January 9, 2021

Me and My Friends #27 - An Opening

At the very first Red Hot Chili Peppers show all those years ago, the band played one song: “Out In L.A.” This short song is the perfect Chili Peppers track, in that it gives you everything you really need in order to understand that early version of the band: rap, slap bass, a scratchy guitar playing the Hendrix chord, tight drumming, boisterous silliness, and lyrics about Anthony having sex. Everyone gets a solo and the band gets a chance to introduce itself.

If you were in, say, Nashville, Tennessee, in late November 1985 and were being dragged to some show from a band you’d never heard of, you’d have a pretty good idea of what they were about at the end of that first song.

While there was the occasional date in which something else was played first – a jam on “Battleship” and “Buckle Down” here, the Rocky theme song here – “Out In L.A.” was the regular opening track at every show the band played until 1991. Every show. From the clubs around Los Angeles in 1983, to the wintery empty rooms during the first tour, to the first overseas performances as Freaky Styley was released, to thousands of heaving Finlanders at Hillel’s last show, right to the end of the bigger and bigger Mother’s Milk tour, when they were regularly playing to sold-out arenas.

The exact point that the band stopped playing “Out In L.A.” not just as their opening track but basically all-together, is the break for the Blood Sugar Sex Magik sessions. The last real show we have a setlist for is February 9, 1991 - a few months before the album was recorded and the band changed forever. The first real show after the recording sessions, in October, opened with “Love Trilogy”, and this continued throughout the tour.

In Europe early the next year, when things with John had started to first turn south and then plummet head-first off a cliff, the band tried to open with “Out In L.A.” again in some last ditch effort to return to normalcy. This isn’t some guess - Anthony outright admitted that this was the case:

Earlier in the day, whilst writing out the setlist, Anthony remarked that since the band broke ritual halfway through the last US tour, and stopped coming onstage to ‘Out In LA’, things had been going downhill. Tonight they come on stage with the ritual back in place.

Obviously, that didn’t work - John still left the band a few months later, and by then they had opened with songs as varied as the familiar “Give it Away” and “Green Heaven” – the latter being particularly bizarre, as “Green Heaven” hadn’t even been released in Japan at that point.

After Arik joined, the band settled into another routine. Of his 57 shows, only one of them appears to have been opened by something other than “Give it Away” – that was on July 19, 1992, when they played “Out In L.A.” for the last time (until 2004). ¹

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The Dave-era began with a few shows that landed around the 10 year anniversary of the release of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and in honor of that, the band played a short version of “Grand Pappy du Plenty” to open each performance. But, in every occasion, this also segued into “Give it Away” – by this time it was obviously one of the band’s two signature songs, and what the majority of people would have known them for. After One Hot Minute was released, the band kept up the “Grand Pappy du Plenty”/”Give it Away” double hit, all the way until the end of 1995.

As the rescheduled U.S. tour kicked off in 1996, they replaced one tease of an early song with another; in this case, “Freaky Styley” – which also incorporated the Parliament song “Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples” – but instead of going into “Give it Away”, the band spent much of the year opening with “Suck My Kiss” (though there were occasional reversions to the norm.)

At the start of the Oceanic tour in May, “The Power Of Equality” was moved up to the top spot, and remained that way until the European tour that started the next month, when they returned to the, by then, tried and true standard of “Give it Away.” Being the opening track on the album, “Power of Equality” seems like a no-brainer to open a show with, but evidently the desire to play something more crowd-pleasing and familiar up front was more tempting, and “Give it Away” won out.

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When John returned, a few interesting things happened. The first was that they reverted back to the early-BSSM era setlist at the initial few shows back. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere in another letter, but I’d give anything to see a few shows with this band at this exact moment. The raw punk aspects of Uplift combined with the sparseness of parts of Blood Sugar in a tiny little club? Bliss. These shows played over the summer of 1998, when John was back but they hadn’t yet shifted into writing Californication is very interesting to me. They’re full of energy, but still licking their wounds a little. A completely different band.

The second interesting thing is that once the Californication writing sessions went underway, they started opening shows with “I Like Dirt” – aside from their first year as a band together, this is (just about) the only time the RHCP have ever regularly opened a show with an unreleased track. This was the case for every show for the rest of the year, except for this performance in Santa Barbara, when they got “Under the Bridge” immediately out of the way. ²

But once Californication was released, “Around the World” became the go-to opener. While some shows featured a loose cover of Public Image Limited’s “Religion II” to start things off, every show in 1999 started the same way, with a few exceptions, in particular this short run of shows that opened with the about-to-be-released “Emit Remmus” – the second time in less than a year that they lumped an unknown track on an audience.

