he’s still shouting, “Fuck him, fuck him”.
I’ve just asked him if he’s hurt that people are already calling the Chili’s new double album “John’s album”. It would seem a reasonable question. The album, ‘Stadium Arcadium’, comes stamped with John Frusciante’s screaming guitars all over it and, from an outsider’s perspective, it would seem that he’s taken a certain amount of control.
There have also been stories that Frusciante and Flea have fallen out, that Flea wanted to leave the band and that the image of the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a band of brothers was, in fact, untrue.
Before his tantrum, Flea has hardly poured water on these claims, saying that Frusciante, “thought his opinion was more important than mine. His opinion has never been more important than mine, it’s not more important than mine and whenever he thought it was, he was wrong every time.”
Meanwhile, in separate interviews, the band’s singer Anthony Kiedis said, “Whoever said a band was supposed to this perfectly functioning unit? We’re dysfunctional.” Drummer Chad Smith added, “There has always been a creative power-struggle. John’s kind of the catalyst in the band. Flea probably felt he had to be on his toes.” While John Frusciante said, “Ever since I joined this band, it’s been bandied about that we’re a four-man gang, that we love each other and that we’re a tight unit. It’s never been that way.”
What on earth has been happening to the world’s biggest rock band?
THE RED Hot Chili Peppers prefer to be interviewed individually. John Frusciante is the first to walk into the room. He looks a little lost, confused almost, and his hair is long, dishevelled and still wet from the shower. He looks anywhere but your in your eyes when he’s talking to you, his sentences rolling on interminably until you’re forced to interrupt him.
Since joining the band as a 17-year-old in 1988, he’s had turbulent history. He says his childhood revolved around, “being alone and practising the guitar. When I was around people I was usually pretending, putting on a show. I would put on a mask.”
He also found success hard. When the album ‘BloodSugarSexMagik’ made the Red Hot Chili Peppers superstars, they all embraced it except Frusciante.
“I didn’t know how to be successful,” he says. “It was very rare that it meant anything to me if someone complimented me. I gradually started having very little concern for the rest of the band’s feelings. I just cared about my own life. I really didn’t care how that fitted with them. They weren’t any more considerate of me either.”
So he left the band while they were on tour in Japan in 1992 and dedicated himself to painting, playing guitar and trying to be, “as creative and beautiful as possible.” Mostly, though, he shot heroin.
The evidence of those years is still with him today. When he rolls back his shirt sleeves, his pockmarked, burnt forearm is revealed – the result of setting himself on fire while freebasing. Perhaps surprisingly, he doesn’t regret the six years he spent doing drugs away from the band.
“People think that was a dark period,” he says. “I don’t look at it like that. That was the period that I learned, when I got my mind straight about everything that I needed to know. I really value that period of time.”
He’s aware that drugs still hold a strong power over his life, that there’s chance he’ll revert to his old ways. “Yes, it’s a possibility but it’s one that I won’t succumb to. I have an addictive part of me and a disciplined part of me. I just have to make the disciplined side stronger.”
Ask him when was the last time he took drugs and he says, “I’m not going to talk about it.”
It’s music that truly motivates him now. Since rejoining the band in 1998 this is what he’s immersed himself in, this is his life, and this might be the only thing he truly understands. “Now I’m into Jimi Hendrix, Tony Iommi, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton,” he says of his inspirations for ‘Stadium Arcadium’.
It’s an album that howls, shrieks and judders with his guitar. Was it his album?
“It was like that on ‘By The Way’,” he admits. “It’s more of a band now. I don’t force my ideas on people as much as I did then. I care more about what everybody thinks now.”
There were major problems between him and Flea during the recording of the last album. He says that the pair have always been competitive, “But in a healthy way. On ‘By The Way’ that competitiveness turned into a bad vibe. I knew it was a bad vibe but I didn’t care. I was not being honest enough with myself and I wasn’t looking at what I was doing wrong. I didn’t put any pressure on myself to change. I felt I was perfectly in the right and following my artistic path. Something comes out in music when everyone feels free and the band is a true democracy. That’s something I’d lost sight of.”
This realisation seems to have sparked a new sense of unity in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “This is the best we’ve ever gotten along. This is the most we’ve been on the same page,” he says before our time draws to a close.
ANTHONY KIEDIS is looking sharp in a three-piece suit. His hair is long again, a curl hanging down over his left eye. Less tall than you might think, there is nonetheless something intimidating about him. He surveys you with a suspicious look, one that’s both guarded and in control.
