Me and My Friends #36 - 13 notes on One Hot Minute
I like "Warped" just fine. It's a really catchy riff, it's a great opener, and the interplay between Chad and Flea/Dave is great. But was it really first single material? I get that they probably wanted to make a statement and get the leather and piercings out quickly -- "This is not the Red Hot Chili Peppers you thought you knew!" -- but the song isn't exactly radio material, is it? I think the issue is that Anthony basically gets lost in the noise, and when they play it live (especially when they played it live early, when the vocals weren't yet smothered in protective delay) it just kind of landed with a whimper. Surely they should have made Aeroplane the first single?
Speaking of Aeroplane...An example of how memories fail us: a few years back I spoke to someone on the mastering team for One Hot Minute, asking them about the process, whether or not the could shed any light on "Blender" etc. What they told me was this:
The challenge in the case of OHM was that these songs, for the most part, were long jams, most between 10-20 minutes, going by memory. as this was almost 25 years ago. Rick would occasionally call out, “cut here” or “cut that” but Rick’s genius was to let people who he trusted just do the work without micromanaging, so I was pretty much left to my own devices to edit and arrange these jams into songs.
Aeroplane was my favorite, not just because it was such a great song, but because of that little bass solo, which I created by editing down this epic section Flea had done. I was thinking the whole time, these guys are going to have to relearn these arrangements and Flea nailed it when i saw them do it live.
Now, I don't want to claim like I have an unimpeachable memory myself, and like he says it was 25 years previous, but this answer definitely made me laugh. As we can hear thanks to the leaked rough mix, the bass solo in "Aeroplane" has been unchanged since recording, and was obviously all done in one take.
Some songs were edited down, of course, during the mastering process. Every album gets edited and tweaked and sliced like that. But long jams? 10-20 minutes? Not quite.
Ah well.What is the background voice saying at 1.36 in "Deep Kick"?
"If only the freaks can be united?"
"If only the French will be united?"
And who is that whispering - Flea? Answers on a postcard please...Josh managed to get the band to play "Aeroplane" during his tenure with the band, but it wasn't the only One Hot Minute song he fought for - "My Friends" was considered as well. The closest he came was this tease.
"Coffee Shop" had the working title of "Baseballs" because of Flea's use of this pedal when writing the song. Here's the pedal in action. I can't imagine I would get much use out of it.
This article in RAW magazine, written just before the album came out, is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, the reviewer was listening to an early version of the album; "One Hot Minute" is in third place, which seems like a bizarre spot to put it, "One Big Mob" and "Stretch" are still connected (and "Stretch" is yet to be cut), "Blender" is present, and apparently Anthony sings "Pea."
Not really, of course, they're just mistaking Flea's vocals for Anthony's, but it's fun to think about an alternate version of that song. It wouldn't really have the same kick though, would it?
(Isn't it also odd that the band were passing around unfinished versions of the album?)
In 2011 I bought a pre-release tape of One Hot Minute (along with pre-release versions of Blood Sugar and Californication) that seemed to be one round of edits past the one in the article above. No "One Big Mob/Stretch" or "Blender," they had been cut, but "One Hot Minute" was still in it's different position, and there were a number of differences to "Walkabout," "Coffee Shop," "One Hot Minute," and "Falling Into Grace" -- which I'll talk about below.The crying baby heard during the bridge of "One Big Mob" is a recording of Dave's half brother Gabriel (maybe the most, erm, unique auditory moment in RHCP history?). Here's an unaired 2002-ish MTV pilot featuring Dave in which he... moves back in with his family... featuring an older Gabriel, which is an odd little curio. (Sometimes I need to remind myself that Dave is genuinely one of the greatest guitarists of all time, and not just some MTV reality star hack.)
Would you like to hear a fun tease of "Walkabout" from August 1994, over a year before the album came out? Yes, you would. I particularly like Flea guiding the rest of the band through a variety of head nods and gestures. If you've ever been in a band, you know what that's like. Who says they didn't have chemistry with Dave?
"Can you turn up the track a little bit please?" in "Tearjerker" is only a handful of 4th-wall breaks in RHCP's discography. Not a mistake or a background noise, but a moment in which it's revealed that the band are just a bunch of dudes in a recording studio, and this noise isn't just emerging from nowhere.
What are some other examples?
"Rolling everybody... this starts with bass..." in "Ethiopia";
"Clean it up Johnny!" in "Readymade" (although you could argue that's almost a lyric I suppose...but Anthony is reacting to the music around him);
"Ugh, fuck! Shit!" in "Your Eyes Girl"? Or does that not count either?The sound at the end of "One Hot Minute" is supposedly Dave screaming into his guitar pickup (though now that I mention it, I can't actually find a source for that claim). It's a fun technique; you don't tend to think about the fact that a pickup is basically a microphone. Here's a compilation of musician Mitski doing something similar. What a neat trick... almost earthy in a way, that combination of voice and guitar and pickup and amp.
This is that extended "Falling Into Grace" I mentioned above. Almost a whole minute extra in the outro. I have definitely linked it on here before, but maybe you haven't heard it. Listening to the album version feels different now -- that end felt so natural, but it turns out it was just a lucky break! (It's funny to think that little transfer I did in my bedroom back in 2011 has 18,000 views on someone else's Youtube upload.)
"Tearjerker," "One Hot Minute" and "Falling Into Grace" were unfortunately never performed live (although "Tearjerker was teased briefly, if you can call that a tease, in February of 1996). Of all the songs from One Hot Minute that were played live, however, "Shallow Be Thy Game" was played the least amount of times. Just four that we know about.
Most of those performances seemed to happen on the band's Australia/New Zealand tour in May of 1996, and as we don't have setlists for a lot of those shows I'm guessing you can bump that 4 up to a 6 or 7. Hell, on that tour they might have even played "Tearjerker," "...Minute," or "...Grace" - as unlikely as it is.
This low number of performances is puzzling to me, because it's such a rocking, crowd-pleasing song. Was it just the subject matter that kept it from being brought out? Did the band worry about drawing the ire of Newt? A few weeks after that Australian tour, they even released it as a single in Australia, though it only sold about six copies.
Here's a recording.If you haven't seen this show, I highly recommend it. The band in a tiny club, one that I'm pretty sure they had played in the mid-80s when it went under a bunch of different names, and just around the time of an album release, which always produces special shows. "Transcending" to "Pea" to "One Big Mob" is an insane triple whammy.
Sadly, they would only play "Transcending" about eight more times. But there's a recording for most of those performances. I could write an entire newsletter about how much I love Dave's interlude guitar line.
Exciting news coming - I hope to be able to share it with you all soon.
Hamish.