Me and My Friends #7 - a followup on last time, and some thoughts on Stadium Arcadium
Hi gang.
Not a whole lot to talk about this time, but hey - let’s see where we end up.
Up front, here’s a few extra things about the band in Japan in May 1992, following on from the last letter.
Loyal reader Santiago sent me a couple of pictures that Instagram user kpgang75 uploaded of Flea and Anthony in Japan during that tour. On his page, there’s also a great photo of John from the 1990 tour.
You can see in the photo of Flea that he’s wearing the Astro Boy shirt that he bought in Osaka on May 2.
I haven’t been able to get a reply from this user about his experiences meeting the band (I’m assuming that’s him in the photos) but if anyone manages, please let me know.
Looking at those pictures, it occured to me that Flea has blue hair, and somehow that got me thinking about those infamous Rolling Stone pictures that John was eventually cut out of. (I don’t think I could have told you what colour his hair was if you’d asked me, but clearly my brain had filed away that fact…)
Apologies for the NSFW image, but there’s a reason I picked that one.
Obviously, these photos were taken in the weeks before the band toured Japan, but it only just occurred to me, thanks to Flea’s hair and Anthony’s bandaged wrist, that they must have been taken a few days before they left. In other words, mid-to-late-April. Remember what that journalist, or friend, or whoever they were, said:
It seemed that Anthony Kiedis had been injured in a mountain biking accident, so his left arm was bandaged from thumb to wrist.
That looks like a bandage on his left wrist to me. Further, you can compare the colour and length of Flea’s hair here with those Instagram photos above. You can also see that John still has that reverse-mohawk, Firestarter haircut in this photo, taken May 7, 1992:
What I’m getting at is: I think, appropriately, these photos are John’s last photos as a member of the band.1 Obviously they were taken towards the time he quit, but it never occurred to me that it was that close. Here he was, taking photos for the cover of Rolling Stone, and out of the band a week later.
Nothing else - professional or amateur, photo, audio or video - has surfaced. The only photo of John in Japan is, technically, after he had already quit the band. It’s quite poetic, then, that he had to be cut out when we all got to see it.
But look - even here, there’s the occasional smile:
Anyway, like I said in the last dispatch, the intention here is for this whole thing to be always added to and stay in a state of constant change and addition. If any more photos from April and May of 1992, I’ll be sure to let you know. If you’ve seen any, please let me know!
Elsewhere, I’ve written that this it’s so good to be a fan of this band because they have eras. Losing eighteen different guitarists every couple years hasn’t been the best thing for their productivity, and it’s almost broken them up a few times, but it means that each album is basically an entire different band.
Maybe that’s the case with every group that have been around for more than five years. But the people that made Blood Sugar Sex Magik aren’t the same people that made Californication, even though, well, they are. And then By the Way is a whole other thing. And so on.
Different sounds, different vibes, different art styles, different types of live shows. People laugh at the fact that this band have had so many different guitarists, but I’m actually thankful for that. What a gift to be able to completely reshape their entire sound time and time again.
Maybe I’m alone here, but often I go through stages of just listening to one album, just thinking about one particular John-haircut. And lately, for some reason, I’ve been thinking about Stadium Arcadium a lot.
I think it started because I saw a Youtube recommendation for those track commentaries that accompanied the deluxe edition of the album way back in 2006. One little dip and I was completely back in.
I have a lot of wonderful, wonderful memories from that period. I’m going to go on a bit of a stream-of-consciousness rant here, if that’s okay. Just let it all unfurl. A lot of this might be completely inaccurate, but it’s how I remember the time…
Funny, I used to think I was such a late-comer to the band, and I was, but there are huge fans now who would have only been two or three years old when SA came out. Time gets away from you, and sometimes an eight month period gets compressed into a tiny sliver, but here’s what I remember from the period:
The first little glimpse of things to come came all the way back in July of 2005. The band played a concert in honor of the 100th anniversary of Las Vegas, and debuted “21st Century” and “Readymade” there. Spot the hilarious mistaken song name here. Two main thoughts went through the community:
1: “Readymade” sounded a LOT like “Mountain Song” (well, the bassline did at least).
2: John was really going for it on the guitar. Both new songs featured blistering guitar solos, and during the rest of the show he was at the top of his game. I still think that version of Give It Away was the best they ever played it, and a lot of that is because of John’s incredible solo(s).
It feels like every time there’s a new RHCP album, the major thing that gets said in advance is some permutation of “OMG the punkfunk is back” or “OMG I wish the punkfunk was back”, as if these 50+ year old men are about to release another “Blackeyed Blonde”. Well, when the band played again in August of 2005, they debuted “Tell Me Baby.”
