The story of Red Hot Chili Peppers

Four kids from Fairfax High

The story starts with four boys who ended up at the same Los Angeles school. Anthony Kiedis was born on the first of November 1962 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His parents split when he was three, and at twelve he moved to Hollywood to live with his father, a struggling actor who called himself Blackie Dammett. His father also sold drugs, and he shared them with his son. Through his dad's connections, the teenage Anthony even landed a small film role, playing Sylvester Stallone's son in the 1978 movie F.I.S.T., billed under the stage name Cole Dammett. At Fairfax High School he was a loner, a straight A student, and a kid with a lot of mischief in him.[1] [2]

Michael Balzary was born in Melbourne, Australia, on the sixteenth of October 1962. His family moved to New York when he was four, his parents divorced, and his mother married a jazz musician named Walter Urban Junior. They moved to Los Angeles, and young Michael fell in love with the trumpet, worshipping Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. Home was frightening. His stepfather drank heavily and was violent, and Flea later said he grew up terrified of the father figures in his life. He was nicknamed Flea because he could never sit still. At Fairfax he and Anthony nearly came to blows when they first met, then became best friends, bonding in driver's education class.[1] [2]

The musical heart of the group was Hillel Slovak. He was born in Haifa, Israel, on the thirteenth of April 1962, to parents who had survived the Holocaust, and his family moved to America when he was four. He got his first guitar at thirteen as a bar mitzvah present and played late into the night, hooked on Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Kiss. With his school friend Jack Irons on drums, he formed a band first called Chain Reaction, then Anthym. When their bass player did not measure up, Hillel taught Flea to play bass. Flea, who had never cared for rock, picked it up fast. It was Hillel, Flea later said, who first got him into hard rocking music.[1] [2] [3]

By the early eighties the friends were running wild in Hollywood. Kiedis, Flea and Slovak shared a small house in a rough neighborhood and used LSD, cocaine and heroin together. Anthym had become What Is This?, and Flea left to play bass in the punk band Fear. Then Kiedis, Flea and Slovak saw a punk funk band called Defunkt and heard Grandmaster Flash, and an idea took hold. When a friend needed an opening act for a show, Kiedis and Flea put together a band for one night only, with Slovak and Irons. They called it Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem. They had exactly one song, called Out in L.A., built on a Slovak riff with Kiedis rapping over it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That first show happened in December 1982 at a small club on Hollywood Boulevard, in front of roughly thirty people. Kiedis had never really sung before, and Flea and Slovak had doubts about him, but once he hit the stage he felt he had found what he was put on earth to do. The club asked them back the following week, as long as they brought two songs this time. They kept writing, played more nights around Los Angeles, and early in 1983 they became the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was still meant to be a side project for Slovak and Irons. Nobody in the room expected it to last forty years.[1] [2] [3]

Socks, a record deal and two new faces

Word spread fast around the Los Angeles clubs. At one gig at a Hollywood strip club called the Kit Kat Club, the band came on wearing nothing but tube socks over their genitals, an idea of Kiedis's. It became their calling card, and some club owners booked them on the condition that they do it again. Kiedis and Flea also carried their demo tape around on a boombox. They marched into Club Lingerie and made promoter Brendan Mullen listen while they danced around like maniacs. He was won over and gave them an opening slot for Bad Brains. Mullen stayed a friend and supporter for the rest of his life.[1] [2] [3]

A manager named Lindy Goetz caught them at the Kit Kat Club in 1983 and agreed to look after them. In November 1983 he landed a seven album deal with EMI America and Enigma Records. But there was a problem. Two weeks earlier, What Is This? had signed with MCA, and Slovak and Irons still saw the Chili Peppers as a side project. In December they quit to focus on their other band. Kiedis and Flea were crushed but pressed on, hiring Cliff Martinez, a drummer who had played with Captain Beefheart and the Weirdos, and a guitarist named Jack Sherman.[1] [2] [3]

The debut album, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, came out in August 1984, produced by Andy Gill of the British post punk band Gang of Four. It was a battle from the start. Gill pushed for a cleaner, radio friendly sound, and the band felt he had sanded all the energy off. Kiedis later wrote that he caught sight of Gill's notebook, where next to the song Police Helicopter the producer had written a single word: shit. After that, it was the band against the producer. The album barely brushed the charts, but college radio and MTV picked it up, and it eventually sold around three hundred thousand copies. The band played sixty shows in sixty four days to promote it.[1] [2]

On that tour the tension between Kiedis and Jack Sherman became too much, and Sherman was fired in February 1985. Meanwhile Hillel Slovak had grown tired of What Is This? and called Flea about coming back. When Flea asked Kiedis how he felt about that, Kiedis said he would give his firstborn son to have Hillel back. Before settling on a producer for album two, the band met Malcolm McLaren, the former Sex Pistols manager, who wanted them to play simple fifties rock and roll with Kiedis as the star. They refused. Fans kept comparing them to Parliament Funkadelic, so they went straight to the source and asked George Clinton.[1] [2] [3]

