Me and My Friends #66 - One Alt Minute
Hello again! This is a companion piece (or a sequel?) to this letter. Everything is a little more straightforward here, and there aren’t any of those strange curiosities relating to timeline placement that the Blood Sugar tapes have.
But it’s all still fascinating. One Hot Minute, like any album, starts out an untouched block of marble and gets chipped and carved and sanded down all the way towards becoming a finished product. I would give a lot to be a fly on the wall when certain decisions were made towards the end of the line here. Was it all done by one or two band members - or maybe even just Rick? Did they vote on it, or did Chad and/or Dave just find out about these things when they heard the finished album for the first time? The mind is boggled.
This is also all very personal to me, seeing as I’m responsible for 2 of the 3 tapes surfacing (don’t tell WB!). I love One Hot Minute and will be its cheerleader until my dying days, and any chance to talk about it, I’ll take.
So. One Hot Minute. What variants are there?
“GRANDMASTER #1” tape ROUGH INSTRUMENTALS (Download here)
This surfaced in 2016 alongside “Circle of the Noose” and belonged at one point to Louis Mathieu, the band’s long time and long-suffering road manager. I think that might be Anthony’s handwriting; I know I’ve seen it elsewhere but I’m not sure where.
As you can see, it’s labelled “Grandmaster #1.” Grandmaster Recordings is the studio (lots of wrong info on that page!) that this was either dubbed at, or maybe where the bulk of the early recordings were done. As you can see, only a handful of songs are present, and while “Walkabout” and “Psychedelic” (aka “Deep Kick”) are listed above, they apparently weren’t on the tape itself. Maybe there’s a “Grandmaster #2” out there with another batch of songs on it.
These are very early, as basic as basic tracks can get. When Chad complained that he recorded his basic tracks over a year before the album came out, and had to re-learn all the songs again, this is what he’s talking about. Every song is instrumental, except for “Pea,” which is essentially finished, and “Aeroplane,” which has a guide vocal, ala the By the Way Sessions CD-R.
“Aeroplane” being more complete than the rest makes sense: it was played live very early on. “Warped” was too, but it’s instrumental here, so make of that what you will.
Things like “Melancholy Mechanics” or, as it was known at this point, “Velvet,” are eye-opening. I’d always assumed it had that working title because it was smooth and… well, velvety. Listening to the instrumental, I wonder if maybe it’s actually a Velvet Underground reference. It sounds like it could be on The Velvet Underground & Nico. It doesn’t not sound like something Lou Reed would write. But that’s a guess.
Instrumentals always make me appreciate Anthony, even the instrumental version of a finished mix. His contributions are always taken for granted, but when you hear tracks without him, you realize that he really did actually have to come up with all this stuff. You sing along with him in your head now, but those parts weren’t always there. It’s the finished piece of the puzzle. You can laugh at his lyrics occasionally - and don’t we all, sometimes - but he’s undeniably a hard worker.
Most enlightening is “Coffee Shop,” which in its basic state feels a lot different, more of a straight-ahead chugging butt-rock track instead of the psychedelic wormy freakout the final version flirts with being.
It was lucky to even be here in the first place:
Coffee Shop would never have been a song if it weren't for this effect called the Electro-Harmonix BassBalls. I started playing with it one morning in Hawaii, and it had the most amazing underwater, Bootsy kind of sound – and it also had this siren effect going on. But when we got to L.A. to start recording, the box never made the sound again. I got so mad, I crushed it! I almost didn't even want to record the song, because to me, it was all about that bass sound. I ended up using a Boss Dynamic Filter on the record.
We didn't know what to do at the end, so I said, 'I'll solo.' I played the track once, and I wanted to fix it later because I thought it sucked, but I never did.
You can hear Flea play the solo here, but it’s mixed low and isn’t that noticeable compared to the way it winds up, and the rest of the band are kind of speeding ahead anyway.