He starts by rambling about the new album, about how proud of it he is, how he felt so fulfilled as they were writing each of the 38 songs that they whittled down into the 28 that are on the album. Kiedis’s lyrics, according to Flea were so “meaningful with great melodies. He did incredibly.”
“I work off the music that’s created by my band,” he shrugs. “They give me a great wall of sound to draw from in terms of lyrical ideas, melodic ideas, textural ideas and rhythmic ideas.”
He’s cagey about his inspirations though. Ask him if his lyrics came from a certain amount of self-examination and he replies, “I don’t know. I’ve never been a very accurate self-analyst.”
He also refuses to be drawn too far into talking about the problems between Flea and Frusciante. “Well it wasn’t that I didn’t notice the friction,” he says. “But I had no idea Flea was feeling so creatively stymied. After ‘By The Way’ there was a certain amount of disconnected behaviour but not to the point of death. Sometimes people just go their own ways for a while.”
Flea has recently admitted that he wanted to leave the band during that period, something he didn’t confide to his longest friend, Kiedis, until recently.
“I was actually glad he hadn’t told me,” says Kiedis. “Sometimes things like that are a personal struggle. If he had told me when he was going through it, it probably would just have freaked me out.”
His unwillingness to talk too frankly makes him sound like a man who plays his cards close to his chest. That’s not necessarily so. In 2004 he published his autobiography ‘Scar Tissue’. In that book he talked in great detail about his drug use, his relationship with his drug-dealing, womanising father and about his own relationships. He also revealed a lot about the workings of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and its members. Surely that caused some problems in the band?
“No,” he says firmly. “John seems to love the fact that I wrote it. He’s always talking about how it was a profound influence on me writing so many songs for ‘Stadium Arcadium’. He thinks it was an unblocking process.”
Some might feel worried about putting themselves out there as openly as the book did. Not Kiedis.
“I’d be much more worried about not putting myself out there. Secrets have been the death of me in the past. It feels good to get it out, to discard it and move on.”
He’s frank about his drug use in the book too but although he now says he’s been clean for, “five years and four months,” heroin still plays on his mind.
“But being a drug addict in recovery is actually a great place to be because you’re forced to look at the rancid layers of the onion that you’ve been carrying around for a lifetime. I’m actually grateful for it.”
He could still go back to using drugs, though. “Well sure I could,” he says. “Today, I’m not interested in it though.” What he’s more interested in is starting a family. Flea has a new child and seems ecstatically happy with his wife, Frusciante is in love with his 25-year-old girlfriend, while Chad Smith and his wife have a new one-year-old baby. Kiedis has never been able to settle with a woman though.
“Well, yeah. I don’t know what that’s about,” he says. “I think kids are very impressionable and, whether you like it or not, you become impressed upon by your parents. My father was very flower to flower in his nature. Although I never wanted to be like that, sometimes you end up that way anyway. Really I want something different. I think that kind of lifestyle ends up being quite lonely in the end. Today, I feel like I’d like to get married and have a family. More so than ever. I really don’t think I was capable of being that guy until about two months ago.”
Why so?
“Because a bomb went off inside me a few months ago. I broke up with a girl that I was really into. I started really wondering why the break-up happened and I realised it was because of some of my own character defects – the feeling of wanting things you don’t have.
“The minute I started seeing how these defects of character were controlling and dominating my life, they vanished. Suddenly I didn’t think the grass was going to be greener, I didn’t feel like I wanted something that I didn’t have. I actually went back to that girl and patiently waited to see if she was willing to give it another go. Now I’m quite content to marry this girl and have a family – if that’s something she’s into as well.”
THE FIRST thing that strikes you about Chad Smith is his size. The man is immense but he’s enormously affable too. He has a slow Midwest drawl, words creep slowly from his lips as if deeply considered. Sometimes it seems he’s simply given up half way through a sentence, so planetary are the pauses between his thoughts.
He also has a reputation for being the ordinary person in the band. He doesn’t seem to mind that people always think of the band as, “three new-age weirdoes and one normal guy. I don’t mind being the guy in the back. I’m less interesting, I don’t have the drug problems…”
It means that he’s seen as the anchor – both in terms of his rhythms and as a rock for the rest of the band to cling to in times of trouble. “There’s some truth in that,” he says. “They do look to me as somewhat of a stable element. Maybe that’s just the kind of person I am. I’m just myself, I do my thing.”