EMI paid Clinton twenty five thousand dollars to produce Freaky Styley, and the band moved to Michigan to make it, first staying at Clinton's own house outside Detroit. They recorded at United Sound Studios with horn legends Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley, in a party atmosphere fueled by cocaine. Clinton even let his drug dealer, who was chasing an unpaid debt, speak on the track Yertle the Turtle. The album came out in August 1985 and missed the charts entirely, selling about seventy five thousand copies by the end of the year. Flea called it too funky for white radio and too punk rock for black radio. One song on it, Catholic School Girls Rule, has a dark backstory. Kiedis wrote in his memoir that it was inspired by his sexual encounter with a fourteen year old girl on the 1984 tour, when he was in his early twenties.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Heroin, a breakthrough and the loss of Hillel

By 1986 drugs were tearing at the band. EMI gave them five thousand dollars to record demos with Keith Levene of Public Image Ltd, and Levene and Slovak quietly set aside two thousand of it for heroin and cocaine. Cliff Martinez's heart had gone out of the group, and in April 1986 Kiedis and Flea fired him. To everyone's surprise, Jack Irons came back, reuniting all four founders. But Kiedis was now so deep into heroin that he turned up to rehearsals practically asleep. Rick Rubin turned down the chance to produce the next record because of the band's drug problems, and the group settled on Michael Beinhorn, their last choice.[1] [2] [3]

Then the band fired Kiedis, telling him to get clean. While he was out, LA Weekly named them band of the year, and the news shook him. He flew home to Michigan, and his mother took one look at him at the airport and drove him straight to a Salvation Army rehab clinic in Grand Rapids. It was the first time he had been fully off drugs since he was eleven. On the flight back to Los Angeles, full of fresh energy, he wrote the words to a song called Fight Like a Brave. The band even auditioned other singers while he was gone, but once Kiedis walked back in sober, he was their frontman again.[1] [2] [3]

The Uplift Mofo Party Plan was recorded at Capitol Records in Hollywood and released on the twenty ninth of September 1987. It is the only studio album on which all four founding members play on every track. Slovak was bursting with pride and wrote in his diary that the work was at times genius. The sessions were still rocky. After fifty days sober, Kiedis decided to celebrate his new songs with one more high, and was soon hooked again, vanishing for days to find drugs. Even so, the album reached number one hundred and forty eight on the Billboard chart, their first appearance there, and they toured America with Faith No More opening.[1] [2] [3]

Hillel Slovak had hidden his addiction better than Kiedis, and it was worse than anyone knew. On tour in Europe in 1988 he was in such bad withdrawal that he could not play one night, and the band briefly replaced him. Back home he pulled away from his friends and stopped painting and writing his diary. On the twenty fourth of June he phoned his brother James and admitted he was struggling to stay clean. He died of a heroin overdose in his Hollywood apartment on the twenty fifth of June 1988, at the age of twenty six. His body was not found until two days later. He is buried at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills.[1] [2]

The death broke the band apart. Kiedis could not face it. He fled to a fishing village in Mexico and missed the funeral, and at first he kept using. A few weeks later a friend got him into rehab and took him to Hillel's grave, and that visit finally started his recovery. Jack Irons was devastated. He said he could not be part of something where his friends were dying, left the band and sought treatment in a psychiatric hospital. Kiedis and Flea, the two who were left, decided the only way to honor Hillel was to keep going and build on what he had helped create.[1] [2] [3]

A teenage fan and a hair metal drummer

To fill the gaps, Kiedis and Flea brought in DeWayne Blackbyrd McKnight, a guitarist from Parliament Funkadelic, and D. H. Peligro, the drummer of the Dead Kennedys. McKnight never clicked with the band and was let go after just three shows, and he was so angry he threatened to burn down Kiedis's house. Peligro, though, had a friend: an eighteen year old guitarist named John Frusciante. Born in New York on the fifth of March 1970, Frusciante had first seen the Chili Peppers at fifteen and worshipped Hillel Slovak, learning nearly every guitar and bass part from their records. When Flea jammed with him, the chemistry was instant.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Frusciante had just been asked to join Bob Forrest's band Thelonious Monster when the Chili Peppers called. When Flea phoned with the news, Frusciante ran through his house screaming with joy and jumped at a wall so hard he left boot marks. He played his first show with the band in September 1988. Peligro's own drinking and drug use soon cost him the job, and in November he was fired. The band held open auditions for a drummer, and the last man through the door was Chad Smith, a tall drummer from Michigan who looked more hair metal than punk. He played so hard that Kiedis said the band could not stop laughing for half an hour. Smith joined in December 1988 and has been there ever since.[1] [2] [3] [4]

