Me and My Friends #58 - A Hot Minute: Melancholy Mechanics
If I'm counting them correctly, there are five spoken word moments in the Chili Peppers discography, all arriving at a steady rate of once a decade. Some of these are a little more easily defined than others, but they all occupy a specific category that doesn't appear that often in Anthony's vocal work.
They are:
the recent intermission sections of "In the Snow" (which could be a letter all on their own and are one of the high points for me in a pretty middling album).
the verse parts of 2012's "Open/Close" - which I get are the outlier in this list, but if they're not spoken-word, they're at least spoken-word-ish, just presented in a more conversational tone.
Anthony's 2006 epic, the era-closing outro to "Death of a Martian," which could have easily been the last moment on the band's final album, and would have fit perfectly.
the comedic lamentation in the final minute of 1995's "Melancholy Mechanics"
And then there's the O.G.: the rap breakdown in 1987's "Backwoods": Hit sipping a bottle of nickel ripple, play the lickity split finger lickin’ licks for all you wicked city slick chicks rolls around in my head on a permanent basis.
("Deep Kick" doesn't count here. Flea wrote that, and this is a letter about Anthony.)
I love each of these little poetry showcases, a chance for Anthony to stretch a muscle that he doesn't get the chance to all that often. His lyrics are quite often poetic, but not a great deal of them diverge from the traditional form. And as good as he's been in hundreds of moments over the decades, he's also the master of a lyric that - when you really look it, think about it, try to pry it open - makes zero sense whatsoever. That's okay; that's the Tony K we know and love, and the band wouldn't be the same without them. Yet they can, occasionally, cloud an otherwise wonderful song.
But in these more poetic instances, where one is expected to use wordplay and surrealism, where the words only have to flow, not rhyme, and the whole thing feels like a manic train of thought, all those "requirements" that the words "make sense" don't matter a bit.
"Death of a Martian" is the prime example of this. From time to time he can just have fun with it, and he obviously was here. It's free jazz: the downturn brave little burncub Bearcareless turnip snare rampages pitch color pages doesn't make any sense, no, but it rolls off the tongue wonderfully and it sets the mood. The coda feels like a thunderstorm and the words match it.
He doesn't always just spout words by free association. But it just so happens that in this more open framework, Anthony has, by-chance, managed to drop some of the more profound lyrics of his career, and presented them in a profound way.
A more recent example: if you sweep aside the superfluous lines from the poetry section of "In the Snow," you can clearly see the hints that Anthony left behind, lines that hint at some recent torment: at some point in the past few years he has gotten involved with a woman, ostensibly Colombian, the same woman he wrote "Tangelo" about, and like all of his relationships it has ended badly. The song is obviously one about heartbreak and the torment of a breakup (or at least the verses are), but hearing the person whose heart was broken (or is he the one that did the breaking?) not hide behind a persona, just say these things outright, tunelessly, makes it all the more effective.
"Melancholy Mechanics" is also one of these times. But it's not a song about heartbreak. It's a song about, well, mindbreak.
Quick release chemicals strike with incomprehensible precision
Bio-organic electronics targeting microscopic destinations of devastation
Cleaner than light, meaner than a laser fight in the night 2000
Billions of micro maniacs unknown to most as the uncontrollable soldiers of suffering succotash
Instantaneous infiltration leaves me with a case of bus station frustration
Alone in the constellation of alienation detached from empty conversation
I wait
I wait
For the wave to break
"Melancholy Mechanics" was released as a B-side on the Warped single, as a One Hot Minute Japanese bonus track, and - of all places - featured in the 1996 film Twister. The band were no strangers to film soundtracks, of course, but this one always felt a little strange, and the tone of this song doesn't exactly match the action-chaos of a blockbuster about tornadoes. Then again, "Soul to Squeeze" didn't really fit the tone of Coneheads. It must have just been the connection to Warner Bros.
The song would be great without Anthony's poem. The instrumentation has a nice groove; there's no wonder its working title was "Velvet." As Rick would say it's light and jazzy, which Dave always seemed to be able to pull off easier than John ever did. "Thank You Boys" from Jane's Addiction's Nothing's Shocking is another example. I can picture that during the recording of the basic track, Flea and Dave were sitting down, if you get my drift. It's "relaxed" like that.
