The musician who hated working with Red Hot Chili Peppers
Some of the best bands come down to just basic chemistry. As much as it might sound great to get the best musicians in the room together and have them make a handful of songs, it’s sometimes about how well artists work together rather than how well they can tear up their respective instruments. While the Red Hot Chili Peppers have made a living off of playing their signature brand of funk rock, post-punk icon Andy Gill initially had no time for them when they started playing for him.
When the band first got together, it was anyone’s guess whether they were going to last for a few years or a few minutes. Forming as a side project for guitarist Hillel Slovak and bassist Flea, the original idea for the band stemmed from them getting up onstage at a bar in California and asking their friend Anthony Kiedis to come up and spit some verses over top of everything.
While that kind of scenario sounds like a fun thing friends do at a bar on a whim, the band quickly got rolling after they started gathering steam, only for Slovak to leave to return to his old band, What is This?. Kiedis and Flea weren’t willing to give up on their dream, though, wanting to work with the best producer they could find on their debut album.
Even though the album still sounded like a demo version of what the band was supposed to be, getting someone like Andy Gill was far from a bad idea. As part of Gang of Four, the post-punk outfit practically gave birth to the kind of dance-punk that Red Hot Chili Peppers were cribbing from, even getting a lot of praise from Flea after the fact.
Once Gill heard their demos, he was absolutely appalled by what he had signed on for. Instead of the funk-rock stylings of their later years, the band were still in their embryonic stages, making a strange combination of Run-DMC style rapping together with the occasional sick bass groove.
Compared to what the band’s demos sounded like, Gill completely neutered what they were going for, taking out a lot of the pocket behind the band’s signature grooves and putting a bit too much reverb on the final mix to make them sound like they’re playing in the middle of an aeroplane hanger.
By the end of the sessions, even the band began hating working with Gill’s vision for what they should become. When looking through the notes for a handful of songs on the project, Kiedis remembered the final nail in the coffin came when they stumbled across notes that Gill had made for the songs they had already started.
Recounting the story in Scar Tissue, Kiedis remembered that Gill was not as kind towards the band’s celebrated material, saying, “One day I got a glimpse of Gill’s notebook, and next to the song ‘Police Helicopter’, he’d written “shit”. I was demolished that he had dismissed that. [That] was the jewel in our crown…Reading his notes probably sealed the deal in our minds that ‘Okay, we’re working with the enemy’”.
While the band were able to put together a decent first outing, they wouldn’t be satisfied with their momentum until The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, featuring Slovak returning to the fold after leaving his old band. Red Hot Chili Peppers were destined for greater things, but they were definitely starting off on the wrong foot when the demos for their debut sounded better than the completed record.
