July 6, 2020

Me and My Friends #21 - Yes I Can Hear You Clem Fandango

Hello dear readers,

I’m about 60% through the first draft of my book about the RHCP in 1983. There are many more people I need to talk to, and further drafts, and the integration of more information that might come through, and I’m assuming clearance issues if I’m allowed to print images, and maybe the publishing side of things if I don’t self-publish.

But: it’s coming along nicely, and if you’re a big RHCP nerd like me, you’ll probably enjoy the book. It’s part reference, part biography.

There are few things I need to get to the bottom of before it’ll be done; a few people I need to talk to, a few theories that need to be confirmed or denied, a few mysteries taken care of. That will take months, it could take years. The Coronavirus has put a complete halt on a few key plans of mine, and so, really, who knows when this will be all be finished. Maybe 2022. Maybe later. It’s currently 47,000 words, with over 300 footnotes so far.

The book is based mostly around the shows that the band played throughout that year: where, when, who with, what happened, and so on. The main thing I’ve relied on when it comes to creating the initial framework is primary documents. Flyers, or newspaper notices, mostly, and from the time it actually happened; memories aren’t 100% reliable, even a few months after the fact.

At the moment, every show has at least one primary source, and for the one show that doesn’t… I’ve spoken to enough people that were there that I can state that it definitely took place.

But there’s one mention of a show that’s popped up during my scouring of sources that sort of explains my whole way of doing things, and I wanted to share the whole process with you, just to give an insight into the difficulties one faces when trying to do this kind of work. This might be a little dull, so feel free to skip to the end, where there’s something a little more fun. ¹

---

Anthony’s father, John “Blackie Dammett” Kiedis, released an autobiography a few years back called Lords of the Sunset Strip. It’s an… interesting piece of work; there are some sections that are… well, I can’t quite think of the right adjective:

The next time I squeezed in at the bar to order more drinks I found myself next to a devil in a red dress that was so damn sexy I spent ten minutes measuring my chances of getting some of that too. She was one of those naughty beauties, sultry and pouty, and she had little red fingernails like a teen tart. Oops. I’d forgotten all about my date. By the time I found her in the crowd, she was almost in tears. I made up to her, but she was anxious to leave. I couldn’t do that without the sultry tart’s phone number. I had to make a choice. I was always making a choice, and they always paid me back for my insolence. The childlike adorable blonde princess called her dad to come get her. I offered to stick with her until he came. She weighed slapping my face or just turning away. She chose the classier. I deserved the worst. And I got it. By the time I made it back to the sexy doll with the short red nails, she was taken.

If you’ve ever seen the British show called Toast of London, you can probably picture the main character, Steven Toast, played by Matt Berry, narrating the book. His voice makes it a lot more fun for me.

And so while huge chunks of the book are evidently the senior Kiedis (or a ghostwriter) going through the band’s clipping archive (some sections are literally word for word repeats from the LA Weekly) or cribbing off Wikipedia to fill gaps, other parts seem to be based on his diaries from the time. And so this does provide for us a few pieces of new information.

It’s Lords that gives us the probable date of the band’s first demo session in 1983: Thursday, May 5. We knew it was some time in May, but that exact date isn’t presented by Dammett as a guess, so we can assume he’s getting it from somewhere reliable and accurate (like a diary). Why else say the exact date?²

But the veracity of that is pretty much called into question in the very same sentence:

May 5th they went into Mark’s studio and recorded the first ever RHCP vinyl demo. Out in LA, Get Up and Jump, Green Heaven, Sex Rap and Baby Appeal.

Obviously they didn’t record direct to vinyl, but they also didn’t record a version of “Baby Appeal” - that’s information mistakenly lifted from some biography that’s conflated two different sessions over the years (he’s not the only one to do it – an explanation is here.)

And so there are some gems – a great story about Anthony tripping over his microphone cord at their June 17, 1983 show, and the story behind this photo of John – but it’s also not entirely reliable. That’s okay. Neither is Scar Tissue, Acid for the Children, or really any book about the band that’s come out. Mine, I’m sure, will even have a mistake or two in it, if it even comes out.

---

But in Dammett’s book, there’s this sentence:

I went North with the band to open for Bad Brains at the Warwick Theatre in San Francisco.

The Chili Peppers opened for Bad Brains on July 18, 1983, at the Club Lingerie in Los Angeles. That’s a fact, with a primary source backing it up - there’s a recording of the band, flyers, newspaper reviews, and so on.

But did they travel to San Francisco shortly afterwards to open for them again? Maybe. Maybe not.