With just weeks together, the new lineup made Mother's Milk, released on the sixteenth of August 1989. Producer Michael Beinhorn pushed hard for a hit and a crunching, almost metal guitar tone, and he and Frusciante fought constantly over it. Still, the album gave the band real momentum. Their cover of Stevie Wonder's Higher Ground became a radio hit, and Knock Me Down, a song about addiction that Kiedis called a love song for Hillel, reached number six on the modern rock chart. Mother's Milk climbed to number fifty two in America and became their first gold record in early 1990. Kiedis's lyrics were changing, too, becoming more personal after the loss of his friend.[1] [2] [3]

This period also brought two criminal cases. After a concert at George Mason University in Virginia on the twenty first of April 1989, Kiedis exposed himself to a woman backstage and touched her face with his penis against her will. He was convicted in 1990 of sexual battery and indecent exposure and fined a thousand dollars on each charge, though he later called it blown out of proportion. In 1990, during an MTV spring break show in Daytona Beach, Florida, Flea and Chad Smith were arrested after jumping into the crowd, where they manhandled a twenty year old woman. According to reports of the case they pleaded guilty, were fined, and were ordered to pay five thousand dollars to a local rape crisis center. Flea later said he wished he had never done it.[1] [2] [3]

The mansion and Blood Sugar Sex Magik

After Mother's Milk the band left EMI. They nearly signed with Epic, but then Mo Ostin of Warner Bros. Records called Kiedis simply to congratulate him on the rival deal. Kiedis was so charmed by the gesture that the band went with Warner instead. This time Rick Rubin said yes, feeling the group was healthier and more focused. Rubin suggested recording somewhere unusual, and chose a big old house in Laurel Canyon, known as The Mansion. Kiedis, Flea and Frusciante moved in for the whole recording. Chad Smith rode in each day on his motorcycle. A crew filmed it all for a documentary called Funky Monks.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The songs came quickly. One day Flea started a bass line that ran up and down the whole neck, and Kiedis grabbed a microphone and began chanting give it away, give it away, give it away now. The phrase came from a lesson the German singer Nina Hagen had taught him years earlier, when she handed him a jacket from her closet and explained that giving things away makes life bigger. Another song almost did not happen. Rubin found a poem in Kiedis's notebook about his loneliness and his old drug days under a bridge in downtown Los Angeles. Kiedis thought it was too soft for the band, but Rubin urged him to sing it to the others. That poem became Under the Bridge.[1] [2] [3]

Blood Sugar Sex Magik came out on the twenty fourth of September 1991, the very same day as Nirvana's Nevermind. Give It Away became their first number one on the modern rock chart, and later won a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. Then Under the Bridge climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest they have ever gone. Frusciante even brought his mother in to sing in the choir at the end of the song. The album went to number three in America and has sold well over twelve million copies. The tour was huge, with Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins among the opening acts.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For John Frusciante, the success was a nightmare. He was only twenty two, he had secretly started using heroin, and he felt the band was now too big, too fast. He clashed with Kiedis, and on Saturday Night Live he played in a way Kiedis believed was meant to sabotage the performance. On the seventh of May 1992, before a show in Saitama, Japan, he told the band he was leaving. He was talked into playing that night, then flew home to California the next morning. The band hired Arik Marshall to finish the tour. With Marshall they headlined Lollapalooza in 1992, won three MTV Video Music Awards, and even appeared as themselves on The Simpsons.[1] [2] [3]

Behind the success, there was more heartbreak. After the tour, Flea was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and told to rest for a year. On the night of the thirtieth of October 1993, Flea was playing at the Viper Room in West Hollywood with a group of friends called P, when word came that the young actor River Phoenix had collapsed on the sidewalk outside. Flea rushed out and rode with him in the ambulance to Cedars Sinai, but Phoenix died early the next morning of an overdose of cocaine and heroin, aged twenty three. His friend Bob Forrest later wrote that Phoenix had spent the days before his death on a binge with John Frusciante.[1] [2] [3]

The Dave Navarro years

Finding a new guitarist proved hard. Arik Marshall did not fit as a songwriter, and was let go. The band auditioned players including the guitarist Buckethead, then briefly hired Jesse Tobias from the Texas band Mother Tongue, only to drop him within a month. Their first choice all along had been Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction, and in September 1993 he finally said yes. In the meantime an outtake from the Blood Sugar sessions called Soul to Squeeze was released on the Coneheads soundtrack and went to number one on the modern rock chart. Navarro's first big show with the band came at Woodstock ninety four.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Making the next album was slow and painful. Navarro did not really care for funk or long jams, and felt like an outsider. Worse, Kiedis had relapsed after five years sober, when a dentist gave him Valium, and he hid it from the band. Songs came so slowly that Flea wrote lyrics for the first time, and even sang lead on a short song called Pea. One Hot Minute finally came out on the twelfth of September 1995. It was darker and heavier, with songs about addiction, a tribute to Kurt Cobain called Tearjerker, and Transcending, Flea's song about River Phoenix. On Aeroplane, you can hear Flea's daughter Clara and her kindergarten class singing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

