Me and My Friends #51 - 40 years of the Red Hot Chili Peppers
Today - Friday, December 16th, 2022 - is the 40th anniversary of the first ever Red Hot Chili Peppers performance.
Today is the band's 40th birthday.
Here's a little background: Gary Allen is an Arkansas-born polymath who used to be in Neighbor's Voices, a funk-art-post-punk act, alongside David Mamou, Thierry Fauchard and Joel Virgel-Vierset. After they broke up, Gary put out his debut solo EP entitled In White America (This Hollow Valley Broken Jaw of Our Lost Kingdom). It's a wonderful release containing four extraordinarily dope songs, especially "Mongol at Home" and "Oops It's An Accident," which is practically New Order's "Blue Monday" but a whole year early. It's streaming - go look it up. Here's the video for "Oops It's An Accident" which will look familiar to Blade Runner fans.
(Flea still owns a copy.)
To celebrate, and to sell some records, Gary hosted a release show for the EP at the Grandia Room, a restaurant and nightclub located at 5657 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood. Here's a photo of the place in 1975:
It looked much the same in 1982:
That's Hillel Slovak standing out front.
The whole building was torn down in 2010 and is now an apartment block with restaurant space on the ground floor.
Every Thursday at 10pm, the Grandia Room became the Rhythm Lounge, a club night that predominantly featured hip hop and electro music, which at that point was practically brand new, but also the occasional performance. These nights were run by Salomon Emquies, who went on to be a photographer of many an A-lister. He was often assisted by Matt Dike, who later produced this song featuring a bass player you might recognize. Dike also produced Paul's Boutique. He's in that photo above, standing to Hillel's left and looking at the camera.
Gary Allen at a Rhythm Lounge night, 1982-1983
After meeting at a club called Brave Dog in downtown LA a few years earlier, Gary Allen became friends with Anthony Kiedis, Hillel Slovak, Michael Balzary, and Jack Irons. They hung out, listened to music, got into trouble. After staying for a while at Janet Cunningham's CASH club, Michael, or Flea as he was then known, moved into an apartment with Gary Allen's former bandmate Joel Virgel-Vierset (and Fabrice Drouet). The whole crew was intertwined.
For his December 16 performance, Gary assembled a backing band featuring Russell Jessum, Keith "Tree" Barry, Rodney "Wizard" Turner, Taquila Mockingbird and Flea.
But he still needed someone to open the show for him. Luckily, Hillel, Flea and Jack were right there.
In October of 1982, Anthony had seen Grandmaster Flash perform live at the Reseda Country Club. Prior to that show, the essentially non-musical but occasionally literary focused Anthony had been intrigued with hip hop, having heard many of its early tracks, including Flash's "The Message." But now he was all in. He wanted to write and perform rap music. He had experience writing poetry, and had been on a stage before in a sort of MC capacity, but had never actually been in a real band. Luckily, Hillel, Flea and Jack were right there.
There's a whole side story to this. An unfinished thread. Either Gary Allen came up with the idea of Anthony being the frontman of a band, or Anthony already had the completely fleshed out idea, and brought it to Gary, who approved and let them open for him.
Anthony has always said it was Gary's idea. Gary says it was Anthony's idea. We wind up with the same result, sure, but how we actually get there matters. We'll probably never know. It might be a combination of both.
On December 16, 1982, Gary Allen held his release party at the Rhythm Lounge.
What happened next is legend now. Anthony, Flea, Hillel and Jack opened proceedings and played "Out in L.A." The tale of how that song came to be, the songs it ripped off, and the tenuous relationship between Flea, having recently joined FEAR, and Hillel and Jack, his former bandmates in What Is This, is too long to get into here. If that interests you, perhaps this new book will.
"Out in L.A." either sounded exactly like this, in which I mean it sounded incredible. Or it sounded completely different. That's another thing we'll never know; there were no recordings, no photos taken (that have survived, at least), no mention of the tiny little jokey one-off act in any newspapers. They were up on stage for about four minutes in front of maybe thirty people. The only thing we have is what's been said since, by people who know what they wound up becoming, which must colour any recollection.
