How American icon Jimmy Webb ended the feud between Nick Cave and Red Hot Chili Peppers
Where music goes, ego follows, and it’s that ego which leads to notorious feuds, particularly in the world of rock.
Rock is a genre that invites conflict, after all, its sound was quite literally built on rebellion and people being outlandish. For as long as people have been adding distortion to their guitars, so too have they been criticising those who they don’t think are doing it right. While it would be great to live in a world where everybody gets along, it’s also impossible to deny the fact that we, the public, love a heated musical feud every now and then.
A lot of the time, these rivalries exist within the same style of music – for instance, who could forget the infamous Britpop war that took place between Oasis and Blur, as people debated which of the two groups were kings of the genre… the back and forth that took place between the indie rock groups was the stuff of legend and something that people still talk about to this day.
“I think there was a week where we [were] wholly uninterested in it,” said Noel Gallagher. “Then, the whole thing started to catch fire, and we became interested very quickly. And if anyone picks a fight with me, it’s fucking on.”
These feuds happen within the same band as well. As creative mindsets shift over time, the amount of friction you’re going to come up against within a band increases, and that leads to bitter resentment and big arguments between different members. While they might have made up now, there was a period when things got very ugly for Guns N’ Roses, as band members (and former members) couldn’t talk to someone from the press for five minutes without slagging some of their contemporaries off.
Axl Rose once criticised his bandmate Izzy Stradlin’s guitar playing, admitting that he thought it was so bad he would get roadies to turn down his amps mid-concert. “Our roadies would stand behind Izzy’s amps, ’cause Izzy would be so whacked of his mind that he would basically be playing a different song in a different key, and the only way we could do the songs is, every time he would go to his amps, he would turn his amps up and he would turn around, to the crowd,” he said. “When he would turn around to the crowd, the roadies would reach around and turn his amps back down so that we could play the song.”
These feuds make sense, but then there are some which seem to have been plucked from thin air, existing between artists that you simply can’t ever imagine crossing the same path or even talking about one another. That’s how you could describe the back and forth that took place between Nick Cave and Red Hot Chili Peppers, as while the two of them are massively different artists, they did have a rivalry at one point, which was spurred on by some comments Nick Cave made about the California-loving funk rockers.
In an interview with Q magazine, Nick Cave once said that he was tired of hearing Red Hot Chili Peppers’ music. “I’m forever near a stereo saying ‘What the fuck is this garbage’?” he said. “And the answer is always Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
While talking to Mojo, Flea said that he was sad about the comments, “Of course I would rather him think we were soulful geniuses, but I understand.”
Flea also revealed in that same interview that the feud between Nick Cave and Red Hot Chili Peppers was seemingly over, as he and Cave had worked together on his recent jazz album. It wasn’t an exchange of apologies that seemed to save the musicians’ relationship, though, and was rather the result of a mutual adoration for an American icon: Jimmy Webb. Remembering Cave’s adoration for the American songwriter, Flea decided to reach out and see if he’d like to cover ‘Wichita Lineman’ on his new record, set for release at the end of March. Just like that, consider the hatchet buried and bye gones officially byed and goned.
“When I was listening back to it, I remembered Nick saying how much he loved Jimmy Webb,” recalled the bassist, concluding, “I know Nick a little bit, it’s not like we’re close or anything, but I sent him the track, late at night in the UK, and he responded in like 30 minutes, ‘Yes. This is so beautiful. I’m leaving on tour in a couple of days, I’m going to have to do it right away’, and the day after next, this thing came in an email.”