One Hot Minute reached number four in America and sold millions, but reviews were mixed and it did not come close to Blood Sugar. The tour kept falling apart. Chad Smith broke his wrist, delaying the American dates, and Kiedis broke his arm in a motorcycle accident. Their set at the first Fuji Rock Festival in Japan in 1997 was cut short by a typhoon. Flea called 1997 the year of nothing. Kiedis and Navarro were both using drugs again, and in April 1998 the band announced Navarro was gone. Kiedis called it mutual. Navarro later said he was not given the same room to struggle with addiction that Kiedis had been given.[1] [2] [3] [4]

While all this was happening, John Frusciante was fading away. He spent years in his Hollywood Hills home, which was covered in graffiti and falling apart. Friends Johnny Depp and Gibby Haynes filmed a short documentary there that showed the squalor. A fire destroyed the house and his vintage guitars. He released two strange, raw solo albums, and later said he put out the second one for drug money. A 1996 newspaper described him as a skeleton covered in thin skin. He nearly died from a blood infection. In January 1998, urged by Bob Forrest, he checked into Las Encinas rehab in Pasadena, where his rotten teeth were replaced with implants and his damaged arms needed skin grafts.[1] [2] [3]

John comes home: Californication

By spring 1998 the Chili Peppers were close to breaking up. Flea told Kiedis the only way he could imagine carrying on was with John back in the band. In April, Flea visited the newly sober Frusciante and asked him to rejoin. Frusciante burst into tears and said nothing in the world would make him happier. Within a week the four of them were playing together for the first time in six years. Kiedis gave him a 1962 Fender Stratocaster, the guitar he has used on every album since. That summer they wrote in Flea's garage. Frusciante, relearning how to play with a band, stripped his style right back to something simple and melodic.[1] [2] [3]

Flea first imagined an electronic record, and the band approached several producers for that direction, including David Bowie, who turned them down. Instead they went back to Rick Rubin and recorded quickly and cleanly at Cello Studios in Los Angeles. Californication came out on the eighth of June 1999. Kiedis's lyrics looked at rebirth, California dreams and the dark side of Hollywood. Scar Tissue spent sixteen weeks at number one on the modern rock chart and won a Grammy for Best Rock Song. Otherside, about Hillel Slovak and the pull of addiction, topped that chart for thirteen weeks. The album sold around sixteen million copies, their biggest ever.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In July 1999 the band closed the Woodstock ninety nine festival in Rome, New York, and it turned into a disaster. The weekend had already been marred by heat, overpriced water and many reports of sexual assault. Flea came on stage naked. An activist group had handed out candles for a vigil for the victims of the Columbine shooting, and during the band's set people used them to light bonfires. At the request of Jimi Hendrix's sister, the band played Hendrix's song Fire as a tribute, and the next day many newspapers blamed them for the riot that followed, with fires, looting and wrecked trucks. Kiedis wrote that the event had become about greed rather than peace and love.[1] [2] [3]

There was one more relapse for Kiedis. A doctor prescribed him the painkiller Tramadol, even though he had asked not to be given opiates, and it pulled him back in. He has said he has been clean since the twenty fourth of December 2000. The band spent 2001 writing By the Way, released on the ninth of July 2002. This time Frusciante led the way, with layered guitars, doo wop harmonies and gentle melodies, and very little funk. Flea felt his voice was not being heard and considered quitting, but the two worked it out. The album reached number two in America, and songs like By the Way, The Zephyr Song and Can't Stop became radio staples.[1] [2] [3]

The tour that followed was enormous. In August 2003 they filmed a concert at Slane Castle in Ireland that became one of their best loved DVDs. In June 2004 they played three nights in London's Hyde Park, drawing more than two hundred and fifty thousand people and grossing over seventeen million dollars, the highest earning concerts at a single venue up to that time. The recordings became their first live album. That October Kiedis published his memoir, Scar Tissue, written with Larry Sloman. It laid out his childhood, his drug use and his many relationships in blunt detail, and it became an international bestseller.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stadium Arcadium and a long goodbye

For their ninth album the band went back to The Mansion. They meant to make a small, tight record of about twelve songs, but they wrote so much that they talked about releasing three albums six months apart. In the end it became a twenty eight track double album, Stadium Arcadium, released on the ninth of May 2006. Frusciante let loose with flashy, improvised solos inspired by Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen, and his friend Omar Rodriguez Lopez of the Mars Volta played a solo too. Kiedis said everyone was in a good mood and felt free to bring ideas. Several band members had fallen in love or become parents, and it showed in the songs.[1] [2] [3]

