The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Guide to L.A.

The Farmers Market

6333 West Third Street

(“on the corner of Fairfax and 3rd”)

Anthony Kiedis: “It’s got fruit, vegetables, flowers, doughnuts, pizza and ice cream and all these different shop—and there’s a great Cajun restaurant there where I get a nice piece of catfish. I used to go in there and sit out in the sun and have a piece of catfish and watch the world go by. There’d be a lot of cute girls passing through.”

The Power House “On Hollywood and Highland Boulevard”

Chad Smith: “It’s a dive bar. They’re good people in there, nobody bothers you. There’s a good jukebox and a pinball machine.”

Chateau Marmont Hotel

8221 Sunset Boulevard

John Frusciante: “I’ve had a lot of experiences at that hotel (Frusciante nearly died there in 1997). It’s not all bad. I like that place and that’s why I was living there the whole time we were making By the Way.”

The Viper Room

8852 Sunset Boulevard

Chad Smith on Metal Shop nights: “There’s a brand that plays ‘80s heavy metal and make fun of it. Me and Steve Tyler from Aerosmith got up and did ‘Walk This Way’ with them. You never know who’ll be there.”

Wattles Garden Park

1850 N Curzon Avenue

Anthony Kiedis: “It’s a great place. It pours out of the Hollywood Hills, covered with palm trees and grass and trails.”

Q’s suggestion that he is the least trouble Chili Pepper prompts an explosive roar of laughter. “It’s all smoke and mirrors my friend. I’m the worst, heheheh! But, yeah, maybe it’s part of my role in the band, being the drummer. I like the other guys to feel like they can always count on me. But, you know, there’s dark places.”

Smith is a father five times over and has been married twice. Contrary to rumor, Chad didn't travel on a separate tour bus; he laughed at reports that he’s nicknamed the others’ vehicle “the tofu bus.”

“We hang, not as much as we used to, but it’s not a substance thing,” he said in 2002. “I don’t feel I have to go to yoga meditation class with Flea to feel connected. I’m not really at that point yet. I’m getting there, though.”

What are your interests outside music?

“I like to ride motorcycles. I like to scuba dive…. My favorite color is red.”

For Kiedis’ interview with Q, he dug into a bowl of black bean soup at a favorite vegan restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard. Between the ages of 6 and 11, Kiedis lived in Michigan. He has spent the rest of his life in this city. His father Blackie Dammett was an actor and, when he was 14, Anthony appeared in a couple of films under the name Cole Dammett. But his role in 1978’s F.I.S.T.—as Sylvester Stallone’s son—was something of a disappointment. “I had one line. It was, ‘Pass the milk.’ And I think you can just see my arm in the frame as I say it.”

When Kiedis devoted himself to music instead, he was determined not to let it fail, even when Hillel Slovak and drummer Jack Irons left to join another band before they’d even recorded their first album. “I was left there sobbing, thinking, ‘Well, there goes my plan to conquer the world.’ But six hours later we regrouped and said, ‘OK, we can’t let this die now.’”

Kiedis has shown similar resolve at several crunch times since, but his iron will leaves little space for frivolity. He sat bolt upright, hands clasped together on the table like a guest on Newsnight He was slow to smile but, like Bruce Willis, he has the kind of mouth that takes little prompting to twist into a mirthless smirk if he dislikes a question. He laughed twice in an hour.

Several of the lyrics on By the Way suggest a sunny optimism quite at odds with Kiedis’s mood. He split from his girlfriend while he was recording the songs she inspired. “Those feelings are still there,” he said at the time. “If anything, you get that extra dimension of sadness that makes it even more meaningful and satisfying to sing.”

So what happened?

“I was ready to go all the way and she wasn’t really into having a family and she got on this career path and we just wanted different things. It’s not like we ever really fell out of love.”

