Red Hot Chili Peppers and ‘Californication’: The remarkably low benchmark for bad mixing
Mixing, mastering, and production are often underrated yet absolutely essential aspects of the music industry. It doesn’t matter how good a band are, or how groundbreaking their songwriting talents may be; if a recording features bad production, it will sound pretty dismal – a fact which has been proved time and time again over the course of rock history.
Back in the 1990s, for instance, even a group as iconic as the Red Hot Chili Peppers was no stranger to the dangers of poor production quality.
Few bands encapsulated the American rock scene of the 1990s quite like Red Hot Chili Peppers. From the breakout success of the album Blood Sugar Sex Magik in 1991, to the band’s closing set at the disastrous Woodstock ‘99, the California outfit was everywhere back in the age of Beanie Babies and communist collapse. What’s more, the band managed to evade the prevailing scenes of the time, never adhering to the attitudes of grunge, shoegaze, Britpop or nu metal, which seemed to dominate the rock sounds of the era.
With that spectrum-spanning mainstream rock sound, however, came high expectations. The Chili Peppers had begun life as a DIY punk rock outfit, and mainstream success never seemed to suit the band. In fact, John Frusciante left the band in 1992, citing the newfound success and popularity they had amassed as a prevailing reason. Even still, the Chili Peppers certainly made a few mistakes and mis-hits within their discography, particularly when it came to the production side of their output.
Rick Rubin boasts an impressive resumé when it comes to music production, having worked with everybody from Slayer to Johnny Cash over the years. Arguably, Rubin’s production style was as essential to the inherent sound and success of the Red Hot Chili Peppers as any of the band members themselves, with the Def Jam co-founder producing every Chili Peppers album from 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik to 2022’s Return of the Dream Canteen, excluding The Getaway.
Nevertheless, even Rick Rubin is susceptible to mistakes every once in a while. For the Chili Peppers’ 1999 record Californication, Rubin and the rest of the production team oversaw some infamously terrible decisions when it came to mixing and mastering, something which haunted the band’s otherwise successful 1999 release for decades.
On the face of it, Californication reached number three in the US album charts and number five in the UK upon its initial release, making it an incredibly successful album by anybody’s standards. However, a lot of those listeners found the album and its title track difficult to listen to, owing to the level of compression and distortion audible in the final mix of the recording.
Seemingly, Rubin and the 1999 album had played into the ‘loudness wars’ – a long-running trend of increasing audio levels, which then reduces quality and fidelity. While it is difficult to imagine many Chili Peppers fans describing themselves as audiophiles, thousands of listeners still complained about the unlistenable quality of the original album mix of ‘Californication’. So much so that the original mix of the track is still hailed today as one of the worst examples of mixing and the dangers of the loudness wars.
Thankfully for Chili Peppers fans, the issue was eventually rectified in 2012, when the entire album was remastered for a vinyl reissue, and then again in 2014 for a streaming remaster. Although certain listeners have still lamented the over-compression of these remasters, they are indisputably superior to that awful original mix, which is now thankfully much harder to find.