Slap bass and chicken scratch guitar? People went wild. First the heavy metal of “Readymade”, and now this. Finally, they screamed, after the “weakness” that was By the Way, the kings were back for the crown. Me, I was excited to get an album. It didn’t matter what it sounded like.
(I still think like that).
A few months after those performances, Chad let slip at – I think – a basketball game, that the new album was going to be a double (everyone was doing them those days), and that it was called going to be called Stadium Arcadium.
The exact makeup of the album shifted a couple of times; first it was coming out in April and had 25 songs, then it was April and 24 songs, at one point “Strip My Mind” was called “Early 80s”… the differences go on and on.
In early March or April, I believe, the official website had an alternate tracklisting up, and it was pretty close but slightly different to the one we know and love today. I think “Especially in Michigan” and “Torture Me” was missing from that list, which is why they’re also missing from the album commentaries, if I’m remembering correctly.
Early reports also said that “Especially in Michigan” was going to be an iTunes bonus track, and “Mercy Mercy” would be a Target-exclusive, but of course “Michigan” wound up being on the final album, and all the B-sides were simply B-sides. (I’m glad the album didn’t go that route).
After a few months of radio silence, a lot of things happened at once. Excitement brewed and blossomed. The trailer for the album came out (though maybe this was later?)… Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure that’s an alternate mix of “Dani California” at the end.
stadium-arcadium.com was founded during this period as well, and that site (RIP) pretty much immediately established itself as the premier Chili Peppers forum online, a feat that still hasn’t been matched.
It was at that forum that a recording of the band (just Anthony, John and Flea) playing in February at a Silverlake benefit surfaced. I recall that there was a lot of behind the scenes drama about it leaking out; it was supposed to be a private trade, or something like that. There are a thousand names from that message board that I used to think of as close friends, but they’re all gone now.
Anyway, thanks to that performance we heard “Dani California”, “Wet Sand” and the new version of “Desecration Smile” for the first time (there’s a recording at that link above). I remember frusciante.net put up a page with guesses about what the lyrics were, even an early tab. A lot of people got excited about John’s solo, even if he did temper it down for the acoustic.
“Desecration Smile” had the new chorus now, as well, and it was weird to get your head around it, the same way hearing the original version would feel now.
I have a lot of memories about hearing “Dani California” and the entire album for the first time, but I won’t bore you with them all; I was fifteen, it was a heady time, we’ve all been there. There were a lot of afternoons full of pale light, abstract, months-away tension, and message board perusal, lots of people faking that they had heard the album early, and coming up with so-vague-they-meant-nothing descriptions of the album. This was back in the day when music magazines still existed, and there was actual information in them you couldn’t get elsewhere. Q was great; NME was too, but they hated the Chili Peppers. Rolling Stone was decent, but not my favourite.
There were a couple of really good gigs just before the album release; I remember downloading a rip of the broadcast of the Canvas Club show and hearing “Charlie” for the first time and just vibrating in the dark with excitement. I’m pretty sure that gig was also the source of the jam commonly given the name “My Girl, My Boy”, which people still think was a real song, even today.
The day I finally got the album, I walked into JB Hifi and “Slow Cheetah” was playing over the speakers. Then I went back to my friend Mark’s house and we listened to it from top to bottom; a man on MSN (remember MSN?!) told me I must have been mistaking the lyrics to “Wet Sand”, but I told him to go fuck himself, because I had the book right there in front of me. I’m not sure why that memory sticks out…
A few fun things that I picked up from the commentary videos:
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The band did take after take of “Warlocks”, but wound up using the very first one they recorded. As far as I’m aware, there’s no “alternate take” for any Chili Peppers song out there… I’d be really curious to hear a bunch of different versions of, say, “If You Have To Ask”. It wouldn’t have any vocals, of course, but it’d still be a fun little historical document.
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“She’s Only 18” used to have a completely different chorus. I wonder if demos exist of all these early versions…or if they’re in any releasable form of fidelity.
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Anthony… didn’t rate “Hump De Bump”? He doesn’t even seem to register the name at first. A lot of people made fun of his gibberish vocals, but to his own credit, he didn’t even want the song on the record.