I’m not a huge fan of the song either way, but it was pretty clearly rescued in subsequent overdubs and the edit. Dave’s dive-bomb guitar work becomes the star of the show. In the final mix, they create an ending, and the song itself, out of nowhere. It’s easy to miss how much work goes into things we’d never think about or notice otherwise.
“Shallow be thy Game” is another interesting one. The song feels a little heavier in this early version. Dave also clearly did a lot of additional guitar work here before it was done. Without the cleaner, direct-to-board sounding line it feels more like a straight ahead heavy metal song, instead of the heavy funk-metal song the final version is. (Notice also that effect they put on the guitars in the intro, something similar was done to “Coffee Shop.”)
“Deep Kick” being missing is a shame, only because the basic track would sound quite sparse and different to the track we know. Alongside “My Friends” it’s (I think) the only time an acoustic guitar appears on the album, but I’m not sure where in the process that was laid down. I have a feeling this basic track might have just been Flea and Chad, and Dave went to town on it on his own time.
I find this tape, and other collections like it, fascinating mostly because I’ve made enough music in the past that has existed in this exact kind of form; unfinished, but with something there, the knowledge that at some point in the future it was going to be complete. Full of potential. Bits will go, bits will arrive, bits will be refined before it’s all over. Sometimes its the best work you’ve ever done, sometimes it’s dreck you’re ashamed to have anything to do with. Anthony probably walked around and drove around with this tape, maybe this exact tape, thinking of lyrics, listening to the songs over and over again.
For now, it’s something to marvel at.
(As an aside, I’d give anything to hear the DAT tapes Dave is talking about in this article. Hours and hours of variants.)
“6/21/95” tape (Download here)
In between the last tape, Anthony’s “writer’s block,” a whole host of vocals and overdubs, and the eventual end of the recording sessions, a lot of work actually got done. In fact, you can see it all in one place here.
This collection is not Black Fish Ferris Wheel, as a few silly RHCP fans have decided to name it. It didn’t even have a name at this point. It’s just every single song finished during the One Hot Minute sessions, put in one place. There’s no real order to the tracks, but if you ask me you can’t detect a kind of preference between which songs appear first and which are dumped at the end.
Like a few of those Blood Sugar tapes, it appears to have belonged to a Warner Bros. executive. Interestingly they seemed to have kept up with all the bits of news and alterations made after the tape’s dubbing: the release date of September 12 is noted, “Velvet” and “Bob” are “off,” “Epic” is renamed “1 Hot Minute,” which is then noted as the “LP title.” “One Big Mob/Stretch” is circled, which might have something to do with “Stretch” being cut from the album before release. I think that says “non-LP” next to “Coffee Shop,” so maybe that was destined to be a B-side at one point? (It actually was a B-side, but also an album track. It was also a single! How’s that for a trifecta!)
I’m picturing the executive on a phone call, being told all about the forthcoming release and writing this down on his copy of the tape while he’s still on the phone. There’s a kind of note-taking, half-present way it’s all written.
This tape is the source of “Blender” finally leaking after 28 years in the wilderness. The band are clearly never going to do a B-sides boxset (he says, hoping to be wrong), so I was glad to finally be able to rip this and get it out there for everyone a few years back.
It’s also the only place you can get a complete, unedited version of “One Big Mob/Stretch.” In the past you’d had to edit the 2006 iTunes release of “Stretch” onto “One Big Mob,” but it was never perfect, and there were definite audible differences. Here it’s all one long movement, essentially the band’s longest song, a miracle on tape.
CIRCA EARLY AUGUST 1995 PROMO TAPES
As they prepared for its release and gave the album its name, One Hot Minute went through a great deal of last-minute alteration and refinement. Early track lists were announced in the press and several journalists even got sent pre-release copies.
Here’s one, from either a Melody Maker or an NME magazine. Notice how "Warped” and “Deep Kick” still have their working titles (“Warped” was released as a single on August 21, so this info might have already been out of date.)
