Out in L.A.: The Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1983

Prologue

August 23, 2003

Slane Castle, County Meath, Ireland

We fade in from darkness. At first, all that’s visible are the bare branches of a tree, but this tree soon begins to overhang tens of thousands of people, their breath bated, their bellies full of hard cider, their legs sore and the backs of their necks red after hours of waiting in the Irish sun. Music has been playing, but it’s just the preshow selection, quietly blasted out over wildly powerful speakers that reach all corners of the packed field. Anticipation is in the air, so thick you can sense it through the screen.

Something changes somewhere. It’s not that the lights go down; there is no descent into darkness that usually accompanies moments like these. We’re outside; it’s only dusk, and in this late Irish summer, the sky won’t go black for at least another hour. But the audience realizes the moment is here. As one, they scream.

The camera glides across the front row of a crowd that is packed with young faces, a crush of people who have stood at the hard metal barricade all day. They’re a mess of body parts, arms sticking up from nowhere, anxious clapping, sweaty heads. Most of them are wearing shirts with band logos on them; most of them are for the band they’re here to see.

Onstage, and out from behind a stack of car-sized Marshall amplifiers, come guitarist John Frusciante and bassist Flea, grins on their faces. Frusciante, long-haired and skittish, has his 1962 sunburst Fender Stratocaster slung over his shoulder, and he mutters something to himself as he sees the crowd properly for the first time.

It looks like holy fuck.

Shocked or not, he starts to play a piece in the key of D—an improvised melodic wail, emotional and comforting at the same time. An introduction to something bigger. Flea—dressed in a skeleton suit as a nod to bass hero John Entwistle—joins in, playing bass his own way, not just sticking to root notes but crafting an individual melodic piece. Soon their drummer, Chad Smith, sitting on the riser behind them, picks up the beat and guides them to a finely tuned crescendo as the lights sparkle all around. It’s something they’ve done thousands of times before, but in different permutations, each composition made up on the fly and unique to the performance. These are world-class musicians. When they’re done—the moment decided upon seemingly via telepathy—their singer Anthony Kiedis bounds onstage to a further rapturous cheer, and like that, they’ve begun.

On August 23, 2003, the annual Slane Concert was headlined by the Los Angeles–based rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Held on the grounds of Slane Castle, an eighteenth-century manor in County Meath, Ireland, the day also featured performances from rock legends PJ Harvey, Queens of the Stone Age, and Foo Fighters.

The show was an enormous affair. Eighty-five thousand adoring fans lay sprawled and screaming across the expansive castle grounds, with a fireworks display capping off the long day of music and festivities. It was a special day when all had gone right. A professional film crew captured the ninety-minute-long performance by the headliners, and it was released soon after as a bestselling DVD, whose audience has only grown thanks to online streaming. *1

In August 2003, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were on top of the world. Arguably, they were the biggest band in the world at the time. Their latest album, 2002’s dream-pop inspired By the Way, was already well on its way to selling an eventual nine million copies worldwide, and the songs performed during the Slane Castle show included many of their beloved worldwide hits, like Can’t Stop, Scar Tissue, and Under the Bridge. That month, the band were in the middle of an enormously successful world tour that took them to virtually every continent. In the years to come, they would release a Greatest Hits collection that rarely left the charts, and three more blockbuster albums. In 2012 they undertook a victory lap induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, all the while constantly writing new music and flexing their creative muscles.

Way up in the top rungs of the music industry, the Chili Peppers could have quit at any point over the last two decades and still remained an all-time legendary act. They are big enough that they can disappear for half a decade—which has happened on several occasions—and still make the news upon their reemergence. They can headline any festival the world over, whenever they wish. They are big enough that their sound is easily reproduced and satirized, yet never bettered. Each individual member is a celebrity in his own right, especially the two founding members, singer Anthony Kiedis and bass player Michael Flea Balzary. Longtime guitarist John Frusciante is frequently labeled one of the best guitarists of his generation, if not of all time, and Flea and Chad Smith have received similar accolades. Anthony Kiedis, while perhaps no virtuoso, is irreplaceable to the band, and has perhaps grown the most in his role out of any of them.

