A Beautiful Mess: ‘Stadium Arcadium’ by Red Hot Chili Peppers
By the mid-2000s, Red Hot Chili Peppers had been on a high for what seemed like nearly a decade. Although there was a bit of a dark age when John Frusciante left the fold for the album One Hot Minute, reforming the band during Californication led to the kind of creative second wind that most bands only get once. And while everything came to a head during Stadium Arcadium, that didn’t mean that everything was perfect.
Because for the uninitiated, let me drop the first lesson you need to learn: every Red Hot Chili Peppers classic is usually incredibly long. That inspiration will never run dry for too long when someone like Flea is in the band, so it’s not that out of the question for a record to be packed to the gills with classic tracks every time they are finished. In the case of their double record, though, it does end up feeling incredibly bloated.
At the same time, I don’t really want to bat them down for being too creative. Many of the tracks on here are among the best that they would ever make, but just like incredible acts like The Beatles before them, making a double album of material usually means that we are getting both the cleanest and the messiest songs that they would ever commit to tape, especially when it starts to drag in the middle.
While we all should be blessed that we didn’t get the intended triple suite of albums they initially had in mind, let’s look at Stadium Arcadium and see what pieces could be salvaged and which should have been discarded. That way, we might be able to keep the classics and maybe drop tunes that didn’t have to be heard to begin with.
So, how do we bring balance to Stadium Arcadium?
It’s not an easy decision to tell an artist how they should redo any of their records. Most of them have the idea in mind and have it fully realised before they even manage to put everything on tape. But looking at where they were heading leading up to their double album, they could have split things up just like they had in mind with their previous album, By the Way.
While Californication was a recovery record if there ever was one, By the Way, was their chance to stretch themselves with new sounds, which included writing a few sunshine tracks like ‘The Zephyr Song’. That led to them throwing out a lot of their heavier material for the funk-rock equivalent of Beach Boys-esque melodies, so why not actually split this album up like they intended the first time around?
Since it’s a double album, it makes more sense to give both albums their own distinct identity to go along with the Mars and Jupiter idea. Looking at the track listing, it could make more sense for the more intense playing like on ‘Dani California’ and ‘Hump De Bump’ to appear on one disc and leave the plaintive ballads for the other half of the record. That way, you’d get to hear both sides of the group.
But would splitting it up affect the listening experience?
Compared to the other Peppers albums in their catalogue, splitting an album up like this does present them with a unique opportunity. If they were to eliminate some of the added fluff on the record and pair both albums down to ten tracks, it would also give fans a break from the longer format to see what a bite-sized version of the group might have looked like. ‘Dani California’ could do a great job opening up the first disc, but instead of ‘Desecration Smile’, what if welcoming in the audience with something slower like ‘Slow Cheetah’ to get them used to everything?
It’s not like this idea couldn’t have been done well. Foo Fighters had already started stretching themselves by showing both sides of their persona on In Your Honour, so working with the same kind of format could have made it possible for the Peppers to show every piece of their creativity under one roof.
And given how they went for a laid-back flow without Frusciante on The Getaway, the softer record could have been a way for them to test out that sound so as not to fall into snoozy territory as the latter half of their 2016 offering did. Stadium Arcadium is far from a terrible record, but it does have more than a few flaws, and by making it just a little leaner and shuffling things around, we could be looking at a masterpiece on the same level as Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