Stadium Arcadium became their first album to go to number one in America, and it also topped the charts in Britain and many other countries. The first single, Dani California, debuted at number one on the modern rock chart, and Kiedis explained that Dani was a character built from many women he had known, the same girl who had quietly appeared in Californication and By the Way. Snow, Hey Oh, gave them a record eleventh modern rock number one. At the Grammys the album won Best Rock Album, and Dani California also took home awards. Rick Rubin was named Producer of the Year, partly for this record.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the long world tour, Frusciante's friend Josh Klinghoffer joined as an extra guitarist and keyboard player, starting in Oklahoma City in March 2007. When the tour ended that summer, the band were exhausted, and agreed not to do anything as the Chili Peppers for at least a year. Flea enrolled at the University of Southern California to study music theory and jazz trumpet, and later joined Thom Yorke in Atoms for Peace. Chad Smith formed the supergroup Chickenfoot with Sammy Hagar and Joe Satriani. Kiedis focused on his newborn son, Everly Bear, born in October 2007.[1] [2] [3] [4]

During that break, on the twenty ninth of July 2009, John Frusciante quietly quit again, though nobody announced it until December. He said there was no drama or anger this time. He simply wanted to follow his own music, which was heading toward electronic sounds. Flea later admitted he had almost left too, wanting two years away to see whether the band should even continue. What kept him, he said, was realizing that Anthony was his brother, and that they had started this band as kids. Kiedis and Flea decided they were not finished yet, and they did not need to look far for a new guitarist.[1] [2] [3]

The Klinghoffer decade

Josh Klinghoffer was just thirty and had played with the band on tour, but he had known Frusciante since he was seventeen, and had worked on many of his solo records. He began jamming with the Chili Peppers on the twelfth of October 2009, the same day their old friend and champion Brendan Mullen died of a stroke. The song Brendan's Death Song came out of that grief. Klinghoffer's first show as their guitarist was a Neil Young tribute in January 2010, and he was confirmed a month later. I'm with You came out in August 2011 and went to number one in eighteen countries.[1] [2] [3]

In April 2012 the Red Hot Chili Peppers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The inductees included Kiedis, Flea, Smith and Klinghoffer, along with Frusciante, Jack Irons, Cliff Martinez and the late Hillel Slovak, whose brother James accepted for him. Frusciante chose not to attend. Irons and Martinez joined the band to play Give It Away, the first time Kiedis and Flea had played with Irons in more than twenty years. Dave Navarro and Jack Sherman were left out. Sherman said he felt dishonored. At thirty two, Klinghoffer became the youngest person ever inducted at that time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 2014 the band joined Bruno Mars for the Super Bowl halftime show, watched by a record audience of over one hundred and fifteen million people. Afterwards, viewers noticed that the cables on Flea's bass and Josh Klinghoffer's guitar did not seem to be plugged in. Flea explained that the league required bands to play along to a prerecorded track, but that Kiedis's vocals were live. Then, in early 2015, Flea badly broke his arm on a winter trip to the slopes, delaying the next album by months. When work resumed, the band tried something new and left Rick Rubin for the producer Danger Mouse, who asked them to scrap their songs and write fresh ones in the studio.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Getaway came out on the seventeenth of June 2016, with Elton John playing piano on Sick Love. Kiedis said many songs came from a two year relationship that fell apart like a nuclear bomb. Dark Necessities gave them a record twenty fifth top ten on the Billboard alternative chart. The world tour ran for one hundred and fifty one shows, with original drummer Jack Irons opening some American dates. In November 2018 the Woolsey Fire tore through Malibu, where Kiedis and Smith lived, and the band played a benefit for its victims. In March 2019 they became one of the few acts ever to perform at the Pyramids of Giza.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then came another twist. Kiedis and Flea were unhappy with progress on the next album, and Flea had begun jamming with Frusciante again. On the second of November 2019 Klinghoffer played his final show with the band, a charity concert for Flea's Silverlake Conservatory of Music. A few weeks later he rode his bike to Flea's house, where the band told him they were asking John to come back. Klinghoffer said he was not surprised, and that it was absolutely John's place to be in that band. On the fifteenth of December 2019 the band announced the news, calling Klinghoffer a beautiful musician they respected and loved.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The third act, through 2026

Frusciante's first show back came on the eighth of February 2020, at a memorial for film producer Andrew Burkle, his first time on stage with the band in thirteen years. Then the pandemic shut everything down. That August, their former guitarist Jack Sherman died of a heart attack at home in Savannah, Georgia, aged sixty four, and the band thanked him for all times good, bad and in between. In 2021 the band sold their songwriting catalog to Hipgnosis in a deal reported at around one hundred and forty million dollars, and after twenty years with Q Prime they switched management to their longtime friend Guy Oseary. Kiedis's father, Blackie Dammett, died in May 2021.[1] [2] [3] [4]

