Red Hot Chilli Peppers 2023

[Gilly Goodness]

Played here last night at the Olympic Stadium. Flea has been spotted around Bondi Beach in his underwear givin' selfies. Homecomin' gig for him. Went down well. Played 7 new songs from the 2 albums last year. Plus the oldies.

Nearly put this thread under Prog Rock. They are pretty great players. Esp. Frusciente.

Now. I remember back in 91? was back in Sydney, playin' pool with an old mate at the Clock Hotel in Surry Hills when someone put Blood Sugar Sex Magik on the jukebox and for the next 40 or so minutes song after song came on and it was so immediate that this was a world class album, great melodies, harmonies, playin', pacin', hooks, lyrics.







What were their best albums? Confess I only heard their singles on the radio. Just realised the hotel may have had a DJ not a jukebox playin' CDs. It's a pretty hip area. Also I spelt the band the Aussie way in the thread title. Goes to show how much I've been payin' attention.

[bondegezou]

[Gilly Goodness]

Minimal. Brilliant!!! 1.6 million views. Not too shabby.

So Russian alt-pop act. Perestroika!!!


Young Adults.


Wonder what would happen if Young Adults met Teenage Dads???

Holey Moley!!! 🤓

[Roundabob]

In the U.S., the long running news magazine show “60 Minutes” ran a story on the Red Hot Chili Peppers last night. They are very impressive. I can’t believe how energetic and animated their performances are, especially considering that three of them are over 60, and the guitarist is 53. . Flea is an incredible bassist. I am not very familiar with them (other than hits from the 80’s and early 90s) but their lack of ego, and dedication to continuing to produce new and exciting music is commendable.

[bondegezou]

I am not very familiar with them (other than hits from the 80’s and early 90s) but their lack of ego, and dedication to continuing to produce new and exciting music is commendable.

I think how they are now is the result of a long and often difficult journey, with band members frequently fighting and way too many drugs.

[bondegezou]

Minimal. Brilliant!!! 1.6 million views. Not too shabby.

So Russian alt-pop act. Perestroika!!!


Young Adults.

I enjoy their original material too:

[Roundabob]

[QUOTE=bondegezou;n37089]

I think how they are now is the result of a long and often difficult journey, with band members frequently fighting and way too many drugs.

Good point. They definitely are in a different/better place now than they were a few years ago. Lessons learned perhaps. That kind of growth is difficult and admirable.

[luna65]

Yeah they were incredibly dysfunctional for a while. I think their high-water mark is Blood Sugar Sex Magick and Californication, but some of their earlier material is fun. Mother's Milk is a decent album. I actually saw them perform at a party when I was in college (this was maybe '86 or '87) and they certainly knew how to get a crowd going, even back then.

[Gilly Goodness]

I enjoy their original material too:

So. The whole minimal vibe with trombone is their thing. Great singer. And nice to hear a voice recorded simply and clearly without drenched in reverb or autotuned.

Like K.T.Tunstall frontin' the brass dudes from Big Big Train.

[Gilly Goodness]

I actually saw them perform at a party when I was in college (this was maybe '86 or '87) and they certainly knew how to get a crowd going, even back then.

Cool story. How long did it take before they became famous and you realised who they were?

[luna65]

I mean. they were already locally popular (Southern California) at the time, so when they blew up it was, like, "Ah they finally did it." I saw more than a few bands like that back in the '80s. Like, I saw R.E.M. in 1984 and sat in on an interview with them. Later I was surprised when Document came out because I never expected them to reach that level of success.

[downbyariver]

Played here last night at the Olympic Stadium. Flea has been spotted around Bondi Beach in his underwear givin' selfies.

That's one more item of clothing than he had at Woodstock 1999!

I saw a several part documentary about that festival on one of the streaming services a while back. When the Red Hot Chili Peppers did their set, Flea came out with a (strategically placed) guitar... And nothing else.

Fortunately, Steve Howe shows more restraint.

I think in the documentary, or maybe this was just what I was thinking while watching that part of the documentary, someone opines about how great it was, for the most part, to be up towards the front of the crowd, except when Flea turned his back.

