FEATURE:
Dream of…
Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication at Twenty-Five
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ONE of the most popular…
and successful albums of the late-1990s, I have been thinking particularly of albums that turns twenty-five this year. Those great albums that were released in 1999. At the end of the decade (century and millennium), it was a fascinating time for music. Some really timeless and extraordinary albums came out. I think one of the best was from Red Hot Chili Peppers. On 8th June, 1999, the band released their seventh studio album. I think that it might be their finest work. Some might argue. Others might not like the band. I have to admit I am not a huge fan, though I do really like Californication. It came out as I was about to leave high school. A few months later, I would leave a school I had been for five years and was about to embark on the next step. I was embracing music and connecting with it in a different way. It was s source of comfort, guidance and inspiration. I am going to come to some features and reviews for the mighty Californication. Produced by Rick Rubin, the album was a number one in several countries, though not the U.S. and U.K. Even so, it was a top-five in both nations. Big singles like Scar Tissue and Californication are indelible and classic. Incredible tracks that have stood the test of time. I think Californication has aged well. It still pops and has a real sense of gravitas. Not only because Rick Rubin is producing. The fact the band are still going today gives the album a real and true sense of relevance. I wonder whether there is anything planned for its twenty-fifth anniversary. You can go and pick up a copy of the album. I wonder if a new vinyl reissue will come about. There is a Deluxe Edition with some extra tracks. I think that a new reissue or expanded edition would be great.
There will be some twenty-fifth anniversary features. Before coming to some reviews, I will look at twentieth anniversary features that came out in 2019. I would seriously urge anyone who has not heard the album to check it out. I discovered it new and carried it through sixth form college. I remember when Californication’s follow-up, By the Way, came out in 2002. It was a big album for my during university. A band I heard earlier in the 1990s, they made a big impression in 1999. I remember buying the Scar Tissue single when it came out in May 1999. It was a real revelation! Even though I do not love all of the tracks, there are at least four or five songs on the album that rank alongside the band’s best. I will start out with Albumism and their 2019 anniversary feature:
“Happy 20th Anniversary to Red Hot Chili Peppers’ seventh studio album Californication, originally released June 8, 1999.
The anecdote goes something like this. In September 1991, L.A funk rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers released their now classic record Blood Sugar Sex Magik. This record was the band’s fifth and took them from a cult concern to international superstardom mainly thanks to the single releases of the mega anthem “Give It Away” and the beautiful rock ballad “Under The Bridge.” The band toured the record globally for years. The strain on the band was immense and the period ended with the band’s genius guitarist, John Frusciante, leaving to pursue a heroin addiction and an undercooked solo career.
In tatters but maintaining a united front (the Chilis’ had a knack for losing members), the band marched on, releasing a series of compilation records and live recordings, and in late 1995 eventually releasing another studio album titled One Hot Minute. Frusciante's replacement, former Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Narvarro offered the band a darker more metal edge to their funk rock sound. Though popular and offering another round of well-received singles (“Warped,” “Aeroplane”), One Hot Minute was not deemed a reputable follow-up to Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The record today is mostly discarded by fans and the bank alike.
Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith later said of the record, “We don't really feel that connected to that record anymore.” And perhaps it’s clear to see why. Musically it was a departure, but on a personal level, Narvarro and the band’s vocalist, Anthony Kiedis, were heavily into drug use. The record affiliates itself with a dark moment in the band’s personal lives.
A pause of several years for reflection and recovery whilst personal issues were ironed out followed. And then in 1999 came Californication, the return of a now fully recovered and clean John Frusciante to the band fold, and a renewed sense of purpose and unity. Californication scored the Chili Peppers a bunch of worldwide hits and saw tours of massive arenas the world over. They were redeemed.
In 2002, the band released their eighth studio record By the Way, which is something of a masterpiece in my own opinion. The record continues the sunny vibes of Californication and adds Beach Boy style harmonies and even more introspective lyricism to the mix. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
In terms of artistry, musical direction, lyrical themes, and stylistics, the distance between Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Californication may as well be light years. The band were older and wiser for having experienced everything that had come within that decade. Even in terms of aesthetics, the band appears so very different from their 1991 funk-boy incarnation.
Sure enough, compare Blood Sugar Sex Magik’s more risque risqué songs such as “Apache Rose Peacock” and “Sir Psycho Sexy” with anything on Californication and you’ll see the appetite for the carnal has been replaced with a yearning for the spiritual, though there are examples such as the throwaway “Get on Top” and the perverse “Purple Stain” that hollaback to the band’s early primal urges but they don’t gel as well.