He’s frank about the rift between Flea and Frusciante too. He saw the problem as competitiveness between the pair.
“When we were rehearsing, John would come in, especially after a weekend, with a lot of stuff,” he says. “I don’t know if Flea felt he had to keep up… You know that John’s always going to have a lot of stuff though. He could take a shit and write a fucking album, it’s just coming out of him all the time.”
Things are different now, he adds. The band relationship is harmonic, partly because, “we’re all a little more sensitive now, we’re more capable of correcting things when they go out of whack.”
FLEA WALKS into the room in bare feet, suit trousers and shirt. He’s tired and jetlagged but talks incredibly fast, as if plugged in at the mains. A lot of what he says could be dismissed as hippy nonsense. He talks about love, about surrendering yourself to the power of music, about the universe and about “energy”. At times it’s as if you’re listening to a new age preacher sermonising.
He warily admits, “there’s been a spirit of competition,” between him and Frusciante. “At times it’s been unhealthy but mostly it’s healthy,” he says. “During the making of ‘By The Way’ it just wasn’t a good time for the relationship between John and I. There were things about him that were bothering me and I’m sure there were things about me that were bothering him. Our creative relationship wasn’t good. It became like a constant argument.”
He says he hasn’t ever listened to ‘By The Way’ since recording it because, “there are moments I remember back to that aren’t pleasant to me.” So unpleasant, in fact, that he decided to leave the band, though he didn’t tell anyone about it.
“There were things about the creative process that I didn’t think were healthy. I could specifically go into them but I just don’t think it’s constructive and it’s kind of boring anyway. The band just didn’t feel like a comfortable place to express myself. I just felt tight and tense in the situation. All through the history of this band, no matter what was going on in my life, it was always the place for me to be myself, to express myself and to let go of everything. All of a sudden it didn’t feel like a place where I could be myself. That was really the thing that was completely unacceptable to me.”
He says that he and John talked about their problems, got things straight between them and had “conversations that were really healthy to me”. Still though, people are convinced that Frusciante wrote a great deal of ‘Stadium Arcadium’, that it’s his album. Surely those impressions must hurt?
“No, God no. People can say what they want,” says Flea. “It’s not John’s record, that’s not true. I love John. He’s my favourite musician on earth, my brother, my friend and I love him but this is not John’s record, it’s all of ours.”
I try to ask him how far the relationship between him and Frusciante has improved, whether he feels more creative in the band. It’s not a question he wants to hear. Suddenly he’s ranting. He’s shouting that Frusciante’s opinion has never been more valid than his. “My opinion is as important as anyone’s,” he says as his eyes widen and water.
Then he explodes. “If you really want to fucking get into, I think it’s fucking silly and you’re kind of pissing me off right now. This is fucking bullshit and you fucking English people always do this fucking bullshit. Shut the fuck up, fuck you.”
And then he hurls the bottle of water at my head and storms out, scattering insults in his wake.
MINUTES LATER, he’s back, still screaming. He’s upset that he thought our conversation was concentrating on the negative side of his relationship with Frusciante.
“I opened myself up about the tensions between John and I because we had gone through this process which was hard,” he says, beginning to calm down. “The working through of that process was a very liberating feeling for both of us. It was really tense between John and I but then it got better and there was this incredible sense of release. It’s like exhaling and inhaling. It feels like a rebirth, like the beginning of the band again. That kind of feeling is the best feeling in the world.”
It’s hard to talk about anything else but Frusciante now. Certainly Flea doesn’t seem to want to. In fact, the only other thing he talks about is his anger. “It’s always been part of who I am, especially when I was younger. I had a fucking rage in me that was unbelievable,” he says. He talks about jazz for a few minutes then stops.
“Did I scare you when I got mad? Did you think I was going to smack you or something? I’m sorry if I scared you. I’ve never hit anyone in my life. I never would hit anyone. You might have hit me back really hard. I apologise if I scared you.”
We leave the room together, travelling in the hotel lift up to where the photo-shoot will take place. He apologises to me again, leaning over and hugging me tightly.
It seems this is a recurrent theme in both Flea’s and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ existence at the moment – arguments and reconciliation.
“That’s the give and go of life,” he says. “You’ve got to love the dark side as well as the light side.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
