Me and My Friends #54 - Rough Mix Ruminations and a Request
Out of nowhere it's suddenly time for my yearly rumination about the Blood Sugar Sex Magik "rough mixes" tape. It's a weird story, and I might have gone into it elsewhere, but maybe this will be new to you.
As a wee lad trawling the RHCP internet back in 2006, I came upon a list detailing the collection belonging to the webmaster of (the now-defunct) Frusciante.de.
On the page, alongside regular store bought albums, imports and out of print singles, you can see entries for a few unmastered / unsequenced tapes and a Californication unmastered - unsequenced CD:
We already had the "unmastered" Californication and a similar By the Way collection. The "unmastered" Californication was, of course, the preferred way to listen to the album for a lot of people. And the By the Way rough mixes was a fun curio, featuring Anthony's guide vocals and the songs in their most basic states.
Already a total nerd in those early days, I salivated at the prospect of further alternate versions of albums I loved, and put posts on the stadium-arcadium.com and OneHotGlobe forums asking if anyone had any more info. I probably spoke, typed and acted like a complete idiot.
My Hail Mary worked. Almost immediately there was a reply on stadium-arcadium.com from a user named something like BSSMUnmastered, who without any fanfare or requests for money or anything in return, anonymously uploaded a cassette rip of... exactly what I asked for. I'm talking like a day later. It was an unfinished, early version of Blood Sugar Sex Magik. You can hear that here. Mp3 copies are floating around, and a few people have taken a stab at editing it, trying to remove tape hiss, etc. but usually to not much effect.
It contains rough mixes of each song (except "They're Red Hot," which seems as if it hadn't been recorded yet). Some songs are missing overdubs, some songs contain things which were later edited out (like the extra toy piano on "Apache Rose Peacock"). There's the extended ending to "Funky Monks," the original unedited breakdown of "If You Have to Ask." Unedited count-ins and Chad counting pauses on his drum sticks and a million other interesting things. It was the album as it stood around three quarters of the way through the sessions. Like you had gone into The Mansion and asked for a tape copy of what they were working on and gone home with it in your car's tape deck.
If that mystery person provided any context, it's long gone. My memory is that they posted once and dipped, never to be heard from again (the forum is sadly down; I mourn it daily). As far as I could tell at the time, I knew it wasn't the webmaster mentioned above, but someone else entirely who just happened to have a copy of it and out of the goodness of their heart decided to share it after seeing my request.
We enjoyed the upload and continued on, Stadium Arcadium came out, and the world kept turning.
Five years later, now running a very rudimentary and early version of the RHCP Sessions Archive, I decided to get in touch with that webmaster (turns out he was a French journalist) and ask if I could buy a few things from his collection, if by some miracle he still had it. Blood Sugar Sex Magik had popped up in 2006, but the unmastered One Hot Minute still eluded us all.
A few emails, $300 and a very long and nervous shipping time later, three things arrived in a big box filled with scrunched up Parisian newspaper:
the Blood Sugar Sex Magik tape
the One Hot Minute tape, and
the Californication CD.
The strange thing is, when I went to rip the Blood Sugar tape, thinking that I was finally going to be able to spread a higher quality version of it... it turned out to be something completely different than what had leaked in 2006.
It was far more complete, basically identical to the final album. The only difference, if I recall correctly, was the sequencing ("Suck My Kiss" was much earlier, "I Could Have Lied" was way later) and the unedited "If You Have to Ask" breakdown. Apparently the backing vocals in "Sir Psycho Sexy" are different, but don't quote me on that. I ripped it, released it.
Elsewhere, the One Hot Minute tape contained some real revelations. Extended versions of four or five different songs, added verses. Leaking this is some of my proudest work. A copy of that is out there floating around as well, in glorious FLAC.
The Californication disc was yet another alternate version of that album, but didn't provide anything all that enlightening. The version of the album that surfaced in 1999 was still the preferred way to listen.
I sold all three a few years later. These photos I took in my childhood bedroom a lifetime ago.
But back to Blood Sugar.
Here we are, more than fifteen years later, and there's still no information about what it was that actually leaked that day on the stadium-arcadium.com boards. It's been given the name Blood Sugar Sex Magik Rough Mixes. Aside from that we don't know where it came from or who it was that put it out. A higher quality version has never appeared. A photo of the tape never surfaced. I asked Randy Mitchell, the source of so many other leaks, like "Circle of the Noose" and the Teatro Demos, if it was him that released it and he didn't know what I was talking about.
But someone out there knows. Some hero who saw my post, threw us fans a bit of treasure, asked nothing in return, and disappeared back into the ether. They've probably forgotten all about this.
The whole event solidified my love for all things unreleased and unmastered and roughly mixed. That there's an alternate version out there of everything we love. Not to compare it to, or try to make better, but to help you look more closely at it all.
There are people out there who hear about alternate guitar solos and extended bridges and their eyes glaze over in disinterest. The thing they had is enough. Which is totally fine. But there are people out there who hear that there's a version of "This Velvet Glove" where the first chorus loops twice and respond with this. It's why I started my website, why I'm here typing this a decade later.
If you released the Blood Sugar Sex Magik rough mixes tape, or have any idea who did, or have any more memory of the posts that surrounded it, or can help in any way, please get in touch. I'd love to help finish the story.
Asking blindly back in 2006 worked wonders, maybe it will in 2023.
H.