The band most likely did not have a name at this show. It's been reported that they performed under the name of Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, or some variation of that, but their name appears on none of the flyers or in any newspaper ads ahead of time. If they did call themselves Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem (Flea's version of it drops the Miraculously), it was just to the crowd of people who were there. Nothing officially documented. And this was an era when every little flyer has been saved.
In fact, the earliest mention I could find of any band member saying that name was 1991. The next time they performed, on December 30, and the time after that, on January 6, they were called The Flow.
In March they changed their name to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the rest is history.
For years now, the first Chili Peppers show was thought to have taken place in February of 1983.
Anthony says so in Scar Tissue, but this book was ghost-written by Larry Sloman and is full of iffy timeline and factual issues. He also says the show was a Neighbor's Voices performance, which isn't true, and misspells Grandia Room:
Flea says the same in Acid for the Children, and I'm just guessing he uses that date because... that's what he thinks is the truth.
Two very fine biographies released in 2004 (Fornication by Jeff Apter and By the Way by Dave Thompson) say it was in April 1983. The 1994 version of Dave Thompson's biography, True Men Don't Kill Coyotes, just says Spring 1983.
The exact date of February 13 has been bandied about because of an interview Anthony gave in 2003. In that interview, Anthony openly admits that neither he nor Flea have any real idea, but that's what they settled on, and so did the rest of us for a few years. The band even teased "Out in L.A." back on February 13, 2017 because they thought it was correct.
The Rhythm Lounge was only held on Thursday nights. February 13, 1983 was a Sunday. Various early Chili Peppers concert archive websites have given the date of either February 10 or February 17, 1983, because those were at least a Thursday. For a long time I thought it was one of those dates as well.
In 1990, Flea gave an interview to Bram Van Splunteren (go to the 39.55 mark in that link) and already isn't sure of when the first show actually was. Maybe it was February, maybe it was March, he says. That was only seven years afterwards, he's standing out the front of the Grandia Room, and he already has no idea.
The band's first show was December 16, 1982. Yes, that does mean that their Wikipedia page needs to be changed, that every article and review that has started with "Formed in 1983..." is wrong. Only by about two weeks, but it is what it is.
I know I'm being pedantic about all of this. And I don't mean any disrespect against Flea, Anthony, Jeff Apter, Dave Thompson, or the webmasters of the two wonderful sites I linked. I also (obviously) don't blame Flea or Anthony for not knowing when a show was as the decades have passed and a million other things have gotten in the way. It's a combination of faulty memories and, until now, no real documentation.
Here's the documentation:
That is from the December 10, 1982 edition of the Los Angeles Reader, a weekly newspaper that listed virtually every show, big or small, that happened in Los Angeles. Martini Ranch, the band who played the week before Gary, featured Bill Paxton on vocals. That isn't relevant, it's just a fun thing I learned while writing my book. The ad appeared again the next week, on the morning of the show. On the same page as that ad is music news written by a pre-Simpsons Matt Groening. Again, not relevant. Just fun to see.
I think that going forward, today, December 16, should be a day - the day - for celebrating the Chili Peppers.
You can spend it how you like. Listen to their music. Read about D.H. Peligro, Jack Sherman, or Hillel Slovak. Watch some Pluralone performances. Take a gander at some old photos, like these ones. Read Scar Tissue or Acid for the Children, or one of Flea's favourite books. Figure out your perfect 1-album version of Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen. Look up Chad's insane history as a session musician. Take a gander at the RHCP Live Archive and their incredible streaming platform. Download some episodes of Universally Speaking podcast. Give that song you've always hated one more try. Buy Dan Bogosian's excellent guide. Anything to spread the love around a little more.
My book, the reason I know all of this, and the culmination of about four years work, is out on January 17, 2023. I just got my first author copies, and it was a thrill that is hard to put into words:
The beautiful thing is that these 300+ pages are just a tiny sliver of a long and wonderful history that started on this day, all the way back in 1982.
Happy birthday to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. 40 years. Here's to many, many more.