“Around the World” remained in the top spot during the Japan and Big Day Out tour in early 2000, and into the U.S. tour that started in March. There are a few shows without setlists available, but the same song seemed to open every single show, all year, aside from the Bridge School acoustic shows and this one-off KROQ performance. That’s over 100 shows. Same song.

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“Around the World” stayed where it was during 2001, occasionally but rarely swapping with “Give it Away”. But at the Silver Lining benefit gig in December, the band had the chance to show off some of the songs they had been writing – one of them, “Don’t Forget Me”, opened the show. In an alternate universe, this would have been a regular occurrence, as Anthony said in early 2002:

One song that Kiedis is particularly proud of off the new album is “Don’t Forget Me,” which he describes as a “painfully simple song.” … I think it will be our opening song for the next three years or so because it puts us in such a good mood.”

That didn’t wind up happening, and after the release of By the Way, things got… predictable. In fact, the entire tour was almost identical; “By the Way” opened proceedings, followed by “Scar Tissue”, then “Around the World”. This was also the point where “Give it Away” was sent to the end of the setlist as a kind of farewell song (closer songs are a whole other letter).

There was about two straight years of this similarity. The Slane Castle show in August 2003 was great, sure, but there was nothing special about the set list. It was basically the same one they played in November the previous year, or February that year. John had even been doing “Maybe” for months. No wonder Flea got sick of the band during that tour.

It seems strange to look at those 2003 setlists and see “Can’t Stop” so far down. It sits in the middle of By the Way, obviously, but for me the song is an opener, and it seems like it was devised that way – there’s so much expectation built into that intro. The single was released in early 2003 but it took until the 2004 tour for the band to start opening shows with it. And there it remained for, pretty much, every show until the end of 2007, 2005’s few regular shows aside.

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Up until the current day, there have been very few surprises. “Monarchy of Roses” opened virtually every show of the I’m With You tour (and yet hasn’t been played since). And in late 2013, either “Can’t Stop” or “Around the World” has opened every show with a few notable exceptions. By the time the last few shows of the 2019 tour rolled around, you could pretty much tell which show you were going to get by which opener you got: “Can’t Stop” or “Around the World”.

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It’s fun to go back and look at how the band have changed over the years, and this is another one of my beloved examples of why this band is so good and such a varied, messy thing. But the question is - how important is an opening song? Does it set the mood for the whole performance, or would really any song fit, as long as it’s played well? If it could be any random song, here’s one example of what it might sound like.

If it does matter, there are obvious candidates for which track out of the band’s vast repertoire would be picked, but they’ve done a few non-obvious things over the years. Once they became a huge arena act, there was the need, if that’s the right word, to play something instantly recognizable for the more casual fans in the audience; something to instill a sense of arrival. This is pretty much the whole reason “Can’t Stop” seems to exist, though “Around the World” hits mostly the same notes. It’s also why choosing the unknown “I Like Dirt” was such a strange choice back in 1998. Then again, in 1998, during a small tour where the band were playing in such illustrious places as the Livestock Events Center, there wouldn’t be too many casual fans there, and I’m sure they enjoyed making it clear to the audience that they were going to be moving forward. A band like the RHCP start also can’t really start with a ballad, which is why that one-off “Under the Bridge” was also such an oddity – could you imagine them doing “I Could Have Lied” first up?

There are songs that build. “Love Trilogy” was pretty perfect in the top spot because it rises in much the way that the opening jams of the current day do. I’ve always thought “Dance Dance Dance” (it’s a good song!) would be pretty great for that exact reason – it explodes at the end, and it could be a really exciting way for a show to start. They could even get really weird with it and play something like “Venice Queen” first; how about a really involved version of that intro swell loop piece that John played in 2003, leading into the song proper?

As I’ve said, in recent years, jams have opened the vast majority of shows. Where before, the four of them would come on stage and warm up in a pretty rudimentary way – doing fills and slaps just to make sure their instruments were all in working order – now they warm themselves up with an improvised piece of fireworks, one that usually hits a fairly rehearsed crescendo and then fades back down, quite often into the rumbling intro of “Can’t Stop.” This (and the longer outro jams) was supposedly done to appease the creatively-starved John during the latter-end of his second stint with the band, but they’ve become an essential part of the spectacle now.

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The next real RHCP show, whenever that is (boy am I getting tired of saying that), will most likely feel very familiar. I gather it will probably look very much like the July-August 2007 setlists, with a few new songs included and (fingers crossed) a smattering of Josh era songs.

But there’s also the chance that this could be not just a new era for the band but a new era for how they open shows. They’ve surprised us before. They can surprise us again.