Red Hot Chili Peppers: The historic first album turns 40
The Red Hot Chili Pepperson several occasions, have said that they would like to re-record their debut album, “The Red Hot Chili Peppers”, Released August 10, 1984the band’s first official album. The album, which turns forty this year, was produced by Andy Gill of Gang of Four, who, according to the original members, was against their stylistic choices. Singer Anthony Kiedis and his band managed to complete the recording, but he didn’t like the final result, which he considered lacking the innovative charge of the 1983 demo from which it was largely derived. At the time the band entered the studio in Hollywood with Jack Sherman on guitar and Cliff Martinez on drumsJack Irons and Hillel Slovak were busy with their second group What is This?.
“I once snuck a peek into Gill’s notebook,” Anthony Kiedis wrote in his beautiful autobiography ‘Scar Tissue’. and next to the song ‘Police Helicopter’ he wrote: it sucks. For me it was one of the jewels in our crown, it represented our spirit and our identity: we were an assault force, of sound and energy, dynamic, alternative, shocking. Reading those words made us think: ok, we are working with the enemy. Recording the album has become a battle”. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Flea, some time ago, also spoke about the internal dynamics of the band: “I think the songs on our first album were good, the band was killing it at the time. But Jack and Hillel left and we had to get another drummer and another guitarist. They were both excellent musicians, but we didn’t have the same understanding, we lacked the deep connection that is the basis of our music”. The bassist’s great dream is therefore to get back to the recordings, re-engraving that first column of the Red Hot temple. “I’ve often wanted to go back and re-record that album, but I can never convince anyone to do it.”
The debut album immediately acquired the reputation of a “musical failure”reaching only the 201st position on the Billboard 200 chart, and holding that position for eight weeks. But it would be wrong to just draw a line. Historically, the album was in fact one of the very first to mix, in a creative vortex, fragments of black music, rap and funk first of all with “True Men Don’t Kill Coyotes”, “Baby Appeal”, “Get Up and Jump”, “Why Don’t You Love Me” and “Out in LA”, with punk splinters present in “Police Helicopter” and jazz in “Mommy Where’s Daddy” and heralding rap-metal in some moments, “Green Heaven”. It is true that at the beginning it did not meet the success hoped for, because the group was struggling with internal problems and with the producer Andy Gill, and their music was still being defined. With its first album the formation iHe did, however, pioneer the idea of performing rap verses over rock bases, years before the advent of crossover..