He changed the subject to the quality of his soup. Unlike his bandmates, Kiedis has little taste for self-analysis. He batted back several questions about the future or his motivations with a curt, “I don’t really think bout that,” or smothered them in dippy Californian gush. When he’s in a funk, so to speak, he prefers to go on an adventure. In the past he’s dealt with bad times by trekking in Borneo and India.

“I constantly have a degree of wanderlust,” he said. “I just like to go and see new places and be in nature. I’ve gotten a lot more out of the ocean than I have out of a shrink.”

Another area Kiedis would rather not examine too deeply is his own history of heroin use. When Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in April 2002, he could, “definitely relate. It makes me think, There but for the grace of God go I, or most of my friends.”

He refused to discuss his rehab method because he’s concerned that if he relapses people will infer that the process is faulty. However, he didn't ban drugs in his touring party, as Aerosmith famously did, and refused to preach. Did he share Frusciante’s confidence then?

“I worry about myself a little more. You know, there are times when I’m tempted just to f**k it all. But I don’t. There was a time when I thought I would live and die sober without any question but, y’know, a couple of setbacks and it sort of f**ked with my thinking about that.”

Life outside the Red Hot Chili Peppers is something he doesn’t really think about, as if the mere thought might jinx them, and he never dreams of a quieter life. He enjoys a degree of fame, which has never become overwhelming, but could he handle not being famous one day?

“It’s too late for that. I think all you have to do is be in the public eye for 10 years and you’ve sort of sealed your fate.”

You’ll be the guy who used to sing that song…

“Yeah. Remember that guy? You shoulda seen him in his day.”

“Who would have thought that Californication, 18 years into our career as a rock band, would have been our biggest album?” pondered Kiedis in 2002. “With this album we had so much stuff. We never felt we were hitting writer’s block or feeling the pressure in any way. Nobody talked about sales and there’s nobody punching cards when it comes to working. We do it all in our own time.”

Life is good then for the Chili Peppers?

“Barring some unforeseen meteorite coming through our path, we’ll be alright for a while.”

20 years after the release of By the Way, the band is still performing and had their most successful year of touring ever, when they earned above $200 million gross. The founding members just turned 60, and Smith, now 61, joked that they traded groupies for “tech support and physical trainers.”

But as Flea put it in a recent interview, surviving this long “takes diligence, it takes sacrifice. We work, we write, we never stop. This is our purpose. We're humble, we're students, we care, we want to grow, we want to learn.”

— e article rst appeared in Q; Q is a sister publication to GRAZIA USA.

The Year The Lp Came Of Age

The albums released 50 years ago were unprecedented for their quality and diversity… but the influence of one man in particular was to change the musical landscape forever

IBY NICK HARDING

n 1972, a 25-year-old David Bowie announced his intention to rewrite the rock ‘n’ roll rulebook.

and I

“Myself and my mates and I guess a certain contingent of the musicians in London at the beginning of the ‘70s were fed up with denim and the hippies. And I think we kind of wanted to go somewhere else,” he later explained. “And some of us… kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we’d better do something postmodernist—quickly, before somebody else did.”

The result was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars—a dazzling, dramatic, decadent and deeply sexy 38 minutes and 29 seconds that Bowie described as “about what rock music was and could become.”

If Ziggy Stardust is now lauded as a landmark moment for music, an apotheosis of its creator’s genius as a songwriter, performer and conceptual artist, it also—perhaps even more extraordinarily—represents just a small part of the story of the year of its release.

Ziggy Stardust landed on June 16, 1972—almost exactly the midpoint of the year. It came at a significant moment in the history of rock, midway between 1967’s Summer of Love and 1977’s so-called “Summer of Hate,” when punk would not only once again rewrite the rulebook, but rip it up, set fire to it, and spit on the ashes. And David Bowie was not the only musician eager to “go somewhere else” just then—a whole range of artists released albums that year that would redefine what popular music could be… and that would set in place a process of evolution and innovation that continues to resonate today.