When sessions resumed with Rick Rubin at his Shangri La studio in Malibu, Rubin said seeing the four of them together again made him cry. They recorded almost fifty songs and wanted to release forty of them on seven discs. Their label pushed back, so they split the music into two albums. Unlimited Love came out on the first of April 2022 and became their first American number one since Stadium Arcadium. Return of the Dream Canteen followed that October, including Eddie, a tribute to Eddie Van Halen. The band also got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, unveiled by George Clinton, Woody Harrelson and Bob Forrest, and launched their first ever headlining stadium tour of America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Another piece of the early story ended that year. D. H. Peligro, the Dead Kennedys drummer who had brought John Frusciante to the band, died at his Los Angeles home on the twenty eighth of October 2022, aged sixty three. It was first reported as an accidental fall, but in 2023 the coroner found that he died from the combined effects of fentanyl and heroin, and he also had lung cancer. The band kept playing to huge crowds. In August 2024 they performed Can't Stop from Long Beach, California, for the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics, representing Los Angeles, the next host city. In January 2025 they played the FireAid benefit for victims of the Los Angeles wildfires.[1] [2] [3]

In 2026 Hillel Slovak got his own film. The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Our Brother, Hillel, directed by Ben Feldman and co-produced by Hillel's brother James, premiered on Netflix on the twentieth of March 2026. It tells how Kiedis, Flea and Hillel became friends as boys, with an AI recreation of Hillel's voice reading from his journals, which the film discloses on screen. The band said they took part out of love and respect for Hillel, but stressed it was not a band documentary. Flea also released his first solo album, Honora, in March 2026, a jazz record with trumpet at its center and guest vocals from Thom Yorke and Nick Cave.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In May 2026 it was reported that the band had sold the rights to their recorded music to Warner Music Group, whose label has released their albums since 1991, in a deal said to be worth more than three hundred million dollars. As of 2026 the four of them are writing their fourteenth album, recording at John Frusciante's house, and Flea says the music feels great. They are due to play a benefit at the Hollywood Palladium on the seventeenth of October 2026 for the twenty fifth anniversary of Flea's Silverlake Conservatory of Music. More than forty years after that one song gig, with over one hundred and twenty million records sold, the kids from Fairfax High are still at it.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Red Hot Chili Peppers

Anthony Kiedis and Flea. They met at Fairfax High, nearly fought, then became inseparable, both outsiders who found each other. Kiedis introduced Flea to punk, and Flea has written most of the band's music while Kiedis writes the words. They have been the only constant members for over four decades. When Flea considered walking away in the late two thousands, he stayed because, as he put it, Anthony is his brother and they started the band as kids.[1] [2] [3]

Anthony Kiedis and Hillel Slovak. Kiedis met Slovak after an Anthym gig, when Hillel invited him home for a snack, and was struck by his calm and his art. They became best friends and, tragically, fellow heroin users who tried to get clean together on the 1988 European tour. After Slovak's death Kiedis fled to Mexico and missed the funeral. Visiting Hillel's grave later helped start his recovery, and songs like Knock Me Down, My Lovely Man and Otherside were written for him.[1] [2] [3]

Flea and John Frusciante. Their musical bond was instant when they first jammed in 1988, and they spent the Blood Sugar sessions playing for hours. It was not always easy. On By the Way, Frusciante's vision dominated and Flea felt he had nothing to offer, almost quitting. Yet it was Flea who persuaded Frusciante into rehab, invited him back in 1998, and planted the idea of his 2019 return. Flea says the two of them simply speak the same musical language.[1] [2] [3] [4]

John Frusciante and Josh Klinghoffer. They met when Klinghoffer was seventeen, and for years they were inseparable collaborators, working together on many of Frusciante's solo albums and in the trio Ataxia. Frusciante once called him the person closest to him. When Frusciante left the band in 2009, Klinghoffer took his place, and he believed Frusciante was surprised the band carried on without him. By 2022 Klinghoffer said their friendship was nonexistent and that they had not spoken in over ten years.[1] [2]

Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rick Rubin. Rubin turned the band down in 1987 because of their drug problems, then agreed to produce Blood Sugar Sex Magik in 1991. He found the Under the Bridge poem and pushed Kiedis to share it. He went on to produce eight of their albums, which together yielded fourteen number one alternative singles. The band briefly left him for Danger Mouse on The Getaway, then returned, and Rubin said seeing them reunited with Frusciante made him cry.[1] [2] [3]

