The five best Red Hot Chili Peppers songs featuring Hillel Slovak
Any longtime fan of Red Hot Chili Peppers knows just how enduring a reach founding guitarist Hillel Slovak holds on the band’s mythos, even nearly forty years later.
The band’s early years, for many, may well spell a moment when the Chili Peppers were at their most raucously wild. Forged in Los Angeles in the early 1980s and teeming with punk party fervour, the good-time metallic funk conjured by the old high school classmates Anthony Kiedis and Flea owed plenty to Slovak’s pumped, dextrous charge between brawny rhythm assault and a bluesy fluidity, while keeping impeccable timing.
One young guitarist paying attention was a teenage John Frusciante, who looked up to Slovak’s funk guitar flash with adoration. Yet, as the years rolled on, a gnawing heroin habit that plagued both Kiedis and Slovak began to take its toll, Kiedis managing to shake off the smack for a brief period while Slovak kept scoring. In June 1988, the founding guitarist was found dead in his Hollywood apartment at just 26 from an overdose.
It was nearly over for the Chili Peppers, but they decided to carry Slovak’s creative torch, bringing in the young Frusciante and Chad Smith on drums to settle their classic line-up and end up as one of modern rock’s biggest-selling bands. Along the way were Frusciante’s own troubles with heroin, wobbles into soft rock territory and juvenile macho posturing, plus scrutiny of Kiedis’ sexual misconduct allegations that have discoloured the Chili Peppers’ legacy.
But through their fraught history and subsuming into mainstream rock radio rotation, Slovak’s spirit is always present in the Chili Peppers’ work, directly inspiring ‘Knock Me Down’ and the mammoth ‘Otherside’, and rubbing off a creative curiosity that would pull the band toward their intrepid genre-hopping to this day. Long before Grammys, Billboard 200 toppers, and Lollapalooza headliners, we take a look at the early but crucial role Slovak held in shepherding the Chili Peppers to rock behemoths.
The five best Red Hot Chili Peppers songs featuring Hillel Slovak:
‘Police Helicopter’ (Demo)
It’s a cut like ‘Police Helicopter’s early incarnation that bottled all of the Chili Peppers’ punk urgency. Briefly departing before their debut album sessions started, Slovak’s chunky guitar stab trickles all over its demo, packing gritty wah attack and cocksure synergy with Flea’s bass groove, scoring the paranoid lyrical skies of LAPD choppers dotting the city’s skies.
Such raw swagger bottles all of the grubby Hollywood glitz that radiated so intoxicatingly to the band in their feverish and hedonistic youth, Slovak conjuring his funk fretwork with all kinds of wriggling, prickling angular bite that could only have been wielded from his signature axe chops, an energy both pulling to the dancefloor yet twisted with troubled disquiet.
‘Green Heaven’ (Demo)
Hailing from the same demo sessions, the Chili Peppers spit a half-trite excoriation of American social decay and political hypocrisy that grows sharper and more comically serrated as the skulking groover takes its shape. With everyone firing on fine form, Slovak’s slithering weave between heavy slugger bludgeon and nimble flicks all ooze together with electric crackle.
The extra touch that gives ‘Green Heaven’ its grimy charm is the expert use of the talk box effects units, manipulating Slovak’s own vocals like a punk vocoder and instilling an extra psychedelic dimension. While all the Chili peppers bristle with young and dumb alchemy on the demo, Slovak’s guitar is the component that best illustrates the song’s cynical lyrical landscape.
‘Jungle Man’
For 1985’s sophomore Freaky Styley, Slovak was back in the Chili Peppers fold, and the band sounded infinitely more bold for it. It helped boasting P-Funk captain George Clinton in the producer’s chair to coax deeper depths of mystical funk virility, but pulling their old comrade into the studio for some official album action elevated their entire sound and attitude.
Such potent energy radiates all over ‘Jungle Man’. Leaping out of the speakers with primal heft, Freaky Styley’s opener is hacked and sliced by Slovak’s irresistibly shimmering guitar licks, bursting with delicious tones and tangy riffs. While co-written by former interregnum guitarist Jack Sherman, Slovak makes ‘Jungle Man’ entirely his own, bursting the stone age silliness of the lyrics with its essential cartoon flavour.
‘The Brothers Cup’
The funk conjured on ‘The Brothers Cup’ is so on point you’d be mistaken for thinking it was some reimagination of an old James Brown or Sly Stone cut from a decade earlier. Zested with cheerful brass and Cliff Martinez’s stolid hip-hop dream beat, there’s perhaps no better example of Slovak’s winding mingle with Flea’s bass than Freaky Styley’s pop flash.
Blowing the doors off from the second, along with Flea’s rock-hard groove, Slovak maintains his razor-sharp timing throughout ‘The Brothers Cup’s blustering swagger, from the driving verses to its warped bridge, all percolating with those wah pinches only Slovak can muster. If you can stomach Kiedis’ snotty rap vocals, ‘The Brothers Cup’ stands as a gem of the early Peppers era.
‘Fight Like a Brave’
By 1987’s The Mofo Uplift Party Plan, the heroin flowing through their frontman proved so much that Flea briefly kicked him out of the band, turning his back for good unless Kiedis got clean. Through withdrawal and rehab programmes, the singer eventually got sober and managed to pour his triumph into the album’s only single, the defiant and affirmative ‘Fight like a Brave’.
Such full-chested power demanded a suitably weighty guitar punch, which wasn’t hard with Slovak in the gang. Charged up on high doses of thrash pummel, ‘Fight Like a Brave’ hurtles with positive ferocity with a raise-the-roof beefy hook that saw the Chili Peppers at their most metal. While their sound was still burnishing, Slovak would pass away less than a year later, recruiting Frusciante as the guitar successor and off to rock royalty for the next 20 years.