Californication spouts enough new-age pop-psychology in its lyrics to make even the most money-grabbing practitioner blush. The song “Californication” itself is a dark meditative reflection on the cheap and tacky underbelly of the sunny side of Hollywood lifestyles. Like Hole’s Celebrity Skin, released a year before, it lays waste to the idea that fame and fortune in Hollywood is a noble endeavor. But it does this in a series of couplets such as, “space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement,” that capture the absurdity perfectly.
So here’s the crux: the distance in time between the two records is just under a decade. 1991 to 1999. This doesn’t seem a huge leap of time, but the artistic jump the band achieved during that period feels extraordinary. And here’s the other, quite extraordinary thing, the distance in time, as of writing, between Californication and now is twenty years (hence this anniversary article) and every day that time period is lengthening.
Yet, to my mind the band is perpetually stuck in this short artistic timeframe. I haven’t experienced enough post-Californication Red Hot Chili Peppers—with the exception of By the Way—enough to shake them out of what I perceive as a golden period. 1991 to 1999 will always remain the same distance and a brilliant example of an artistic evolution.
But I also feel that the Chili Peppers have hardly evolved from the point of Californication. To my mind they appear to be the same band now—at least in sound—as they were then. I know in some respects I’m wrong. Their current guitarist, Josh Klinghoffer, who has been with the band since 2007 (when Frusciante vacated again), has brought a whole new set of talents to the overall sound of the band. But without experiencing that youthful rush, I’m lost.
Back to the record for a moment. The evolution in sound was not met with overall praise from critics. In its review, NME joked, “Can we have our brain-dead, half-dressed funk-hop rock animals back now, please?” and in some respects the reaction to this can be explained. Because of the lack of albums to reveal the sonic/lyrical evolution, the Chili Peppers made big leaps that were not fully understood by critics or listeners. This is the Chili Peppers in the lost 1990s. A band that should have, much like they did in the 1980s, released a cluster of records that improved continuously on their sound in a more progressive sense. A band that should have dominated the landscape of rock and funk and MTV culture. Instead we only got one relatively mediocre record bookmarked by two brilliant, yet very different records.
For me and no doubt many others of my generation, the 1990s are an incredible stretch of time. I started the decade still in primary school, by the decade’s end I was legally drinking, I’d had numerous girlfriends, and I’d even had sex, I was staying out late, I was contemplating leaving home. My personality, my very identity was forged during this decade. It took many attempts and many failures to find the rudimentary person I would become in adulthood.
This is the way every generation, at least in the post-war era in which teenage responsibility was vanquished, feels about their youth. The Baby Boomers long for the idealism of the Sixties, Generation X has a deep fondness for the Reaganite Eighties and older millennials like myself long for the ‘90s. It will be the same for future generations I’m sure.
The era in which one finds themselves, in which one grows, will be ingrained as deeply affecting, and these chops and changes will feel like they happen within an eternity whilst experiencing it, but when time stretches away from those moments it all feels incredibly short. Anything after this blissful era is just surplus time. An article by Marc Wittmann in Psychology Today posits that, “It is probably true that life cannot be experienced with the same freshness we felt when we were much younger. That is what ‘experience’ means: losing the sense of novelty.”
As I get older I’m experiencing this loss of novelty and by all accounts so are the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Californication is the Chili Peppers as grown-ups. We would never experience them in any other way again”.
I will move to a feature from Stereogum. They take a deep dive into a classic from the 1990s. Perhaps the defining work from Red Hot Chili Peppers. I listen back to Californication now and memories flood through. Listening to these songs for the first time. It summons so many vivid moments and scenes:
“For many young people around the country, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a gateway band — a popular group through the ’90s alt-rock boom from whom you could trace the paths back to different progenitors than those of their peers. (Plenty ’90s rock acts could point you to Hendrix, but RHCP could also point you to Parliament.) And as such, they were also the first impression of a lot of things for those young listeners, whether you were a teenager when Mother’s Milk came out or whether you were of the next generation, RHCP one part of your introduction by way of their massively successful late ’90s singles.
