Scar Tissue (41 page)
I don’t feel like I started thinking of myself any differently while this was happening; if anything, I was thinking of myself in a worse light, because I’d lost an important connection in my life with John. I began realizing that I’d been carrying on as a control freak, wanting to have everything go according to my plans, which turned out to be the biggest pain in the ass ever. I used to think that everything would be great if Flea just behaved this way and John did what I wanted him to do, and that was probably the biggest mistake I made during that time, thinking that I knew better or had a plan, and if everyone followed it, things would be peachy. That was a recipe for misery and ruin. Once I recognized all that, the brotherhood of our band had once more been compromised beyond repair.
We hit Japan in early May 1992. It’s strange, because John thought that we had worked out our differences by then, but I still felt that we weren’t close. He was still in his cocoon with Toni. And he was again exhibiting some strange behavior. The night before our Tokyo gig, John was in the lobby of our hotel with Louie, and he became convinced that he had exposed himself to some female autograph seekers and that he was in imminent danger of getting arrested and deported.
There was a distinctly erratic, unpredictable vibe happening around John. He was smoked out of his mind, and also hitting the wine in such a way that he didn’t strike me as being typically drunk. I don’t know if it was a combination of the wine and the pot, but it seemed like he was drinking psycho juice rather than just wine. There was the typical dopey, daffy, wobbly, slurry normal drunk behavior, but there was also this weird PCP-like drunk going on, like he was in a different space.
The next morning John traveled to the venue with the crew. Lindy and Flea and Chad and I came on a later train, and when we got to the arena, Mark Johnson told us that John had quit the band and he wanted to go home immediately. Mind you, we were slated to go to Australia after Japan, and it would be our first Australian tour ever. This was incredibly important to us, because it was a land that we loved, it was the birthplace of Flea, it was the new land of milk and honey and sunshine and girls, just a magical place. So there was panic in Lindy’s eyes and in Flea’s and my hearts. We had to talk to John right away, even though the final die had been cast.
We went back into the room where John was holed up.
“I have to leave the band, I have to quit. I have to go home right away, I can’t do this anymore,” he told me. “I will die if I don’t get out of this band right away.”
I saw the look in his eyes, and I knew there was no other choice. There was no point in even trying to talk him into staying. A huge sense of relief came over me. The last thing in the world that I ever would want to happen was happening, but thank God he was walking away, because as much as this was going to hurt, the relief of not having to deal with the drama on a day-to-day basis would be greater than the self-imposed pain and suffering.
Lindy was concerned with the sold-out venue. Finally, we got John to agree to play the show before he got on a plane to go home. It was the most horrible show ever. Every single note, every single word, hurt, knowing that we were no longer a band. I kept looking over at John and seeing this dead statue of disdain. In some ways, I wish we would have canceled the show and returned everyone’s money rather than have them witness this display of twisted energy. And that night John disappeared from the topsy-turvy world of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
While
we were still in Japan, we came up with a plan. We would go on to Australia, where we’d meet up with our friend Zander Schloss, who was going to take John’s place. Zander was a talented guitar player who could read and write music, a quick study with a zany, soulful, comic sensibility. We had seven days to teach him enough songs to rock out Australia.
Zander met us in Sydney, and we started intensive two-a-day rehearsals. But after four days, it was clear to Flea and me that this wasn’t happening. Zander was playing the songs, but it didn’t feel like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. At that point, we decided we’d rather cancel the dates than present a half-assed version of ourselves.
When we told Zander, he was devastated. You’d have thought he was in the band for four years instead of four days. “Oh my God, I just went from having the richest, most incredible future to not only being where I started from but being eight thousand miles from home,” Zander said. “Am I going to get a ticket back?”
We assured him we weren’t going to strand him, and we all stayed in Australia for a few more days and enjoyed the gorgeous weather and the beautiful girls.
I was friendly with Greer Gavorko, a New Zealander who was one of our crew members. When he showed me pictures from a recent trip he’d taken to Thailand, I thought, “I’m in Australia, which is nowhere near Hollywood. I have no idea what’s going to happen with my future, because we’re now limping through life as a band. My left nut, in the person of John Frusciante, has just departed my testicle sack. So why don’t I just go to Thailand by myself?”