This one here, actually previewed in great detail, has the same track list, but with their final track names. The article also specifically mentions that they’re listening to an advance cassette.
Unfortunately, none of these tapes have ever surfaced, but luckily their contents all exist elsewhere, so there might not be anything exclusive on them. I’d still love to see one, if only to get my hands on as much as I can from this era.
Between these early promo copies, and this next tape below, “Stretch” was snipped from “One Big Mob” and “Blender” was removed entirely.
“Blender,” I get. The song is even more of a sly, quick wink than “Thirty Dirty Birds” or “They’re Red Hot.” It’s basically a thirty second joke. I think if it had been sequenced so it didn’t have its own track marker, and just exploded for a few moments before “Transcending” began, it could work. A kind of hidden-track, but in the middle of the album. Otherwise, I can’t imagine it having much of a positive impact on the album, or being all that beloved by fans.
“Stretch,” on the other hand, is a shame to lose, and a shame for it to be relegated to B-side status. Out of it or “One Big Mob,” I know which I prefer.
Slowly, surely, we approach the finish line.
“UNMASTERED/UNSEQUENCED” tape (Download here)
This is a final draft of the album before it was mastered. It’s the same (early) running order as listed above. There’s no “Blender,” and “One Big Mob” fades out before “Stretch” can begin, but harshly. Real harshly, without much care given to it. Because, of course, this wasn’t the final version of the album, and they didn’t need to get it completely right.
This was the what they intended the album to be when they went into Precision Mastering in, I guess, late-August 1995.
First up, the running order was shifted around while they were in there. It’s only because we’re so used to the final version, but honestly, thank god they did: track 3 is way too early for the (wonderful, but) punishing ordeal of “One Hot Minute” to show up, and “Deep Kick” and its moody ambiance appearing just as the revelry and cheerfulness of “Aeroplane” fades out is too good not to have.
A couple of songs were also edited for length. I don’t think this was done for the same reason that a few tracks from Blood Sugar were cut - i.e. because if not, it wouldn’t fit on a CD. There was still plenty of room. I think they were just making the last round of editorial decisions.
Here are some of the changes made between this version of the album and the final retail edition:
“One Hot Minute” - a few bars of verse after the first chorus were cut.
“Deep Kick” - the song fades out much earlier in the retail version.
“Walkabout” - the introduction goes for a few more bars, and there’s additional lyrics before the “a walk could kill almost all my blues” that were cut.
“Falling into Grace” - a huge portion of the coda was completely cut out. They were lucky there’s such a clean pause where they could end it - which sounds intentional if you didn’t know better! - otherwise, they’d have to do another long fade.
Lots and lots of little edits that shave and trim and refine and perfect. Lots of little changes that, when you hear the alternate version after all those years, sound bizarre, like they’re from some alternate universe. Being halfway through a song you’ve heard 1000 times and then it suddenly being different is the audio equivalent of there being an extra step in a staircase.
(You’ll notice that in the liner notes, they’ve even credited a Digital Editor - that’s how much got done.)
When I first ripped and released this tape in 2011, it was the first time the extended versions of these songs had ever been heard. These extended editions circulated again via the 6/21/95 tape in 2023, but I think the equipment I used in 2011 was much better, even if it could do with an EQ boost. There’s a buzz in the 6/21/95 tape that proved basically impossible to get rid of. (Long story short: cassette players are fucking hard to find these days, and even harder to rip properly!)
And that’s that. The album exists in one final version now, but it was something being edited and decided-upon until basically the last moment. The finished thing is a beautiful work of art, but it’s always fun to spend some time in an alternate universe.
These have all surfaced relatively recently, so who knows what might pop up next, whether it be for this era or anything relating to the band. For all we know “The Intimidator” and “The Junkie Song” are sitting on some DAT in a garage waiting to be sent our way.
See you next time.