Red Hot Chili Peppers and George Clinton. The band were such fans of Parliament Funkadelic that they sought Clinton out to produce Freaky Styley in 1985. They lived at his house in Michigan and bonded instantly, and Flea called him the warmest, kindest man in the world. Clinton wrote the lyrics for the album's title track. Decades later the band recorded with him on his 2008 album, and in 2022 he helped unveil their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Anthony Kiedis and Ione Skye. The actress began dating Kiedis in the late eighties when she was sixteen and he was twenty four, a relationship that has drawn heavy criticism since. She was meant to be the cover model for Mother's Milk, but the label thought she looked too young. The relationship ended in December 1989, as he struggled in early sobriety. In her 2025 memoir, Skye wrote that Kiedis got her pregnant when she was seventeen and paid for her abortion.[1] [2] [3]

Anthony Kiedis and Blackie Dammett. Kiedis idolized his father, an actor who hung around the Sunset Strip and sold drugs, and the two used drugs together when Anthony was a boy. Dammett later ran the band's fan club for years and wrote his own memoir. When the band was named to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the first person Kiedis told was his father, who cried. Dammett died in May 2021 after suffering from dementia.[1] [2]

Chad Smith and Will Ferrell. Smith looks so much like the comedian that he wears a shirt saying he is not Will Ferrell. When they met in 2000, Ferrell looked him up and down and deadpanned that he was very handsome. They staged a drum battle on The Tonight Show in 2014, co hosted charity nights for Ferrell's Cancer for College, and in May 2026 Smith opened Ferrell's Saturday Night Live monologue by pretending to be him.[1] [2]

Jack Irons and Eddie Vedder. The Chili Peppers' first drummer was friends with a San Diego singer he played basketball with. In 1990 Irons passed him a demo tape from a new Seattle band, and Vedder became the singer of Pearl Jam. Irons then asked the Chili Peppers to take Pearl Jam on the Blood Sugar tour. In 1994 Irons himself joined Pearl Jam as drummer, staying until 1998.[1]

Flea and River Phoenix. Flea and the young actor were close friends, and Phoenix appears briefly in the Breaking the Girl video. Flea played bass on a track by Phoenix's band Aleka's Attic. On the night Phoenix collapsed outside the Viper Room in 1993, Flea left the stage and rode with him to the hospital. Flea later wrote Transcending on One Hot Minute about him, and in 2020 helped release unheard Aleka's Attic songs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Red Hot Chili Peppers