Greer recommended some islands in the Gulf of Siam. So I flew to Bangkok, stayed the night in a hotel airport, and then flew to the south and got on a boat to Ko Samui. It was a beautiful island, and the weather was incredible, but the place was teeming with Eurotrash party animals. It was coke, bad music, and half-naked beautiful women all high on Ecstasy. I hadn’t come to Thailand to immerse myself in a techno-fantasy world, so I traveled to the next island, Ko Pha Ngan. It was a little more laid-back and beautiful, but I was still discontented, so I got a recommendation from some Thai natives to go to Ko Tao, a small island with no hotels.
Ko Tao was exactly what I had been dreaming of. I rented a little house from a Thai family and stayed for a week, going scuba diving every day. I left the island feeling recharged and cleansed, and more prepared to deal with John being gone. As soon as I got back, Flea and I went to the drawing board. We were familiar with an L.A. band called Marshall Law, which consisted of two brothers, Lonnie Marshall on bass and Arik Marshall on guitar. Both of these guys were funky, freaky oddball prodigies on their instruments. They were from South Central, and they were half black and half Jewish, the old Blewish thing. I had seen them a number of times, and Arik’s guitar playing, especially, had blown me away. It was funky but also hard-rocking and inventive.
We auditioned a few other people, including this guy called Buckethead, who would play his whole set with a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head while encased in a chicken coop. When Arik jammed with us, it was fun and inspiring, so we ended up hiring him, and he was thrust into the insanity of our world. Even though we had just lost John, who was such a fundamental element of our huge success with
Blood Sugar,
the promoters and MTV and the whole music industry didn’t perceive us as being finished, because nothing was stopping. We were offered to headline Lollapalooza, the biggest tour in America that summer. Lindy had booked some huge European festivals for us in June as well.
Luckily for us, Arik was an incredibly fast study. He could hear a song on the radio and, within sixty seconds, play it with the same vibe and spirit of the original. But going to Belgium a few weeks into his tenure in the Chili Peppers before seventy thousand people was truly a baptism by fire. He was petrified. Arik had hardly ever left L.A. County, and now he was in an exotic country in Northern Europe where they speak three languages.
Arik was extremely introverted, so he dealt with all this pressure by sleeping. The motherfucker would sleep all day and all night, then get in the van on the way to the show and sleep some more. But he never let us down in concert. He just stood up there and played his ass off.
Headlining Lollapalooza was a pretty big-ass deal for us. It was the second year of that festival, and the idea of traveling across the country with a bunch of like-minded maniacs appealed to us. Anytime you’re part of a festival, the pressure is cut in half. Even if you’re the headliner, you don’t have to carry the weight of the whole show. Since this was a tough time in the life of our band, thank God the shows were not all about us. Plus, you get to meet some interesting performers whom you might never encounter if not for this. I was never a fan of Ministry, but they wound up blowing me away every night. I didn’t know how they could be so fucked up on booze and heroin and coke and whippets and go out there and crush it.
After a few shows into the tour, everybody started jamming with everybody else. Ice Cube was rocking the house, and Flea and I used to go onstage for a song. We danced, happy to be part of his flag-waving posse. Then he joined us on “Higher Ground.” Eddie Vedder, who was there with Pearl Jam, would sing backup for Soundgarden, but in keeping with his humble-servant-of-music attitude, he’d stand way off by the back of the stage. Chad played drums on one of Ministry’s songs. The whole show was a lovefest except for the Jesus and Mary Chain, this British group, who were just bitter. They’d polish off a giant bottle of booze by two in the afternoon and curse and put everyone down. One time they went too far with the guys from Ice Cube’s band, and they got themselves a beating.
I bonded with these giant gangster Samoans called the Boo-Yaa Tribe, who were playing on the secondary stage. I was enthralled, listening to their stories of gang warfare in East L.A. They told me that their friends would get shot and not even know it because they were so big, so they’d walk around for a couple of days with bullets in them. By the end of the tour, I got one of the Boo-Yaa guys to come onstage during “Higher Ground,” and he put out his arm, picked me up, and perched me on his forearm. I rocked the whole song sitting like a puppet on his arm.