One may wonder where these four individuals came from. How they got to that stage in Ireland on that late summer’s day in 2003. What journey had they been on, and what odds had they beaten to get there? Like all great groups, they were shaped and molded by their own histories; nothing great ever emerged from a vacuum, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are no exception.

Does one look to John Frusciante’s triumphant return in 1998, and the band’s subsequent world domination with the release of Californication the next year? Or maybe the pivotal moment was earlier, when Frusciante first joined the band a decade previous, replacing original guitarist Hillel Slovak after his tragic heroin overdose, setting them on an entirely different course? Is it one of the many times—1992, 2009—when they’ve been left without a key member, and yet decided to move forward as a band anyway?

What explains their longevity, their uniqueness, and their unbreakable spirit?

To answer that question, one certainly won’t go amiss looking as far back as possible to compare the Red Hot Chili Peppers of 2003 with their original incarnation in 1983. Twenty years is a long time. It is longer than most bands are together, after all.

In August 2003 the band were superstar behemoths, an autonomous industry with hundreds of employees and a fleet of trucks, playing on this particular day to so many people that, for safety reasons, the band had to helicopter into the show.

In August 1983 the very-different looking and sounding quartet was only about eight months old. They had, if one is being generous, ten songs in their repertoire. And of those ten, two were over in under a minute, one was a quick-fire Jimi Hendrix cover, and three were simple campfire-style a capella jokes.

They were almost a joke themselves. The early Red Hot Chili Peppers didn’t take themselves seriously, and neither did the crowds they played to. It was not a career yet. Most of the members played in different, more serious bands: bands that had real potential, bands that had been built from the ground up and amassed actual fan bases outside their own circle of friends. This new thing was just a side project, something that had taken them three live performances to even think of a real name for.

But by the end of 1983, things were in motion in a way that nobody, especially the band, ever expected. Maybe they weren’t such a joke after all; maybe there was something real happening there. They had developed their act onstage, playing live approximately thirty times, and had worked out most of the kinks in their live show. They had recorded a blistering demo, a perfect representation of their repertoire as it stood at that moment, with an energy and economy that they would spend the rest of their careers trying to re-create.

They had also suffered the first setbacks of their careers, the first in a long line of setbacks that would have destroyed any other band. They had lost their guitarist and drummer—key members and close, childhood friends—who wrote music and partied and bled and loved and danced with those that had remained.

They would lose a guitarist nine more times in the next three decades, and a few drummers on top of that for good measure. This first parting was merely a warm-up. The decision to continue the band at the end of 1983 by Anthony Kiedis and Flea was a decision made many times again.

As their stage time at Slane Castle finishes, and the band (half of them shirtless, all of them sweaty and exhilarated) wave to their adoring crowd, the Red Hot Chili Peppers head backstage to catch their breath and prepare for their next move. More stops on the traveling behemoth beckon: one more show in Scotland, and then another leg of an endless US arena tour. A far cry from the miniscule world they inhabited in their formative year, in which all but one show was performed in their beloved native state of California.

Everything that made the Red Hot Chili Peppers the superstars of modern rock that they are today was only able to happen because of the events of 1983. Each step made in that chaotic year planted the seeds for the rest of their illustrious career. There were moments of chance, moments of chaos, moments of lunacy. But there were common threads: a love of music—more specifically, a love of a certain kind of music—and a love for each other, whether it was all four band members or just the core two, Flea and Anthony. This band could have broken up countless times since they came together; because of 1983, they never have. Without 1983, there’s no Slane Castle, no story beforehand, and no story afterward.

What follows is the story of how the young men who became the Red Hot Chili Peppers met, how they formed their band at the tail end of 1982, and how they decided to turn a one-off show into much more than that. It is the story of where they played, what they played, and who they played with. This is also a story about the punk scene in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Unique, vibrant, and as wholesome as it was seedy, these often sparsely populated shows took place in wildly different venues across the city. Converted restaurants, country-and-western bars, and strip clubs all feature.

Most important, it is the story of Anthony, Michael, Hillel, and Jack, four kids who got lucky and tapped into something unexpected that to this day still endures.

