The three Red Hot Chili Peppers songs about Hillel Slovak
The bond between the Red Hot Chili Peppers members has always been more of a brotherhood than a band. Though the group might not have the most insightful lyrics in the world, their reputation as one of the ‘best good time bands’ is always balanced out by wearing their heart on their sleeve. You don’t get to where the Chilis are today without going through hardship though, and Hillel Slovak was the by-product of their debauchery.
When the band was originally starting out, Flea and Anthony Kiedis had the idea of working with Slovak after hearing his guitar skills in high school. However, once Slovak started to gain traction with his band What is This?, he had to leave to focus on his other band before committing to the Chili Peppers.
While Slovak signed back on around the time of Freaky Styley, his skills were always undercut by his appetite for destruction. Slovak and Kiedis had independently become hooked on heroin, and it was anyone’s guess how their shows would play out once they got junk in their veins.
Around the time of The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, the band were riding high after getting their original drummer Jack Irons back into the fold, but the unthinkable happened once they came off tour. After only a few days at home, Kiedis was crushed when he found out that Slovak had died of a drug overdose. To Kiedis, this was more than just a fallen bandmate. This was practically a death in the family.
This became Kiedis’s first wake-up call to get clean, and he ended up immortalising his sobriety in the song ‘Knock Me Down’, where he asks anyone who sees him messing around with drugs to calm him down. While Kiedis has a lot more responsibility in this song, there’s also a touch of anger in there as well, as he’s still reeling over the death of his friend. Though the guitarist slot went to John Frusciante after Slovak’s death, Slovak’s death always followed Kiedis around.
On the band’s blockbuster 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the deep cut ‘My Lovely Man’ was written in reference to Slovak, as Kiedis to see him further down the line. While Kiedis had said all that he wanted to say at the time, a brotherhood bond like that doesn’t go away overnight.
After Frusciante quit following the BSSM tour, Kiedis also became lost, relapsing on hard drugs and writing about his descent across the album One Hot Minute. When he finally came back down to Earth and got Frusciante back in the band, he couldn’t help but be reminded of his old friend again when writing By the Way.
When talking about his past sins, Kiedis wrote ‘Dosed’ as a way to cope with his trauma with his friend Hillel. Although the song has a bright tone influenced by the Beach Boys, this is a grim picture of what Kiedis had to go through every day, always looking for different ways to abuse himself with Slovak.
Kiedis has said that those three songs had been inspired by Slovak, but the spirit of the former guitarist lives on in their other work. Despite singing about his own drug abuse, it’s hard to think of Kiedis wrestling with his demons on songs like ‘Otherside’ and not think of the horrors that he had to witness with his friend. Even though Slovak might not have had a hand in the well-remembered Red Hot Chili Peppers songs, his spirit is present every time the band takes to the stage.