If you were part of the latter group, Californication might live on as their definitive work, rivaled only by their 1991 breakthrough Blood Sugar Sex Magik. This, in some ways, was the album that seemed to capture everything this band was always supposed to be. It made them feel, at the time and aided by a clutch of singles destined to soon be ubiquitous in every small town shopping mall and on every small town alt-rock station, as the embodiment of a certain kind of late ’90s iconography. Extreme sports and artificial energy drinks and turn of the millennium graphic fonts attendant to both. The same sun-drenched place glimpsed in ’90s alt-rock videos, where everything seemed more saturated than it could possibly look in real life.
It didn’t matter if this was authentic or the stuff of skateboard video games and sunglasses stores. This was yet another small chapter in America’s long history of mythologizing California, the Golden Coast and the frontier and the full realization of this country’s identity. The Peppers, for better or for worse, felt like the total fulfillment of that promise, a vaguely cartoonish one for the end of a century.
“Californication,” the song, despite being named with a very characteristically RHCP pun, was actually about the darker side of things. You see that name, and you’d immediately assume it was another piece of ribald funk with Anthony Kiedis offering up a semi-juvenile rap. Instead, it’s a fairly mournful, balladic composition. There are still some clunkier lines, naturally, but there are also some truly poignant ones. Rather than a celebration of their hometown and its mythology, “Californication” echoed the addiction, alienation, and self-destruction that had actually colored the individual lives of the Chili Peppers’ members.
Californication, the album, is not exactly “dark.” But it is more consistently gentle and somber than they had ever been before. At this point, this band, and its individual members, had been through it. And you could hear that in the music. Californication represented a previously hard-to-imagine prospect: an older, ever so slightly wiser Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The Chili Peppers had already come back from horrible circumstances. They had already lost one guitarist and friend to drug addiction, when Hillel Slovak overdosed in 1988. It compelled Kiedis — whose tumultuous upbringing and relationship with substances would be further detailed in his 2004 memoir Scar Tissue, named for one of Californication’s key tracks — to get clean. His struggle would continue on through the ’90s, with one relapse casting a shadow over 1995’s already-troubled One Hot Minute. After Slovak’s death, they’d hired a kid named John Frusciante, and the band went on to release albums that started to gain wider and wider traction, initially peaking with Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The explosion of fame proved a lot to process, and Frusciante departed the band and subsequently battled a brutal heroin and cocaine addiction through the middle of the decade.
The ensuing years were not easy for the rest of RHCP either. Aside from Kiedis’ personal struggles, the prospect of following Blood Sugar Sex Magik was challenging, especially as they tried to find a groove with their new guitarist, Dave Navarro. The chemistry never quite developed, and despite having some strange, enduring RHCP tunes, One Hot Minute was regarded as a disappointment by every metric — the hits weren’t big, it didn’t sell as well, neither critics nor fans embraced it. Navarro would leave the band, and Flea convinced Frusciante to rejoin the fold.
It was a strange place to be. RHCP had already been around since the early days of the ’80s, but they were now approaching the other side of another decade, one that had granted them stardom. They had already undergone runaway popularity, the valleys that can follow; they had already undergone addiction and recovery and loss in multiple cycles. The only album they had released since their breakthrough had been written off as a failure. And so, going into the late ’90s, they had rebuilt what in hindsight can easily be called the definitive Chili Peppers lineup — Kiedis, Flea, Frusciante, and Chad Smith. And they were positioned for, in need of, a comeback moment. They got one.
Whether it was the travails of life or having Frusciante back, RHCP returned with an album that broke new ground for them artistically. Softer, more introspective, more tasteful. Kiedis, suddenly, could really, really sing when he wanted to. (There’re plenty of annoying honks across the album still, but there’s also singing.) It was a rebirth for the band creatively, personally, and narratively. Californication became a huge success, surpassing the heights of its predecessors and unleashing a series of singles that became some of the band’s pivotal tracks.
Along with the aforementioned title track and “Scar Tissue,” Californication also featured “Otherside” — a genuinely pretty and cathartic composition that ranks amongst the band’s very best. It’s hard not to hear the reintroduction of Frusciante as being crucial to songs like these. In his second run with RHCP, there was always something odd about seeing him onstage. He seemed sadder and weirder than the rest of the band, or at least than the music they made. And that in turn pushed RHCP in this era, Frusciante’s guitar work effortlessly shifting between clean and fluid, then percussively funky and precise, classicist then wildly creative. Say what you will about the resulting sounds they made collectively, but RHCP could always boast a small collection of musicians who played off each other perfectly. Frusciante was vey much a part of that, his guitars adding just the right textures to the rhythms of Flea and Smith, his background keens lacing Kiedis’ melodies with melancholy.