Glenn Hughes Forum, May 5, 2006
I suppose now is as good a time as any to admit that I also helped leak the album; it came out a week or two early in Gibraltar and I and a few other people on stadium-arcadium helped talk a fan through the process of ripping it and uploading it. That, of course, lead to Flea’s wildly misinformed Fleamail:
when i woke up this morning, i was was confronted with the news that our record has been leaked to the internet, it does not come out til may 9 but now it has leaked, and not that i know alot about this kind of thing, but i guess now it is possible to down load it for free if you want. well, that’s not very nice, if you down load it now off one of these file sharing sites, you will be getting a pale imitation of the record, it will be of the poor sound quality of the technique they used to, get it on there. and that will break my heart
Of course, what leaked sounded better than what was going to be on iTunes a week or so later, but as Flea himself says: he didn’t know what he was talking about.
(I didn’t listen to the leak; I was a good boy. The one time I tried, I stopped myself a few seconds into “Snow”. I think it was morals related, but who knows.)
I did a poll on Twitter recently about favourite songs, and Wet Sand won, predictably. It blew every song out of the water, and never received anything less than 50% of the vote.
Here were the final ten songs:
- Desecration Smile
- Snow (Hey Oh)
- 21st Century
- Turn It Again
- Slow Cheetah
- Especially in Michigan
- Dani California
- Wet Sand
- Hey
- Hard To Concentrate
Not a bad album. And this highlights the beauty of double-albums - you can pick and mix and make your own. Part of me salivates at creating a little Beatles-esque 10-track/40 minute version of SA and seeing how it feels. But which tracks? It would probably look something like this:
- She’s Only 18
- 21st Century
- Slow Cheetah
- Torture Me
- Wet Sand
- Hey
- Desecration Smile
- Animal Bar
- We Believe
- Turn It Again
- Death of a Martian
That’s probably not the best flow, but that’s a damn good album, and I haven’t even included b-sides (I’d probably add “Lately” and “I’ll Be Your Domino”).
(All of these scans courtesy The Chili Source)
Stadium Arcadium completely took over the winter of 2006 for me. Not a single album since has completely soundtracked months and months of my life. But I also disliked a lot of it. “Hump De Bump” embarrassed the hell out of me, and it’s only recently that can actually appreciate it.
In fact, during this latest flurry of focus, I went through each song from the SA sessions that I didn’t like, and listened to it again with years of distance. Some of these songs I hadn’t heard in about a decade. I think – maybe? – it’s “important” (?) to re-evaluate stuff that you don’t like about the things you love. Normally I’d be the first to tell someone that if they didn’t enjoy something, then don’t waste your time with it, but it doesn’t hurt to dive back in once in a while…2
Stadium Arcadium: Still bores me. To put this dreary slog so early in the running order of the album really slows things down. I appreciate the breakdown, though. How many extended bridges are there in the RHCP canon?
Especially in Michigan: This song suffers badly from Anthony’s tendency to rhyme every line of a song, with no thought to whether it makes sense or not. And the rest of it is… smeary. That’s the word that comes to me.
C’mon Girl: Dull verse, dull, repetitive chorus.
Make You Feel Better: I always cringed a little at this song, but that’s starting to change. The lyrics bothered me - I know where Anthony was coming from, but it still felt very self-serving and egotistical. But it’s fun and upbeat, and the layering that emerges and evolves throughout it is fun to listen to. The backing vocals towards the end (AK, right?) are something pretty unheard in any other Chili Peppers song.
Storm In A Teacup: John, almost infamously, said that he liked this song until Anthony put his lyrics onto it. I agree. (The rest of the song is pretty uninspired anyway).
Funny Face & Joe: These two songs are fun, and I’m not saying I hate them, but they feel more like experiments than anything else. “Joe”, especially, is just the band doing a reggae impression, King Tubby dub echo effects and all. An outlier in the RHCP discography, a bit like “The Sunset Sleeps”…
Mercy Mercy: At a certain point, maybe Anthony should have stopped himself. Instead of writing lyrics for every song they released, he could have worked harder on a smaller batch. The pre-chorus on this track… why?
A Certain Someone: Not bad, but perhaps too short for its own good. It doesn’t fit anywhere. Remember when people used to think this was a Greatest Hits session song, because of the “digital” sounding drums?
Whatever We Want: Another song where it seemed like they were copying another sound. It didn’t work.
Million Miles of Water: I really love the verse riff, and then the song keeps derailing itself by repeating the chorus over and over again. Missed potential? This track feels like it really could have been on the final album, though.
I started writing this entry a long time ago; so long ago that the Stadium Arcadium phase I was in has completely ended. I couldn’t find the time to write it as I was busy with uni.
However… that just finished, forever, and now I can throw myself back into this, including the book about the band in 1983 that I’m writing. Next month, I might share a little of what I have so far.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Hamish