Actually, I watched all three parts of the documentary about how awful it was and I kept thinking about how in retrospect I kind of wish I had been there. Like it was this disaster, but it also looked like a fun disaster (Checkout the way that crowd was moving during the Korn set- that looks pretty wild [in a fun way] on film). My guess is it's the kind of thing you go to and it's fun for a little while and then you're tired and sore and can't afford the $40 waters (They didn't allow outside water in, and then a bunch of the bottled water stands ran out of water and the few left started price gouging) and there's trash everywhere and stuff on fire and... Actually, that still sounds kind of fun. But I also see why people had a miserable time and were driving out Sunday morning in droves even though the festival continued to Sunday night.

When they showed the like just acres and acres of ground covered by trash that people woke up to on Saturday morning, I immediately thought, you know, while that's horrible on the part of the festival organizers, I would have immediately shot a picture of it with my phone and sent picture messages to a bunch of people and that would have been fun seeing their reactions and having some virtual conversations.

But I thought about it and- you know, I didn't have a cell phone back then. Not a ton of people did. I didn't have a cell phone until late 2001 or 2002. And texting was something I didn't find out about until like 2003. So, no phone, no camera. Maybe the trash fields aren't as fun if you can't start text chains about them on the spot.

It's funny to think how much the world has changed. Even just that one thing. I'm not even saying the mobile Internet, though obviously that's been a huge change. But just the widespread use of pocket size cell phones with cameras that can be used for individual and group texts and picture messages on like the old "brick" phones and flip phones. Everyone having them changed everything.

Unfortunately I missed a lot of this stuff when it happened. I had kind of a conservative upbringing and then like almost the second I got to be 18-19 and at least a little bit out from under my parents' thumbs, a bevy of long-term health issues hit, which limited both my stanima for escapades and also created fiscal difficulties. So I didn't have much of a chance to get into youthful trouble.

I can't entirely blame my parents and the fates, though. I admittedly wasn't that social (to be fair, there was some bullying growing up [I wasn't the one doing the bullying], which gave me good reason to like my books and whatnot) and preferred a computer screen to doing things a lot of the time. But, I don't know, I wonder if I'd have eventually opened up to more stuff if I wasn't physically in a lot of pain or financially limited or whatever.

I did get to attend a lot of football games for a while. That was something.

I did after seeing that documentary and a few too many episodes of Bar Rescue think, you know what I might be able to do despite a health, financial limitations, and middle age? Take a stroll down Bourbon Street in New Orleans drinking some nice big alcoholic beverages and handing out beads. Then I realized, you know, the financial limitations would make it hard to get to New Orleans and the health issues might mean I'd only walk a block or two (Maybe a little more than that, but not as much as I'd like). It seemed plausible when I saw that episode where they fixed up that bar on Bourbon Street, though. Seems more manageable than time traveling back to Woodstock 1999, at least.

Bourbon Street seems like it's, especially during Mardi Gras, sort of an all (adult) ages spring break or frat party where you can be middle aged without seeming inappropriate, but it isn't like solely limited to middle aged people). At least, it looks that way on television. Anyone ever actually been there? If so, what were your impressions?

How about Woodstock? Anyone go to Woodstock 1999? If so, what was your experience of it like?

Anyhow, I'm not a huge fan of the RHCP, but I do like "Soul to Squeeze", "Give It Away", and "Under the Bridge". They also included a reasonably good cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Castles in the Sand" as a bonus track on the only full album I have from them (Guess which one? ).

I like them enough that I'd be pleased with them as a warmup act to a band I like who's concert I was going to anyway, but not enough to ever try to pay to go see them independent of that.

I think my favorite Woodstock 1999 act, of the ones I remember from the documentary, would have been Bush. I've never seen them live, but I to this day have all their studio albums. A new Bush album comes out, and it's pretty much an auto-buy. I might or might not get it right away, but eventually I get it.

Bush actually were the first band referred to in writing as "post-grunge". A reviewer coined the term and applied it them because he or she felt that they were basically a Nirvana ripoff from the UK that had had basically done the equivalent of culturally appropriating (I mean, not really, all the bands on both sides of this are predominantly white) the Seattle grunge sound that had arisen in the Seattle area in the late 80s and broken into the national and to some extent international mainstream circa 1991.