We added some special elements for our Lollapalooza shows. We built a giant psychedelic
Twilight Zone
–looking spiraling wheel that we placed in the center of the stage for hypnotic purposes. But the ultimate touch was the fire helmets that we wore for our encore. Whenever I think of performing, fire comes to my mind—it’s such a visual thing, and it goes so well with music. I wasn’t thinking in the grand pyrotechnical arena of bands like Kiss or the Who. I just thought it would be great if we wore helmets that belched fire. So we went to a prop designer Lindy knew, and he came up with a silver construction helmet that had a spigot sticking out of the top and a tube that ran from the spigot to a can of propane housed on a waist belt. We each had a valve at our side so we could control the intensity of the flame.
But when you’re dealing with fire and a delivery system, there are bound to be some screwups. We’d be able to spew out a good three-foot plume of fire, but on some nights, someone wouldn’t hit the valve right, or the propane can would be nearly empty, and there’d be three guys with raging volcano heads and one guy with a three-inch Bic lighter coming out of his head, only he had no idea his flame was so small. It was very emasculating. Flame envy.
At several venues, fire marshals tried to stop the show. Lindy used to have to carry extra cash, and when the marshal told him that we could be fined if we lit up those helmets, Lindy pulled out his wad and asked, “How much?” In another city, the fire marshals required our roadies to wear firemen’s outfits, complete with helmets, when they lit us up. Mark Johnson, our tour manager, was, in some ways, the original Homer Simpson, so just imagine Homer with a full fire-retardant outfit trying to get it together to turn the right knobs and light the fire. It’s amazing we got through that tour alive.
In September 1992 we played the MTV awards show and picked up two awards for the “Give It Away” video and the viewer’s choice award for “Under the Bridge.” It must have been awkward for Arik to be onstage accepting awards for work that John had done. We were full of ourselves and obnoxious and loud that night. When we went up to get the breakthrough video award for “Give It Away,” Flea simulated masturbation. I had a list of thirty people I wanted to thank: artists, musicians, filmmakers, scholars—and Satan. Back in Florida, my grandmother, who was a devout Christian, didn’t realize I was joking around and disowned me. A little while later, I asked my mom why I never got any letters anymore from Grandma Kiedis, and she said, “She thinks you’re in league with Satan.” I had to write Granny a postcard on her eightieth birthday, explaining that I wasn’t really a Satanist.
That fall we traveled to Australia and New Zealand to make up the dates we had canceled. Even though we weren’t on an arena level yet, since this was the first time we’d ever played there, the audiences were amazingly responsive. As soon as we set foot in New Zealand, I fell in love with the place. It seemed like a home away from home. There was more plant life than I’d ever seen, and towering majestic mountains and very few people. After our shows, everyone raced back home, but I decided to stay and explore the country.
I got a room in a cool art deco hotel in downtown Auckland and hung out with Greer, who was a native Kiwi. One night we were playing pool when a longhaired brunette goddess out of a Kiwi fairy tale walked into the room. She stood at the bar and watched me, and I got up the courage to approach her.
“What are you doing here?” I said, since she was out of place in the seedy bar.
“I came to find you,” she explained. “I heard you were in town, and I’ve come to get you.”
Julie got me, all right. We spent the rest of my stay together. We took a trip to the Rotorua, and checked out the giant hot mineral lakes and the mud pits. We broke into a national park and made love at the edge of a mud pit that was a big bubbling cauldron of steam and mud. On November 1, we celebrated my thirtieth birthday at the seaside home of Mr. and Mrs. Murdoch, who owned Warner Bros. records in New Zealand. They organized a beautiful picnic on the beach for me. It was a bittersweet milestone. I was far from home, surrounded by relative strangers. The band was doing great, but it also was not right. Ever since John left, we had kept forging on without stopping to look at the lack of perfection, just moving forward to try to keep it alive.