Before the Beginning: 1982

Michael Balzary was nineteen years old and technically homeless when he moved into the Contemporary Artists Space of Hollywood (CASH) at the end of 1981. Run by Janet Cunningham and located at 1953 Cahuenga Boulevard, CASH opened in June of that year and was immediately home to a variety of punks and street kids, including Laurence Fishburne, star of the recently released Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now.

CASH was Cunningham’s ploy to get grant money from the federal government. Having already been involved in similar spaces in her native New Orleans, she decided to incorporate her own after moving to Los Angeles: Get grant money, open up a performance space, put on shows, theatre, live music, readings. ¹ A calendar from the period shows a typical week of performances on Monday, video and film screenings on Tuesday and Wednesday, and new music nights on Thursday.

An extremely informal enterprise, over time CASH evolved from a gallery and artists space into a crash pad for a few locals. Frequently, those that hung out there were invited to stay the night, as long as they helped out. Though he never lived there, Fishburne would provide free security for shows, and Balzary’s ongoing residence was dependent on his sweeping skills. Early ads for the space listed the opening times as 9 p.m. until whenever people decide to leave. Bring your own refreshments. ²

Cunningham, a no-nonsense woman who took shit from no one, ³ also kept her scrappy guests fed with generous meals of New Orleans–style beans and rice while they slept off hangovers, created art, and formed countless bands; some one-off, others a little more serious.

Michael Balzary wasn’t yet the internationally famous rock bassist better known as Flea. Born in Melbourne on October 16, 1962, his customs officer father moved the family to New York from Australia when Michael was seven. His parents broke up shortly afterward, and his father, Michael Sr., moved back home on his own permanently, not wishing to disrupt his children’s education. His mother, Patricia, subsequently moved the family into the home of jazz double bassist Walter Urban Jr., a teacher at the Manhattan School of Music, where she was learning guitar. They soon married. ⁴

The Balzary family was uprooted again to Los Angeles, arriving in the city on November 14, 1972, and ten-year-old Michael was soon torn from a pleasant but dull suburbia and quickly surrounded by music, violence, and illegal drugs on the West Coast. Despite the hardships, an important connection to music, specifically jazz, was sparked during this time. Walter Urban would hold jam sessions at home with local musicians, and Michael would watch, mesmerized at what he was seeing: These guys would pick up these things and start blowing and sucking and hitting and plucking, and it made me so happy I’d roll around on the floor laughing. ⁵

But his stepfather and his friends were rarely employed and often in trouble with the police, causing family friction and driving Michael to start roaming the streets in order to escape the trouble at home. Eventually, he developed drinking and marijuana habits. These guys couldn’t really catch a break, he remembered years later. They had shitty jobs. My stepdad would fix cars in a backyard. He was a great bass player, man. God bless him, it was very difficult. ⁶ When Walter Urban was working, it was with greats such as Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Gaines, and Joe Greene, but those gigs were few and far between.

Unsurprisingly, Michael also picked up a musical instrument. Urban played double bass, but his son-in-law strayed slightly and started playing the trumpet at eleven. A scholarship student, Michael was soon highly proficient, even playing with the Jr. Philharmonic Orchestra and the Los Angeles City College Jazz Band for a spell, in addition to his school marching band, choir, and orchestra. *1 But by the time he had moved into the CASH club in 1981, he was, more or less, a full-time electric bass player, and in a rock band, to boot.

The band Michael played in formed at Fairfax High School, on Melrose Avenue, on the border of West Hollywood. They first played as a three-piece, without a bass player, under the name Raven, which was changed to Chain Reaction, and again to Anthem. Once they discovered that another band from the San Fernando Valley already had that name, they switched up the spelling and started calling themselves Anthym. By mid-1981 *2 they had moved on again to something more arty, and more permanent, and by the autumn of that year the foursome were playing local clubs and developing the beginnings of a following under the name What Is This. *3

Michael was drafted into the band (back when they were still known as Anthym) by his school friend Hillel Slovak toward the end of 1979, as a replacement for their original bass player, Todd Strassman, who joined around the time they changed their name to Anthem. Hillel and the band’s vocalist Alain Johannes saw potential in their friend, who by then was only a trumpet player, but who had grown up with a double bass-playing stepfather. We needed a bass player, Johannes recalled, and we thought it would be really good to take somebody who didn’t play and mould them to our own style. ⁷

