John Frusciante’s favourite Ramones song
It’s easy to forget the kind of universe the Red Hot Chili Peppers inhabited before 1991. Topping the Billboard charts with Blood Sugar Sex Magik’s alternative funk energy, they went on to dominate the pop world well into the 2000s. Their creative scope widened with the classic line-up, apart from a brief collaboration with Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro, and included ventures into faux-guru soft rock with tracks like ‘Scar Tissue’ and ‘The Zephyr Song’.
Formula began to materialise across the years under Rick Rubin’s majority production oversight, furthering a lapse into perennially juvenile fascinations with sex and curdling spiritual musings as deep as a Facebook inspiration post from your aunt.
The Chili Peppers’ potent cringe factor has always been present, but at least in their 1980s infancy, they were young and dumb enough to get away with it. The fact is, puerile lyrics and frat boy posturing aside, they did wield an infinitely more interesting attack of punk riffage, metal bombast, and a crackling pop urgency which channelled the decadent Los Angeles scene with an opiate rush.
Many would argue that they never topped 1989’s Mother’s Milk, a heavy funk attack filled with soul and grit that perfected the lessons learned across the prior uneven three albums, and was the first to feature guitarist John Frusciante and drummer Chad Smith.
Punk, along with other indulgences, was swimming in their blood through the 1980s. Beyond just a sonic flavour coursing through their early records, the Chili Peppers were cutting albums with Gang of Four’s Andy Gill, boasting Dead Kennedys’ DH Peligro briefly on drums, and offering Circle Jerks frontman Keith Morris a stand-in for Anthony Kiedis for a show in 1984. Every member who had formed the Chili Peppers’ revolving door of band staff was burnished in some fashion by punk’s flashbang explosion, which upended the rock world toward the end of the 1970s.
In 2021, Frusciante and manic bassist Flea co-hosted the Timely Inspirations show on LA’s dublab radio station to discuss the bands that soundtracked their formative years. Among cuts from Iggy Pop, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Captain Beefheart, Frusciante picked a lesser-known number from the Ramones’ canon as part of their curated playlist, opting for 1977’s ‘I Don’t Care’ from their third LP, Rocket to Russia.
It’s hard to overstate the impact Ramones had on the New York music scene when first donning their Perfecto jackets way back in 1974. It’s a well-trodden narrative that punk truly did turn classic rock on its head, lighting a fire underneath the day’s stadium sellers lost in their own lofty spectacle, mercilessly smothering prog’s bloated compositional indulgences. Scores of the city’s kids were begging for a group like Ramones to pull rock back to its founding and resurrect its flame to inspire a whole movement that coalesced around Manhattan’s CBGB and Max’s Kansas City.
It’s hard to hear Ramones’ ephemeral spark in Chili Peppers’ efforts in the last 25-odd years, but the former’s stripped-down direct punk attack knocked down barriers that scores of artists eagerly raced through across a vast array of genres into the 1980s, unified by the dumbstruck lightning bolt of first hearing those essential Ramones records all those years ago.