All of which is to say that, the more mature iteration of RHCP some of us saw in this stretch of their career wasn’t ever 100% true, nor was the aging/soft version decried by those who missed the partying goofball pranksters of the past. If you still wanted RHCP to be fun and silly and puerile, there was a bit of that on Californication. If you had been curious what would happen if earlier, mellower tracks like “Under The Bridge” and “Breaking The Girl” had not been outliers, you got your answer on Californication. Across its 15 tracks, the album had a whole lot of room for all the moods and sounds this band wanted.
And oftentimes, those explorations, those sounds of a just-about-middle-aged Red Hot Chili Peppers, resulted in some of their best songs, including but also beyond those major singles. “Parallel Universe” remains one of their nimblest and most propulsive rock songs. Working off an inverted structure, “Savior” flipped between thunderous verses and dreamlike, wispy choruses (or chorus stand-ins).
It was fitting that Californication concluded with a tribute to journeys taken together, to the endurance of close bonds amidst trials and defeats. After their respective battles through the middle of the ’90s, Californication was the sound of four guys coming back together, still with some unspoken musical connection between them in their bloodstreams, and revitalizing each other. They crafted themselves a turning point.
From here, their magnitude was confirmed. Rather than continuing a potential decline set off by One Hot Minute, Californication redirected the path upward, to sustained status as one of the world’s last gigantic rock bands, to Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductions, to a striking amount of albums sold.
But more important than material metrics, Californication remains one of the prime arguments in a messy, surprisingly convoluted career if you are going to try and make your case for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. As popular as this band has been and will remain, debates will never go away regarding their actual quality. There is certainly a lot of embarrassing output to their name, and they’re being one of those bands you can get into easily at 13 years old always seems to saddle them with a guilty pleasure status as you get older.
Chances are none of that was on the mind of kids who found this album in 1999, though. They weren’t on mine, at least. At the time, it was the sound of these four guys reunited, at the height of their powers, not without missteps but able to evoke some fantasy place somewhere else. Later, you could decipher the darkness hanging at the edges, too. But for a while, the Red Hot Chili Peppers offered music that sounded like a transmission from the West Coast that was just as glamorous as more respectable Californian legends. Whatever you think of this band, that world they created resonated for a lot of young people then. And because of that, there’s something about Californication that still resonates today”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews for the globe-straddling Californication. This is what Entertainment Weekly had to say in their positive review of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ smash seventh studio album. One that is still played and revered to this day. I hear singles from the album played regularly across multiple radio stations:
“The Red Hot Chili Peppers couldn’t have picked a better year for an attempted comeback. Way back in the ’80s, the Chili Peppers’ overflowing keg of metal, rap, and funk pioneered the funky-white-boy pose, at both its best and worst. After the stumble of 1995’s almost-there One Hot Minute, though, they laid conspicuously low (thanks, in part, to accidents and recurring drug habits), and maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea: How much longer could they have carried on the horny-shirtless-stud shtick before descending into self-parody?
Starting with its elbow-in-ribs title (which makes one think they’ve been spending quality time with fellow sex-pun groaners Van Halen), Californication has the whiff of desperation. And when Anthony Kiedis opens his mouth, the situation grows even more dire: ”All around the world, we could make time/Rompin’ and a-stompin’, ’cause I’m in my prime,” he raps on the first track, ”Around the World.” You’re tempted to hit the stop button on your stereo then and there.
But then something startling happens. Perhaps it’s the return of guitarist John Frusciante, who played such an integral role in 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik. For the bulk of Californication, the Peppers sound more relaxed, less grating, and, in their own way, more introspective than ever before. The soul-searching sentiments of ”Otherside,” ”Californication” (which appears to take digs at Courtney Love and ”celebrity skin”), and the sobriety-imbued ”This Velvet Glove” are set to music that’s lilting and freshly scrubbed.
The rockers are powerful but not obnoxious (or clotted with popping bass lines), and the whirlybird pulse of ”Parallel Universe” also marks new turf for them. The Chili Peppers — Kiedis, in particular — can’t refrain from sub-beat-poetry lyrics, throwaways like ”I Like Dirt,” and the naughty finger-painting ode ”Purple Stain.” But those tendencies are kept to a minimum. Californication is the sound of aging party animals who sense the room is emptying out and that they’d better look for another, healthier buzz”.