Bad Brains did in fact play on July 21, 1983, in San Francisco. That adds up. Here’s a notice from the San Francisco Examiner:

Now, there’s no mention of the Chili Peppers here. But that’s okay - perhaps they were drafted in at the last minute, to replace Personality Crisis, or some other band. I’m sure there are a few shows from the year I’ll never be able to find mention of, because there’s no documentation left.

But hang on, isn’t that the wrong venue? On Broadway isn’t the Warwick Theatre.

In fact… the Warwick Theatre doesn’t actually exist. At least not that I’ve been able to find, in San Francisco. The only thing named anything like that is on the other side of the country, on Rhode Island. But Dammett probably just meant The Warfield, which is a venue that the Chili Peppers definitely played a few times. Big deal, a typo. But is this one mention enough to go on? Is that a confirmation? Should it go in the book?

There may be more evidence. This time it’s from Flea, in his 2019 Instagram post announcing that the RHCP were going to play at the Pyramids:

I remember the first time the red hots played outside of la in 1983, I was beyond thrilled. We drove up to San Francisco and performed at I-Beam club. Man, we were international touring superstars I couldn’t believe it and it meant everything me to show those people in Northern California what we were about, to pour my heart out, for us to give every fiber of our beings in the process of bringing our music to life.

A show in San Francisco – the first for the RHCP outside of LA – in 1983? Sounds an awful lot like the one Blackie is talking about, even if he does neglect to mention the Bad Brains connection. So maybe it really did happen. Except - the I-Beam? That’s not the On Broadway or The Warfield.

Again, it’s absolutely possible Flea got the name of the club wrong. So we can look past that. And in the rest of the Instagram post, Flea talks about a show that happened in 1983, in Aspen, Colorado. So the timeline matches up.

But is there also a chance that Flea is actually remembering this show, from October 1984? This is the earliest confirmed RHCP show in the city, and from the distance of 35+ years, I can imagine it’s easy to think October 1984 actually happened a year earlier. It wasn’t the first time the band played outside LA, but who knows what types of tricks the memory plays on itself.

It wouldn’t be an isolated incident. Here’s Flea just the other day getting the recording dates for their one-off song Tough Guys and the Freaky Styley album sessions mixed up. Which, you know, fair enough: this was all three decades ago. I don’t want to make it seem like I wouldn’t do the exact same thing if it was me talking.

And let’s take another look at that clipping to see who else played the On Broadway in the summer of 1983:

August 2 and 3, 1983 saw Flea’s other band, FEAR, playing the venue during the same period. This wasn’t even the first time FEAR played the city during Flea’s tenure on bass with the band. They were in San Francisco in December 1982 and April 1983, though never at the I-Beam. Any one of these trips up north could be what Flea’s (in his own words) pot-addled mind is recalling.

…I’m not done! To make things even more complicated, one of the times the Chili Peppers definitely played the Warfield in San Francisco, in September 1985, they supported Run DMC. Who aren’t Bad Brains, of course, but who were a bigger, more established band. This is less likely, but is it this show that Dammett’s remembering? All the pieces fit, except for the band that was being supported. And the year. But who knows?

---

So, we have one mention of a show, with no date, at the wrong venue, in a book that’s otherwise not 100% reliable.

There’s another possible mention of this show, but at the wrong venue, with no other identifying information, during a year full of similar shows that could easily be misremembered. Instead of confirming Dammett’s information, it just confuses things.

And not only that, but there are a variety of confirmed shows that could be the ones being discussed, but there’s no way to confirm one way or the other.

Now you see why I need primary sources. Just one little mention in a newspaper, and this entire problem goes away. The band have spoken often about the thrill of getting asked to open for Bad Brains in July 1983, but why couldn’t they have mentioned a trip to San Francisco in the same week to do it again? It would make my life a lot easier.

Until then, I’ll keep looking :-)

---

Have you ever noticed that Cliff Martinez isn’t actually in the “Catholic School Girls Rule” video?

I don’t know who this is, but it ain’t Cliff:

It may well be Dick Rude, who directed the video. My emails to him have gone unanswered.

The video was recorded in February or March 1986, pretty close to when Cliff left the band. Is that why he’s not present, or is there a completely innocent reason?

(I love this song with my entire heart.)

---

Another fan stream! This time we’re “broadcasting” the Woodstock 1994 performance. I’ve only seen bits and pieces of this over the years – the lightbulbs, mostly – but never the full thing, and I think that’s the case for a lot of people; the full thing doesn’t seem to be available anywhere on the net. We’ll fix that this weekend.

³

I hope to see you live on Saturday night (or Sunday morning depending on where you live!) as we take a fun little look back at the beginning of the Navarro era.

Here’s the link to set a reminder via Youtube.

---

Thanks, as always, for reading.

H.