Me and My Friends #61 - Thanker's Milk
The Chili Peppers' early albums, in their initial CD releases, had barely any liner notes at all - just a paper square that unfolded once into a white rectangle of - usually - nothing. The bare necessities: no lyrics, only an occasional picture, and some credits (and sometimes not even credits).
"I always thought it was pretty cheesy that you just get this little sort of wispy slip of non-informational artwork that they release the CDs with these days," Anthony once said. "It’s just so much more fun to get a record, or a CD or a tape, and unfold it and be able to kind of read about the musicians that played on the record, and the lyrics."
This was mostly the case for some, if not most CDs at the time; hard to believe, but it wasn't ever assured that the format would ever take off, and LPs and cassettes were still king for most of the 1980s.
(Since streaming annihilated/saved/altered the music industry this has sadly happened again; the liner notes for The Getaway onwards have been pretty bare. Gone are the days of One Hot Minute's custom calligraphy. Now if there's any attention paid to a physical edition, it's all about coloured vinyl.)
But it was also a sign that EMI didn't take the band that seriously. In fact, their first two albums weren't even released on CD until 1988. And when they were: wisp.
But in many ways EMI upped their game when putting out Mother's Milk; they could tell it was going to be bigger than anything the band had released before, and they treated the 1989 version of the band fairly differently than the 1984, 1985 and 1987 version of it. One of the ways this manifested was the liner notes - for the first time there were lyrics in a CD release, and not just lyrics but quite a lot extra.
Over the last couple of weeks I've had to spend some time with the liner notes for Mother's Milk, and I thought I'd share some of the nice things I've read while looking at them for what was probably the first time. They're pretty much confined to the acknowledgments section, which gives you quite the insight into each band members' worlds at the time. These are reproduced in the remastered edition as well, but it's nice to go back to the source and see how it was some 35 years ago.
Here it is:
Lets look at Flea first up, as it's the shortest. During the writing and recording of Mother's Milk, he was a new father. Clara Balzary was born on September 16, 1988. That was three months after Hillel died, three months after the band almost fell apart, three months before the Mother's Milk sessions commenced. He was in full new dad mode at this point. And of course, that's all he was thinking about. All he had to thank.
There's a mention of Loesha Zeviar in there, Flea's ex-wife and Clara's mother. But he isn't strictly talking about Leosha. Clara's middle names are actually Loesha Zeviar. So really, he's saying Clara's full name, but also including his wife. A nice way to include both parents in the naming of one child!
Chad's entry is a list of names, a lot of whom I'm not familiar with, and clearly some are long-shut restaurants and music stores and a variety of in-jokes, but there are some standouts.
John gets labelled as "Green Man" - which thanks to Scar Tissue we now know actually bothered him a great deal: “Flea and I used to continually tease him, calling him “Greenie” or “The Green Man” or “The Green Hornet.” Years later, John confessed to me that all this ribbing made him incredibly self-conscious, but at the time, we had no idea of the effect we were having on him.”
Baskin Robbins & Lincoln Logs get a shout-out. Why? Well, "his first kit was a set of Baskin-Robbins ice cream containers;" he "air-drummed to Beatles songs using Lincoln Log sticks." And here he was in a new band, about to take over the world.
Anthony goes full picture. Amongst the obvious picks of Mom and Dad and the entire Lakers line-up, are "all the girls that I've ever loved before," Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bob Marley. A lot of easy home runs for him. He thanks Sitting Bull for killing Custer. This was back when Anthony leaned way more into his apparent Native American heritage, which he seems to have stopped mentioning these days... I wonder why...
But something I found fascinating in his entry is his acknowledgment of Jack Sherman (and Cliff Martinez): "They rocked," he says, which is true. They've always loved Cliff, of course, and his leaving the band was amicable. But Jack was pretty far in their rearview mirror at this point. Jack did contribute backing vocals to Mother's Milk, so perhaps he was on his mind when it came time to write these, and Anthony was feeling generous. But to see him outright say something positive about his former bandmember was a nice discovery.
(This was pre-lawsuit. No wonder he wasn't ever thanked again.)
Note the typo in his mention of Stevie Wonder - "the bad ass that his is" - unless he's talking about Stevie's actual ass, which I doubt, that should be he.
(It's nice that AK gives a shout out to Bob Timmons, the guy who got him clean in 1988.)
Some of the people John loves:
Harry "Calamari Butthole" Reemes - I am not going to link you to Harry Reemes. You can Google the ex-porn star yourself.
Bill Breaux, a friend and roommate of John's, son of US Senator John Breaux, who is not a great guy (John B. that is, not Bill B.). In the 1990 VPRO documentary, when John talks about his roommates, he's talking about Bill.
Divine. Featured in John Waters film, whom he also thanks.
Robert Hayes, his friend and fellow musician that he met when he first moved to Hollywood. Robert Hayes died a few weeks before he quit the band in 1992; I have a feeling it contributed heavily to his depression at the time. More on that later.
Sarah Cox, who was his girlfriend at the time. Sarah is the person who, in 1987, asked John if he would still like the Chili Peppers if they ever played the LA Forum. He scoffed and said that would be impossible. In March 2024 they are going to play it for the sixth or seventh time.
Traci Lords, and... see Harry Reemes above. I'm pretty sure that the, er, additional vocalist on "Stone Cold Bush" is Traci Lords. See their appearance in Chad's entry: "for the inspired tracks."
Steve Vai, his original guitar god.
D.H. Peligro, former Chili Pepper, who is responsible for John being in the band in the first place. If Flea or Anthony weren't going to mention him it's nice that at least John did.
The "Two" Free Stooges - either a typo, or an early name for the Too Free Stooges, a band with a big connection to the Chili Peppers, especially in 88-92.
And lastly, it's nice of John to give love to the love his bandmates are living with; Loesha and Ione and Gina. Chad thanks Gina Martocci as well, she might be his first wife, whom he married in 91 or 92, but I'm not that familiar with his personal life.
The acknowledgments section in future albums have never been as detailed or as lengthy as the one in Mother's Milk, nor have they revealed so much about the band's inner lives. I quite enjoyed going through this little slip of paper and glimpsing them as they were in mid-1989, even if a lot of the names were people who have long left their orbit. It's a snapshot in time.
If only all of their albums since had revealed so much.
But then again, I guess that it revealed so much is probably why we didn't see it again.
See you next month.
H.
(P.S. Don't forget that December 16 is the band's 41st birthday.)