I like their music anyway. And I think the idea that you can be charged with something resembling cultural appropriation* for taking up a modern form of music who's best bands (and/or their agents, labels, and promoters), at least when it first expanded nationally and internationally, did everything they could to make it popular around the world with album sales, tours, and concerts is kind of ridiculous, especially when it's two closely related cultures and people of mostly the same race. And I vote straight ticket Democratic (The US' equivalent of Labour or Labor) these days, so I'm sensitive to these issues to some degree, but I don't see anything wrong with Bush. . Certainly plenty of American bands copied the Beatles and the Rolling Stones back in the day, who in turn were building on the work of American musicians, and so on.

Anyhow, one interesting side note there is that the initial use of the word post-grunge seemed to be a slightly different than the way we look back on it. The author was basically seeing it as a band with different roots copying grunge as closely as possible (in that person's opinion). The term post-grunge actually eventually became a catch-all for almost everything after grunge and the use of some grunge tropes blended with a wider degree of, often more mainstream, musical styles and sometimes even (*gasp*) upbeat lyrics. It was sort of like the Seattle scene mixed with the other stuff going on musically and post-grunge was their love child.

With only two of the big four grunge bands left making new music, some technically post-grunge stuff is probably a good thing for people who like grunge to be into if they are looking for new music. I mean, there were a lot of minor grunge bands in and around Seattle and stuff back in the day, so one could expand one's collection in that direction, but honestly I feel like there was a reason a lot of that stuff didn't hit it big.


* I think the main era where people probably have a point when they talk about cultural appropriation is when primarily African-American musical forms combined to form what was initially a manly African-American genre called rock and roll, and suddenly most of the stars (Obviously with extremely notable exceptions like Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix) were white and getting rich on not only the style that they hadn't invented, but in some cases by doing covers of songs African-Americans had written and released without having much impact on the market, that became big hits when white people performed them.

With that said, though, getting more people creating and performing new rock songs and albums, and increasing the audience for that type of music was likely a good "end". You want good music genres to get songs and albums from a wide variety of types of people. It wouldn't have done anyone much good if rock music had been limited to minoritt audiences in that era, and there were certainly talented musicians of all races, including white folks, who all deserved to be heard.

But I really wish a way could have been found to get some of the early African-American rockers and even jazz musicians and such from whom rock artists cribbed, but who were under compensated for what they did, some significant financial compensation from the big labels back in the day. Maybe a few of them are still around and have medical bills or bad living situations. It would be rare food publicity for the labels themselves if they were to give some of these people houses (or pay off their mortgages) or pay off all their medical or other debt.

It's probably too late to compensate most of them. If you did something that led into rock and roll at age 20 in 1950, you'd be 93 today. So, a lot of them are dead. But not all of them. It'd be nice for the labels to acknowledge them and pay those who are still living.

[Gilly Goodness]

Had a strong cup of coffee Dbar? Only kiddin'. Went to a few outdoor festivals in the day. Saw Talkin' Heads at Narara Festival near Gosford. Was a farm. Muddy. Camped. Was OK. When you"re young, dumb and full of...high spirits, you can overlook comfort. Hitchhike. Party with strangers. Dance in the rain. Sleep under the stars. But bushwalkin' the Overland Track in Tasmania with all it's heritage cabins spoiled me forevermore. Glampin' is the only way to go.

New Orleans has always been fascinatin' to me esp after readin' how The French explored and colonised down the Mississippi creatin' Louisiana and New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Whilst the English stuck to the Eastern seaboard. The French and their Jesuit priests reportedly had better relations with the Indians than the English and esp the Spanish.

As to reparations for ailin' ol' bluesmen and their legacy from rich record companies ( lookin' at you Led Zeppelin and Atlantic Records )...nice to consider but I think the Greeks will get their Elgin Marbles before that ever happens. Or Benedict Cumberbatch ponies up to the descendants of all his family's slaves. Google it.

Hope you are well and gotta feelin' it's gonna be a big year for a certain Mr Sherwood.

[Frumious B]

I like the idea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, like and respect them quite a bit as individual musicians, but I don’t enjoy their actual music. I’ve tried several times and just can’t get into it.

[Davy]

Same here. I've heard them do a few covers, particularly one of Jimi Hendrix, and they were really good, though.