Post by r3dh0t on Jun 1, 2006 19:35:04 GMT 1
sth more:
All four members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers have reconvened at the infamous Chateau Marmont on Sunset Strip in Hollywood. The band used these bungalows at the side of the hotel to write and record part of its last album, the multi-platinum, international chart-topper By The Way. Four years on they're back here, the occasion this time being the press launch of the Chili Peppers' ninth studio album, the epic, double-disc, 28-song Stadium Arcadium, out Saturday, May 13. EMILY WATERS reports.
Media from around the world has been flown into town to get a first listen to the new music and talk to band members. But the ambitious album isn't finished yet. So the media get to hear only 21 songs, in no particular order.
While Flea, Anthony Kiedis and Chad Smith start doing their interviews in various rooms upstairs, guitarist John Frusciante remains downstairs, talking on the phone to one of the engineers that is still working on completing the record. Frusciante delivers minutely-detailed instructions of the changes he wants made. A little more volume here, a touch less reverb there.
For Stadium Arcadium, Frusciante has stepped to the fore, essentially seizing control of what the massive recording would ultimately sound like, working closely with producer Rick Rubin.
It's proved an enormous job. After nine months of recording, not only was there an original batch of 38 songs to finish - the band had originally planned to release three discs worth of new songs - but each track has an enormous amount of music within itself.
"Some of these songs have 71 channels that they are using on the board," says Frusciante. "That's 71 different things to be balancing. I had a whole 24-track machine just for my backing vocals and a whole 24-track machine just for the guitar overdubs and another 24-track machine for the band. We had three 24-track machines going at once for these songs, so they are a real job to mix."
Frusciante admits that, at first, the other guys in the band weren't too sure about following his vast vision for the record. "For a long time, I don't think we knew if we were going to be happy with the direction that each other went," he says. "At one point, I don't know if everybody was trusting of how it was going to be for me to mix everything the way that I was envisioning in it. Because I did do so many overdubs, they didn't realise it would be able to be placed perfectly.
"We had a little tension before the mixing started because Flea thought he was going to want it different than me. Anthony thought he was going to want it different. It ended up that once we mixed the first song, we realised that everybody was liking the same thing. But it is this huge pressure when you've gone as far as I've gone.
"For this album, I did a lot of vocal harmony, I did a lot of guitar overdubs. Luckily, they all ended up serving the song really well, which was my original intention. When you're a guy that's just stuck in a room trying to write lyrics every day, you can't step outside yourself that far to see clearly where someone else is going. You've just got to trust. Luckily, we've got that trust and we always end up agreeing on everything but we don't always know we are going to agree on everything."
If there's one word that best sums up the 28 songs of Stadium Arcadium, it is, not surprisingly, variety. There's funk, heavy stuff, punk, often all mashed into one. Frusciante says that this broad scope of the album started taking shape following abandoned recording sessions two years ago. "We were doing a lot of folk music combined with heavy metal," he reveals. "We would start out as a folk song and then build to a punk thing or a heavy metal thing. It was a good experiment but I feel that what we have done right now is a lot more fluid and a lot more seamless. As songwriters, for us the challenge is to find new ways of peaking other than the obvious ways."
Stadium Arcadium is a major work from a band that has never rested on its laurels. It's mind-blowing to think that the Red Hot Chili Peppers have now been around for 22 years, or that it's already 15 years since the release of its breakthrough international smash hit, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Back then, the Chili Peppers were at the forefront of a new wave. On their US tour in 1991, their support acts included Pearl Jam, The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. Miraculously, for all of the Peppers' well-documented dark days, they somehow emerged as the healthiest survivors from that period.
Frusciante says that era now feels like a lifetime ago. "I was a much different person then," he says. "We were all much different people then. It's kind of surreal, you know, especially because when Nirvana first came out, I wasn't really a fan. Then during the time that I was a drug addict, I became a huge fan. I was obsessed. So it was always a trip for me to read about them in books and remember my little run-ins with them when, at the time, it meant nothing to me. And looking back it was like, 'Wow!'"
Of course, soon after, just prior to the Chili Peppers first Australian tour in 1992, Frusciante was so messed up that he had to quit the band, only to clean up and rejoin again in the late '90s. How messed up was he back then? Well, he remembers living here at the Chateau Marmont around that time.
"I also had a lot of crazy experiences here when I was a drug addict," he says. "One time I took down a wall because I thought there was a painting behind it. I did it with a fork. There were fake wood panels, I was tweaking on coke. I'd run out of heroin and I had to wait until seven o'clock the next morning to get more heroin, so I just had coke.
"So I just started tweaking very hard and I took my fork and I started taking off these panels of wood. And I spent all night doing it because I saw this little green thing underneath that looked the same colour as a painting that was in my book. And I thought it was a gift waiting for me. So I tore down the wall.
"The next morning, a friend of mine came over. They were about to kick me out and this friend of mine was a famous actor, so he talked them out of calling the cops. He drove me home and they told me never to come back. But they ended up taking me back."
Years later, Flea reminded him that they had talked on the phone during that night. Frusciante told him what he was doing. "And I said, 'There's something behind there for me, and there's one for you too'," says Frusciante laughing.
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