By the time Ziggy Stardust was released, the year had already seen a bumper haul of landmark albums—and across a wide range of genres. As early as February, Neil Young had unveiled what for many remains his defining masterpiece—and officially the biggest-selling LP of the year—Harvest, and through the spring, the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach, Little Feat’s Sailin’ Shoes and Young’s former bandmate Stephen Stills’ Manassas had reinforced Young’s idea that the blues-influenced country rock of the late ‘60s could blossom into a more sophisticated genre in its own right. Meanwhile, Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything? had attracted huge acclaim for its polished take on commercial pop, and at the other end of the scale, Deep Purple’s Machine Head and Alice Cooper’s School’s Out were rocking harder and nastier than ever before.

But just one month before Ziggy Stardust, there came two other albums that were to set a new standard—not only for the artists who created them, but for what an LP could mean in its own right. Elton John’s Honky Chateau, released on May 19, made a megastar of the pianist as the first of a run of six LPs to reach Number 1 in the US Billboard Charts. It is also notable for only containing one major hit, the (admittedly world-conquering) “Rocket Man.” Suddenly, the idea of an album being little more than a collection of singles plus a few filler tracks no longer applied.

This idea was taken to even greater heights by the Rolling Stones, who released Exile on Main St. on May 12. Despite clocking in at a lengthy 67 minutes, the double-album contained only one radio-friendly single, “Tumbling Dice”… and yet topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and remains for many the quintessential Stones record.

Keith Richards later summed up the idea of an album being allowed to exist as a commercial and critical entity on its own merits. “We didn't start off intending to make a double album; we just went down to the south of France to make an album and by the time we'd finished we said, ‘We want to put it all out,’” he explained. “The point is that the Stones had reached a point where we no longer had to do what we were told to do… we'd done our time, things were changing and I was no longer interested in hitting Number One in the charts every time. What I want to do is good s**t—if it's good they'll get it some time down the road."

If the 1960s were about the thrill of the seven-inch single, the simple perfection of a three-minute pop song, then by 1972 the long-player had become king, as musicians sought to stretch their artistic wings into creating something more sophisticated.

Albums by Pink Floyd, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep and Yes released in 1972 all heralded the rise of prog rock as a genre that could appeal to musical sophisticates and record-buying teenagers alike (in Pink Floyd’s case to unprecedented heights with the release of Dark Side of the Moon the following year), while further releases by artists as diverse as Steely Dan (Can’t Buy a Thrill), Rod Stewart (beginning his transition from scruffy Faces rocker to million-selling megastar with Never a Dull Moment) and Stevie Wonder’s sublime Talking Book only served to highlight the range and ambition of the album charts through the year.

But if 1972 could credibly stand as the year the LP came of age, its lasting legacy remains with the creator of Ziggy Stardust

In November, former Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed released Transformer, his second solo album, after his self-titled debut (released at the beginning of the year) had failed to make any impact. It came at a difficult time for Reed—although the Velvet Underground had been lauded in industry circles, they had never enjoyed commercial success. Amongst his fans, however, were David Bowie and Spiders from Mars guitarist Mick Ronson, who acted as producers for Transformer

The result? Not only one of the greatest albums of 1972, or of the 1970s, but arguably, of all time. With Bowie pulling the strings in the studio, Transformer’s sleazy, romantic, dangerous, beautiful vision became a huge hit—and lead single “Walk on the Wild Side” transformed Reed almost overnight from cult artist to international superstar.

The legacy of 1972 as a landmark year for the LP does not only stand with the quality of the albums released that year. Listening to Harvest, or Honky Chateau, or Exile on Main St., or Talking Book, remain sublime experiences… but the real significance in what happened 50 years ago lies with two releases especially. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in June, and Transformer five months later, not only rewrote the rock ‘n’ roll rulebook—they set the template for every band who has attempted the same since.

BOB DYLAN

Our

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