Elvis Presley: The rock legend that Anthony Kiedis initially hated: “I just didn’t get it”
Every rock and roll band is bound to crib from the artists that came before them. It’s impossible not to draw from one’s influences, and it’s easy to see Red Hot Chili Peppers incorporating every genre they can think of into their music. Although the band may have been able to use a broad range of musical colours across their albums, Anthony Kiedis was not at all impressed when hearing one rock and roll trailblazer for the first time.
By the time Kiedis had arrived in California, though, he was already interested in all kinds of music. Loving the sounds of David Bowie and Led Zeppelin as much as Parliament Funkadelic, Kiedis would create an amalgamation of rapping and singing throughout the first Red Hot Chili Peppers album, relying more on his flow than any set melody.
Before the sounds of funk had become a standard part of the pop mainstream, the stone age of rock and roll had its roots in rhythm and blues. From the first sounds of Chuck Berry igniting a guitar lick on ‘Johnny B Goode’, many of the greatest rock and roll tunes of the 1950s saw the artists putting a healthy dose of energy into their bluesy shuffles.
Even though artists like Little Richard were the complete package of songwriter and showman, Elvis Presley was about to become one of the biggest names in music by reinventing this style. By taking the crux of what black artists had already made, Presley made his own brand of rock and roll, presenting the sounds of songs like ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘That’s All Right Mama’ to a completely different audience.
While Presley would later go on to inspire every single rock and roll showman that came after him, Kiedis remembered being less than impressed when looking at Presley for the first time. Compared to the other artists he listened to during his youth, Kiedis never understood the draw in looking at Presley’s signature hip-twirling onstage.
For a long time, Kiedis would say that he resented Presley’s work and would go out of his way to avoid his music, telling Rolling Stone, “As a kid, I was anti-Elvis. I just didn’t get it. Once I stopped being so judgmental, I found the great wonder of Elvis and all that he did. I was a little self-centred gutter punk in the early 1980s, and all I wanted to do was diss everybody. I remember going to Graceland as a kid and talking shit while I was there”.
As Kiedis grew as a musician, though, he started to see the subtle nuances of what made Presley irresistible. Even though he may not have written a lot of his own tunes, Presley’s way of arranging a song turned tracks like ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ into the sounds of rock and roll, creating a model for acts of The British Invasion to follow years later.
While Red Hot Chili Peppers would move in a different direction than the simplistic rockabilly that Presley played, they did eventually pay tribute to the ‘King of Rock and Roll’ in their video for ‘Dani California’, with Kiedis adopting the same hairdo and mannerisms of Presley throughout the first section. Even though Presley may not have been for everyone, his indelible mark on the music industry turned rock and roll from a passing fad into one of the greatest forces in music history.