I am going to end with a review from Rolling Stone. Although some have been mixed or a bit sniffy towards the album, there are those who find plenty of positives about Californication. It is an album with so much variety and depth. Some incredible and compelling songs that still sound so essential twenty-five years later:
“LET’S KEEP IT real: white boys do not have to be funky; they only have to rock, and that the Red Hot Chili Peppers do quite wickedly, thank you. Historically, though, RHCP albums have been long on sock-it-to-me passion but short on the songcraft that made their hero George Clinton’s most acid-addled experiments lyrically haunting and melodically infectious. Up until this new Peppers joint, Californication, that is. For Lord knows what reasons — age, sobriety, Blonde on Blonde ambitions or worship at the altar of Billy Corgan — they’ve settled down and written a whole album’s worth of tunes that tickle the ear, romance the booty, swell the heart, moisten the tear ducts and dilate the third eye. All this inside of song forms and production that reveal sublime new facets upon each hearing.
Back in the revolving-guitar saddle is John Frusciante, of Blood Sugar Sex Magik fame, who replaces the outgoing Dave Navarro (who, of course, replaced Frusciante himself not so long ago) and proves once again why he’s the only ax slinger God ever wanted to be a Pepper, too. As in days of yore, Frusciante continually hits the mark with slithery chicken licks, ingenious power chording, Axis: Bold as Love grace notes and sublimely syncopated noises that allow the nimble Flea to freely bounce back and forth between bombastic lead and architectonic rhythm parts on the bass. If there were a Most Valuable Bass Player award given out in rock, Flea could have laid claim to that bitch ten years running.
The real star turn on this disc, though, is by Anthony Kiedis, whose vocal cords have apparently been down to some crossroads and over the rehab, and returned with heretofore unheard-of range, body, pitch, soulfulness and melodic sensibility. On “Scar Tissue” he laces out a falsetto purple enough to have made Jeff Buckley swoon with envy; on “Savior” he croons and belts with enough chest-thumping pride to suggest that Vegas is just a kiss away, sustaining supple, buoyant tones with such ease, you know he must be amazing himself, too. (As a friend observed, if she didn’t know it was Kiedis, she would have thought the vocalist a Kiedis clone who could actually sing.) The point being that until you hear Californication, you haven’t ever heard Kiedis truly sang, as they say in the church, nor prove himself so adept and moving in the lyrics department, either. Just in time for Matrix fever, “Parallel Universe” speaks of an “underwater where thoughts can breathe easily/Far away you were made in a sea, just like me” to the beat of a track that hybridinally splits the difference between the Yardbirds and Eurodisco. (Flea and Frusciante’s remarkable handheld trillings on that one are more than a little technically impressive, we should add.)
The band treads more-familiar funk-rap ground on cuts like “Get on Top” and “Right on Time,” and on this album’s “Under the Bridge” reduxes — the title track and the aforementioned “Scar Tissue,” a dreamy Venice Beach pimp stroll with lullaby-lovely slide guitar. But songs like “Otherside” and “Porcelain” are delicate, vulnerable and volatile enough to earn the rubric Pumpkins-esque, while the baroque progressions and contrapuntal maneuvers heard on the hook-drunk “Easily” could have one thinking that the Chili Peppers car-jacked Elvis Costello and made off like musical bandits. The poetry found on “Easily” is no joke: “The story of a woman on the morning of a war/Remind me, if you will, exactly what we’re fighting for/Throw me to the wolves, because there’s order in the pack/Throw me to the sky, because I know I’m coming back.” As dope as all of the above are, however, they’re only the setup for the glistening simplicity and serenity displayed on the disc’s denouement, “Road Trippin’,” a finger-picked Olde English tyle number that ties the album up in a bow while gently inferring that Californication is the recovering singer’s way of reminding himself to wake up and live and be “a mirror for the sun.”
While all previous Chili Peppers projects have been highly spirited, Californication dares to be spiritual and epiphanal, proposing that these evolved RHCP furthermuckers are now moving toward funk’s real Holy Grail: that salty marriage of esoteric mythology and insatiable musicality that salvages souls, binds communities and heals the sick. Not exactly your average white band”.
On 8th June, the fantastic Californication turns twenty-five. Few bands can hit a new peak and level on their seventh studio album. A consistency and sense of importance that is pretty impressive. One of the finest albums from the final years of the twentieth century, I wanted to salute Californication ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary. It is an album that I would recommend everyone listens to…
RIGHT away.