In later years Alain Johannes mentioned that Strassman left amicably to focus on his plans to go to law school. But in 1994 the incoming bassist remembered the situation a little differently: Hillel said, ‘Our bass player’s a jerk, why don’t you learn to play bass?’ ⁸, *4

He recalled the moment he was asked in a televised conversation with longtime producer Rick Rubin in 2019:

He [Slovak] said to me, Why don’t you join our rock band, and we’ll get rid of the bass player we have ’cause he’s not willing to give his life to it. And that was, you know, and I’ll never forget that moment. Like sitting in his car, pulled over to the side of the road, it was raining outside. And the DJ, Kim Ladd on KMET, was playing Riders on the Storm, *5 and it was raining. I don’t know if I ever felt that loved in my life, ever. Like in that moment, you know what I mean, join our band? ⁹

A few months after picking up a bass guitar for the first time, Michael and Anthym were performing live at the legendary club Gazzarri’s in a Battle of the Bands competition. Soon afterward, the new member involved himself deeper by becoming the band’s booking agent. Anthym came in second at the competition at Gazarri’s, but only because the winning band carted a busload of their friends in to cheer for them. Michael didn’t drop the horn entirely; he still played it from time to time, including onstage with his new rock band, but the bass became his musical focus going forward.

The poodle-haired boys of Anthym. Alain, Michael, Hillel, and Jack just before a show at the Troubadour, their biggest show yet. Circa 1980.

Hillel Slovak was born in Haifa, a coastal town in northern Israel, on April 13, 1962. His parents were Holocaust survivors, and the family, which by then included a younger brother James, moved (like the Balzary family) first to New York and then to Los Angeles in 1967. Hillel received his first guitar as a Bar Mitzvah present from his uncle Aron and went to music lessons on Fairfax Avenue with his schoolmate Jack Irons, a Los Angeles native, also of Jewish heritage. *6

As a child, Jack had seen a drum set in the window of a music store and had known immediately that drums were his future, once he was able to convince his father to buy him a set. He didn’t think I was ready to take it on seriously, he remembered. ¹⁰ The drums would come with his thirteenth birthday, but in the meantime, bashing away on pots and pans with cutlery would do the trick. Around the same time, Jack and Hillel started a KISS cover band, *7 miming to album cuts in front of their homeroom classmates at Halloween in Junior High, one of whom was their future bandmate.

The lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist in What Is This was Alain Johannes Mociulski. He was born in Santiago, Chile, on May 2, 1962, but had moved to Los Angeles (by way of Switzerland and Mexico) with his parents as a twelve-year-old. After watching Hillel and Jack mime KISS tracks on that day in homeroom, Alain, for reasons still unclear to him many years later—I was very shy, I spoke very little English ¹¹—decided to test the structural integrity of Jack’s flimsy homemade codpiece, which was actually just a tennis ball cut in half and spray-painted silver. He quickly discovered it had very little. After a frenzied apology, the trio began to jam, and Raven was formed, with the band rehearsing in a variety of bedrooms and garages across Los Angeles. Alain (whose father was a musician, and whose uncle, Peter Rock, was a star back in Chile) had been playing the guitar since he was four years old, and so was the most experienced musician in the group as well as its de facto leader. *8

What Is This comprised these four members, but their circle of school friends was extensive; some of these friends were musicians, like Keith Barry, who played viola and whose father sold Michael his first bass, and Patrick English, who played trumpet. Some were not musicians, or at least not yet. One of these latter friends was Anthony Kiedis.

Anthony was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 1, 1962. As a child, his family moved to Los Angeles to follow his father, John Kiedis, in his dreams of becoming an actor. But fame did not come as quickly as all had hoped, and the family fell apart soon after; Anthony moved back to Michigan with his newly single mother, while his father stayed in Los Angeles. In the intervening years, John Kiedis graduated with honors from UCLA and studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute, known for its method acting techniques. He played bit parts in Starsky & Hutch and Charlie’s Angels in the late seventies, but most of his income in these early days came from publicity work and drug dealing.