But the song really soars with the poem, which takes up the final sixty seconds of the song exactly, especially coming after that explosion towards the end. It's like one last transmission from a dying radio after the bomb goes off. The poem is what makes the song unique, but it's also probably the reason why it didn't make the album: I can't really figure where it would sit in the track list without halting proceedings completely (although now I really am curious - before "One Big Mob"?). This would be the same reason "Death of a Martian" and "In the Snow" were the final tracks on their respective albums.
It's hard to pinpoint, but the Anthony we know - the Anthony that has revealed himself to us over decades of media appearances - has always been a little removed. He has walls up.
He may well reveal himself to his closest friends and confidants, i.e. not the type of person reading this newsletter. But for us all kept on one side of the fence as fans, it seems as if the Anthony we meet/see/hear 99.9% of the time is "media" Anthony, not the real thing.
I've seen Flea cry in about 25 different interviews, but Anthony rarely lets anything out.
After a bizarre and abusive childhood, after the band started and got thrust forward propulsively year after year, after Hillel died, after his issues with drugs were turned into narrative waypoints for journalists, after he had a thousand microphones shoved in his face and was asked point blank to talk about these deep formative moments, what came out was, unsurprisingly, the work of an actor. And an actor was what he was going to be before the band came along.
Maybe it's just me, overthinking things. But even in the more dramatic moments of Scar Tissue, the moments in which he goes through whole-body torment - waking up after a relapse, going through severe break-ups, having his entire life upended - the response from Anthony is, most of the time, a kind of aloofness. He's a man of steel and nothing seems truly horrible. The worst days of his life get reduced to a couple of sentences written by someone else and then the next chapter comes along. And as revealing as the book is, in terms of talking about events and actions and things that happened to him, he doesn't allow much self-reflection or true vulnerability.
(There is one passage, in which he's confronted by Hillel's grave for the first time, and he breaks down and weeps while talking to him. That seems to have slipped through the machine.)
Don't get me wrong. This isn't a complaint; if a wall is what he needs to put up, by all means. I don't have a drug problem, but I can't imagine what it's like to have one, and have to talk about it with people I've never met day in, day out, for years on end. I have dead friends, sure, but the thought of having to mourn them in real time, in public, on MTV, makes me want to throw up.
(Jack Sherman put it in a far more brutal fashion: "In the case of Anthony, it was like I was around something that was inhuman. Somebody that was like a cypher ... and if you look at pictures of him now, I ask you to find humanity in his face." That's harsh, too harsh, but I can sense where he's coming from. Anthony never got on with Jack, never treated him decently. So the version that existed in Jack's eyes wasn't the real thing.)
The problem with a wall, though, is that you can come off uncaring, or like you aren't taking stock properly, and that you really are the California Ding Dong Dang guy.
The good thing about a wall is that they usually have openings.
It's not like he hasn't expressed an emotion on disc before. He sings about heartbreak and loss, helplessness and hopelessness, sings about loving his son and missing his friends, but it's always under the guise of a Singer fronting a Band. Singing might be one of the oldest pastimes on the planet, but there's something detached about a frontman of a band digitally mixed to be front and centre, something detached about the way Anthony does it, something detached about the way he holds himself in public. But in this little free expression poem it feels like I'm finally scaling the wall.
The weird thing is, the rest of it, and his delivery, is at times fairly goofy, but it doesn't detract from the final result. He's obviously talking about some sort of mental (or brain) deficiency that he thinks he has. With "alone in the constellation of alienation, detached from empty conversation," perhaps he's talking about depression as a whole.
The world play comes out. He utilises that reliable trick of laying on rhyming words in quick succession. And "uncontrollable soldiers of suffering succotash" can only bring to mind Sylvester the Cat (go look up what succotash actually is - I guarantee its not what you thought).
But to me that sounds like a man barely holding his wall up. As the rest of the band vamp - "play it Dave, play it Dave" - I picture him losing focus and looking off into the distance.
And at the end, as Anthony utters "I wait... I wait... for the waaaave to break..." I finally sense the real Anthony in one exhale. All thats been weighing on him the last few years comes through, and 1992 to 1995 were some of the strangest, most turbulent years of an already strange and turbulent life. The wave whose break he is waiting for could represent anything.
It sounds bizarre, I know, but for me it's one of the most emotive moments of his whole career.