• As a teenager, Anthony Kiedis played Sylvester Stallone's son in the 1978 film F.I.S.T., billed as Cole Dammett. He took the stage name from his father's own, Blackie Dammett, who helped him find acting work. He also appeared in an ABC Afterschool Special that year, and later played a surfer named Tone in Point Break.[1]
• Flea started out as a jazz trumpet player and did not care about rock until Hillel Slovak taught him bass. As a boy Flea idolized Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie and took private trumpet lessons. Slovak taught him bass so he could replace Anthym's bassist, and Flea said it was Hillel who first got him into hard rock.[1] [2]
• Hillel Slovak's first guitar was a bar mitzvah present, given to him when he turned thirteen. The Israeli born guitarist then played late into the night, copying Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Kiss. His brother James later named his book of Hillel's diaries and art Behind the Sun, after one of his songs.[1] [2]
• Their very first gig was meant to be a one time joke band playing a single song, Out in L.A. Under the name Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, they played just that one song. The club asked them back, as long as they brought two songs next time.[1] [2]
• Brendan Mullen booked them after Kiedis and Flea played him their demo on a boombox and danced around his club. Mullen gave them an opening slot for Bad Brains and stayed a close friend. He died the day Josh Klinghoffer started jamming with the band, inspiring Brendan's Death Song.[1]
• Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren once tried to turn them into a fifties style rock and roll band. Before Freaky Styley, McLaren was considered as producer. He wanted simpler, retro rock and roll with Kiedis as the central character. The band flatly refused and hired George Clinton instead.[1]
• The voice on Yertle the Turtle belongs to George Clinton's drug dealer, who showed up demanding money. According to Kiedis, Clinton could not pay a debt, so he offered the dealer a spot on the album instead. The song itself borrows verses from the Dr. Seuss poem.[1]
• Gwen Dickey, the singer of the disco group Rose Royce, sings backing vocals on their debut album. She appears on Mommy Where's Daddy. When the band played the song live, Flea sang her part.[1]
• Their label refused to release Behind the Sun as a single in 1987 because it was too melodic. EMI finally released it in 1992 to cash in on their Warner Bros. success, and it reached the modern rock top ten. As of 2023 the band had never played it live in full.[1]
• When Frusciante heard he had got the gig, he jumped at a wall so hard he left permanent boot marks. He ran through his house screaming with joy after Flea called. He had been playing with Thelonious Monster, and turned them down to join his favorite band.[1]
• The drums on Taste the Pain were played by Fishbone's Philip Fisher, not Chad Smith. The track was recorded before Smith joined the band in December 1988, when the Chili Peppers were still between drummers.[1]
• Ione Skye was supposed to be the woman on the cover of Mother's Milk, but the label thought she looked too young. She was eighteen when the photo was taken. The label used another model instead, and Skye posted the unused photo in January 2025.[1] [2]
• Blood Sugar Sex Magik came out on exactly the same day as Nirvana's Nevermind, the twenty fourth of September 1991. Nirvana later opened for the Chili Peppers on part of the Blood Sugar tour, alongside Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins.[1] [2]
• Blood Sugar Sex Magik is dedicated to Mike Watt of the Minutemen and fIREHOSE. The band thanked him for his friendship and musical inspiration. The album's artwork and photos were credited to film director Gus Van Sant.[1]
• The percussion break in Breaking the Girl was played on junk the band pulled out of a garbage dump. Chad Smith, John Frusciante and Flea gathered the debris themselves. Frusciante said the song's main riff was inspired by Led Zeppelin ballads.[1]
• John Frusciante's mother sings in the choir at the end of Under the Bridge. Rick Rubin wanted a big group of voices for the ending, so Frusciante invited his mother Gail and a friend of hers, both choir singers.[1]
• Under the Bridge became a single because the crowd sang it when Kiedis missed his cue at a show. Warner Bros. staff were in the audience. Kiedis apologized for messing up, but they told him that if every kid sings a song, it is the next single.[1]
• The Give It Away riff was first played in a side project called H.A.T.E. with members of Fishbone. Frusciante and Flea came up with the riff and bass line there, then brought it to the Chili Peppers when the side project ended.[1]
• On Aeroplane, the children singing are Flea's daughter Clara and her kindergarten class. The song was the third single from One Hot Minute and reached number eleven in the UK.[1] [2]
• Before Californication, the band wanted an electronic album and approached producers including David Bowie, who turned them down. Flea had been thinking of something like U2's Zooropa. With no electronic producer on board, they went back to Rick Rubin and made a stripped back rock record.[1]
• In the Scar Tissue video John Frusciante is shown driving, but he does not drive in real life. The car is a 1967 Pontiac Catalina convertible, and the scene was filmed in the Mojave Desert. The drive was a metaphor for his comeback.[1]
• Frusciante's main guitar since 1998 is a 1962 Stratocaster that Kiedis gave him when he rejoined the band. He had lost all his earlier guitars when his house burned down in the nineties. He has played the Strat on every Chili Peppers album since his return.[1]
• Road Trippin' has no drums because Chad Smith skipped the surfing trip that inspired it. The song recalls Kiedis, Flea and Frusciante surfing at Big Sur after John's return. Smith only shows up briefly in the video, arriving by boat.[1]
• The Californication video, styled as an imaginary video game, passed one billion YouTube views in December 2022. It is the band's most watched video. In 2022 a Spanish developer even built a playable game based on it.[1]
• Josh Klinghoffer was the youngest person ever inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when he went in at thirty two. He held that record from 2012 until 2020, when Nine Inch Nails drummer Ilan Rubin was inducted.[1]
• Former drummer Cliff Martinez became a film composer, scoring Traffic, Contagion and Drive. A tape he made led to work on Pee Wee's Playhouse and then to Steven Soderbergh, who hired him for Sex, Lies, and Videotape in 1989.[1]
• Jack Sherman went on to play with Bob Dylan, and even sang backing vocals on Mother's Milk after being fired. He co wrote much of Freaky Styley's material before Slovak returned, and later worked with George Clinton and Feargal Sharkey.[1]
• Dani, the girl in Dani California, first appeared unnamed in the song Californication. Kiedis said he realized he had been writing about the same character for years. She shows up again in By the Way as Dani the girl.[1]
• Elton John plays piano on the song Sick Love, and he and Bernie Taupin share a writing credit. The track is on The Getaway from 2016, the band's only album since 1989 not produced by Rick Rubin.[1]
• Kiedis gave emergency CPR to a baby during a break in filming Carpool Karaoke in 2016. A woman ran out of her house saying her baby could not breathe. Kiedis revived the child before the ambulance arrived, then went back to filming.[1] [2]
• For their 2022 albums, the band first wanted to release forty songs on seven discs at once. Warner resisted, so they split the material into two albums, Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen, released six months apart.[1] [2]
• Flea's solo album Honora is named after his great great grandmother, who left poverty in Ireland for Australia. The cover shows a 1960s photo of his mother in law in Iran. Released in March 2026, it features Thom Yorke and Nick Cave.[1]
• In May 2026 Chad Smith opened Saturday Night Live pretending to be Will Ferrell, and Paul McCartney joined the joke. It was the season finale hosted by Ferrell, a nod to years of jokes about the two looking alike.[1] [2]
• The Netflix film about Hillel Slovak uses an AI recreation of his voice to read his own journals. Director Ben Feldman said Slovak's family gave their blessing, and the film tells viewers early on that the audio was digitally reconstructed.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.