John was a mythical figure to Anthony. Aside from the odd visit during summer holidays or an impromptu visit east to run drugs, Anthony would only ever hear from his father through letters and care packages that showed a vastly different life to the one he was living in the snowy, freezing, boring Midwest. But in 1974 they reconnected, as the younger Kiedis got his wish and finally moved back to California, and right into a life of movie auditions, close proximity with rock legends, and free and easy drug use. Eventually the elder Kiedis rebranded himself as Blackie Dammett, a stage name inspired in part by pulp crime author Dashiel Hammett.

Michael and Anthony met when they were both fifteen years old. At first, Anthony had tried to attend University High upon his graduation from Emerson Junior High but had been prevented by the school from enrolling once the administration discovered that he had been lying about his address. *9 He was sent to Fairfax High, seven miles to the east, instead.

This was a disappointing shock at first, but it changed his life in many ways. About a month into the school year, Anthony was confronted with the image of his friend Tony Shurr being held in a headlock by a runty kid with a puffy afro and a gap tooth; to add further insult to injury, this suddenly present bully was in the process of administering a noogie. Pulling the kid off Shurr, Anthony came face to face with Michael Balzary for the first time and threatened him with violence if he ever lay another hand on Tony. The altercation was quickly defused, but later that day the two were sat next to each other in driver’s education class. Their teacher had a pet peeve about students writing on school property; when Anthony left his seat, Michael wrote Anthony Kiedis Was Here on his vacant desk, which Anthony could only find funny upon his return. *10 The next day, they sat together in the gym bleachers as rain interrupted a physical education lesson, starting a conversation that, as Michael said, continues forty-odd years later. ¹²

Even though we were starting off on this ‘I’ll kick your ass aggressiveness,’ Anthony remembered, I felt an instant connection to the remarkable little weirdo. ¹³ They were quickly inseparable, even if they were polar opposites in many ways. This was perhaps a result of Anthony’s admitted attempts to befriend all the loneliest and most unwanted kids in school. ¹⁴

More consequential friendships were to be made. One day shortly after meeting Michael, Anthony watched a strange band full of poodle-haired boys called Anthym perform during a lunch break in the Fairfax High quad and took one of the band’s pins that were being passed around. He happened to be wearing this pin shortly afterward when he ran into Hillel Slovak, who invited him over for a snack after school. They bonded over egg salad sandwiches and immediately became close friends as well. Anthony, Michael, and Hillel became their own little group inside the larger friendship circle that blossomed after they graduated from Fairfax in July of 1980. *11 More into outrageous antics and illicit substances than, say, Alain Johannes or Jack Irons were, the three of them were Los Faces, a joke gang in which they all had their own Cheech & Chong–inspired Mexican alter egos. Michael was Poco, Hillel was Paco or Slim or the Israeli Cowboy, and Anthony was Swan or Fuerte. ¹⁵, *12

Anthony was a natural showman who had already taken acting classes, was in the Theatre Club at Fairfax, and won several parts in commercials and Hollywood films as a child under the stage name of Cole Dammett, inspired by his father. The most prominent of these early roles was opposite Sylvester Stallone in 1978’s F.I.S.T., a crime drama directed by Norman Jewison. Cole Dammett, playing Stallone’s son, only has one line, but it was a line that millions saw.

Capitalizing on this element of his personality and perhaps craving time in the spotlight, Anthony began to open for Anthym (and later What Is This) as emcee, around the time Michael joined the band. *13 Just before the band played, Anthony would bound onstage and rip off some of his father’s moves: he’d tell jokes, scat mostly nonsense rhymes, and warm up the crowd (who were often there to see someone else). Anthony’s material would fluctuate naturally, but there was one frequent passage that he returned to when the time came to introduce the band: Cal Worthington calls them the hottest rockers in Los Angeles. Their parents call them crazy, and the girls call them all the time. But I call them like I see them, and I call them . . . Anthym! ¹⁶

After his minute-long set was finished, he would join the crowd and jump around as wildly as possible, influencing the crowd now from within. That he ever considered himself a full-time member of Anthym or What Is This is unlikely, but in the future, homework-avoiding journalists