Have the Red Hot Chili Peppers totally lost their rebellious side? As pointed out by the LA Times, there was a time when the rock band ‘greeted any mention of the Rock hall of Fame with derision’.
These times are over, as this week Flea could not believe his band had been nominated, and was all teary when talking to the Times by phone:
‘It’s very emotional, and I’m not sure where the emotions are coming from’.
He was even endorsing the nomination in the name of the group’s founding lead guitarist and friend, Hillel Slovak, who died from a drug overdose in 1998: ‘Hillel grew up loving rock and roll so much, he hasn’t been here for some time, but I know how much it would mean to him. It’s a powerful thing.’
So what about this tone of derision that Flea used to have:
‘It’s always been easy for me to pooh-pooh these awards — the [Rock] Hall of Fame too. But I inducted Metallica a couple of years ago, and it was really a beautiful thing to see as all these people were being inducted. It made me love it. I love halls of fame anyway — the Basketball Hall of Fame, the Baseball Hall of Fame.’
Oh I see, if Metallica has joined the club, it is then ok for the Chili Peppers? He continued:
‘So I feel grateful for the recognition of what we have done, and for the hope and potential of what we’ll continue to do.’
‘I can never claim to understand how anything of that works. I think of some of the most important artists in the history of music who aren’t in, and it can make me feel like ‘That’s ridiculous.’ Nick Cave — he isn’t in, is he? He’s the greatest songwriter on Earth in the rock world, besides Neil Young, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘But I’m really grateful for it,” he added. “It makes me reflective about our career — all the things we’ve been through, the love we’ve shared and how we’ve stuck to this thing. I feel choked up.’
Beside The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N’ Roses, the Beastie Boys, Donovan, Laura Nyro and the Small Faces will be in the party:
‘It’s really cool to be going in with the Beastie Boys, who I love, and Guns. When I was a little kid in my very first band with Hillel and Jack [Irons, the Peppers’s original drummer] and we were rehearsing in my bedroom, this kid who lived about a block away came climbing over the fence and sneaking in to my backyard. It was Slash. He lived one block away, but our bands came from very different scenes. We were more from the underground punk world. At the time, it was worlds apart.’
Flea could not stop talking about the event and even added:
‘Right now is a really great time for our band. We’re going through this rebirth and there’s a whole new excitement. We’ve been on tour for a few months, and these shows are feeling a lot like how it felt in the beginning, when we had all these new vistas in front of us.
‘To have this come right now, it adds such a feeling of depth. We’re always so caught up in the moment, we’re not always thinking of the last 28 years, or whatever it’s been. Everyone in the band might express it differently, but it feels poignant and beautiful and [the induction ceremony] should be a great, fun event. To be where we are right now, in a forward-looking place, it’s a really rich experience.’
I am not sure if the Red Hot Chili Peppers have ever been considered as punk, but this is definitively the end of it! Remember when the Sex Pistols refused to attend their induction in 2006? Calling the institution ‘urine in wine’, and declaring ‘We're not your monkeys, we're not coming. You're not paying attention’, with Johnny Rotten adding that the ‘Rock and Roll Hall of Shame’ was ‘a place where old rockers go to die’.
Now that was punk!
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