Me and My Friends #10 - Fleamail & Teatro Memories
Hello all,
To celebrate the release of Flea’s book, Acid For The Children, I thought I’d put together a sequel of sorts.
Here is a link to an epub ebook made up of Fleamails from between 1999 and 2014 (with a few bonus letters).
These are the same letters you can find here, but formatted far better than one long block of text, and including a couple of entries that I missed in my first attempts at finding them all, so this book has some “exclusives”.
This equates to about 52,000 words, longer than The Great Gatsby, and is full of wonderful moments, such as this from August 14, 2003:
“Today I ate and played trumpet. I walked in the park for a couple of hours. It was nice at the park and I fed the ducks a muffin. Little baby fuzzy ducks too. ”
The rest of the collection is full of book, movie and music recommendations, musings and regrets about the LA Lakers, stories from tours, and even, yes, please stop asking, yes, John Frusciante makes an appearance! (so does a baby Josh, which is very nice.)
If you’re (needlessly, in my opinion) upset that Acid for the Children doesn’t feature any stories from after the formation of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, heres an antidote. And, from what I’ve been told, there are supposedly hints in Acid that he’ll write a sequel, which will be about his time in the band.
I’ll make this link public on November 5, the same day Flea’s other book is released, but for now, lets keep this between us. Obviously, it goes without saying that these words belong to Flea, and this is for archival purposes only.
If you need to convert the epub into something more suitable, you can use Calibre, but .epub files should work on just about anything - here’s a webpage detailing how you can open it. If you really need help, reply to this email and I can send you a .pdf
Because this edition is fairly light, I thought I’d also include this extra little novelty. It’s from a book called Listen Up! by Mark Howard, who engineered the Teatro Sessions back in September of 1998.
There are a few mistakes in this retelling, but there are also some fun details that I’d never heard before. I’ve included the entire chapter dedicated to the RHCP.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers came to the Teatro in September 1998 to demo their Californication album with me. It was pretty low key — just me and the band and their road manager, Louie Mathieu.
It would be the return of John Frusciante. He had left the band due to a heroin addiction that had dominated his life, but he was newly clean. The drug had taken a heavy toll on his body and speech. Both his arms looked like they had third-degree burns, scars from years of open sores that came from shooting up. This may have been the first time the band had played with him since he’d gotten clean.
There were no guitar or drum techs, and the Chili Peppers set up their own gear. John was having a rough time getting it together so I offered a hand. He was plugged into the amp but he couldn’t get sound out of it. “My amp don’t work,” he sort of stuttered.”
I looked at the amp.
“It’s only the standby switch,” I told him and flicked the switch to fire it up. I was concerned that maybe the years of heroin had taken its toll on his abilities. He couldn’t go into a store and buy a bottle of water or pay his bills, and the fact that he slurred his words and couldn’t turn on an amp made me think this was all too much. But once his amp fired up, it was like he was reborn. The band kicked in with him. I have worked with a lot of amazing guitar players, but this was the first time I was truly in awe. He had that same funk thing as Leo Nocentelli (an American musician and songwriter) but John was at a different level. The band played like they had never been apart. It was an amazing thing to see: they were fresh and tight, excited to be playing together again.
Chad Smith, the drummer, known for his bombastic beats, showed up with just a pair of sticks. I set him up with the Teatro house kit. It was a 1960 Gretsch four-piece, with white frosted heads tuned up high, like jazz drums should be. The kick pedal was a Speed King, so it had a lot of bounce. Chad is one of those drummers who buries the kick pedal into the head, so he wasn’t used to this floating action, but I think because of that he played more like Mitch Mitchell from Hendrix’s band.
Flea, the bassist, had a routine before playing in which he would do yoga stretches on the floor and meditate. He brought in his road rig and I took a direct right off his bass.
I handed Anthony a Shure Beta 58A mic to use and he asked for some headphones. I told him try it without them; he didn’t know that we were in quadraphonic sound. I had the rear PA disguised with some Indian tapestries, so it looked like cloth towers. The band was playing and when Anthony sang, his voice came out of the speakers, sounding like a live concert but crystal clear. The effects I had on his vocal made him sound great and he was excited to sing.
There was only one run-through for each of the songs and some small arrangement changes, but the band didn’t labor over anything. After a couple of days, they had put down versions of all the songs on the record. Anthony was still working on finishing up some of the lyrics, and he spent an extra day with me to try a couple of the songs again. I made everyone a CD to listen to, and as reference for Rick Rubin, their producer. They ended up going to Cello Studios in Hollywood to make the record, but they had a rough time getting back to the sound they’d achieved at the Teatro. While listening to the new music they’d cut, Rick kept referring back to the recordings I’d done with them. He went through a couple of engineers trying to improve the sound. One day, Rick was walking by one of the other studios at Cello and saw my friend Jim Scott working.
Rick asked Jim if he could help because they were having a hard time bettering the demos, then Jim made the record with them. This is something that affects a lot of people: it’s called “demo-itis“. Something happens on a demo — it feels fresher. The Teatro recordings ended up being used as B sides for some of the Japanese singles. They also used some of the jams for “Around the World” as a B side on a single and called it “Teatro Jam.” Californication became the Chili Peppers’ most commercially successful album and sold fifteen million copies worldwide.
No one knows how, but some of the Teatro outtakes ended up leaked on the internet, many of them very different from the versions that appeared on the final album.
I was surprised to read that the demos were supposedly done over a couple of days; I just assumed it was all done on the same day. Hearing that Chad used a different kit than usual was interesting as well - I had always thought he sounded brighter than usual.
I’ve always been intrigued to hear more about the false-start that the Californication sessions had. Jim Scott talks about them here:
when they came to the recording studio they were very well prepared, and in extremely good shape. They actually started work with another recording engineer, but after a week in the studio they felt things weren’t happening.
Did anything survive from those initial sessions? I’ve always wondered that maybe Instrumental #1 and #2 are from then; they always sounded a little different to me, a little drier than the rest.
If the band had any interest in revisiting their past, maybe we’d hear those tracks on a boxset. Obviously that won’t be happening any time soon… but we can always hold out hope for the future.
Until next time,
H.