Originals Week: Frusciante Covered Too!
Jun 05
1980s crazy town, frusciante friday, john frusciante, originals week, red hot chili peppers No Comments
Frusciante Friday lives on through Originals Week. Now, this entry is from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and I know you’re probably thinking, “But how could someone cover a Chili Pepper song in the past decade and people not know it was by them, especially since their hits of the 90s still dominate the radio today?” If I could see you in person, I would slap you for not only asking that question but for still listening to the radio in this day and age. Radio…that’s a good one. Anyway, it is true that a band covered a Red Hot Chili Pepper song and I would be very surprised if even one person who reads this has not heard of it…but let’s start by talking about the Chili Peppers’ song first which is actually the story of how Frusciante came into the Chili Peppers. My, my, my how I love Frusciante Fridays!
The Red Hot Chili Peppers originally consisted of Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Jack Irons, & Hillel Slovak. However, due to contractual obligations to another band, Slovak and Irons were not around for the first album and only Slovak was around for the second. However, the Chili Pepper’s third album The Uplift Mofo Party Plan (featured “Fight Like A Brave“) is where the original line-up was finally together on an album. What resulted was a clearly better representation of their funk-punk fusion than their first low-rent punk album and they’re second mostly funk album (it was produced by George Clinton: what are you going to do?). Their third album did miles better than the second as it got to 148 on the Billboard 200 as opposed to…not charting before…so there was definite cause for celebration. However, that celebration was short-lived as Kiedis & Slovak both developed horrendous heroin addictions and tragically, it took Slovak’s life. Adding a smaller, but still substantial blow to the Peppers after this was the announcement that Irons would be leaving as he thought the band would keep killing his friends and didn’t want to be part of it. So what to do, what to do? Well, by this point in 1988, Kiedis & Flea had barely scratched their musical potential and with Kiedis clean, they both decided to keep the band going. They quickly snagged up DH Peligro & DeWayne McKnight to play the guitar and drums respectively, but chemistry is very vital in bands & ultimately the lack of it here lead to their departure. As luck would have it though, Peligro knew someone who had not only passed a class on RHCP Chemistry, but was now ready to teach it.
John Frusciante was one of those crazy guitar kids. You know, the ones you see on YouTube these days. Well, he was that kid in the 80s playing guitar from the moment he woke up to the moment he fell asleep. He played so much that he got his parents’ permission to drop out of school, passed his equivalence test, and moved to LA to continue his guitar learning. And of course, when he got to LA, he ended up seeing a RHCP concert and quickly fell in love with them. He went to all their concerts, learned all the guitar & bass parts, and even stayed late after shows to talk to Slovak. Frusciante was an undiscovered guitar god at this point simply by spending every waking minute in music, probably half of which were the Chili Peppers’. By the time ‘88 rolled around, Frusciante just needed a band to be apart of so he could show off his skill and believe it or not too, he was dangerously close to two other bands besides the Chili Peppers. He almost auditioned for Frank Zappa’s band (one of his guitar heroes), but decided against it as he could not live the rock lifestyle (the one that killed his idol, you know). He also almost signed a contract with a band called Thelonious Monster (Bob Forrest was the leader of the band – remember him, he’ll come up later in the blog) and had been playing gigs with them for two weeks. But also during that time, Peligro had introduced Frusciante & Flea to each other and they began to jam. It wasn’t long before the switch went off in Flea’s head that this guy was born to be a Chili Pepper and Kiedis & he quickly snagged him up from their old friend Bob Forrest (who jokes about it to this day). After that, Chad Smith soon auditioned and nailed the part (albeit a hiccup with a hat incident at the actual audition) & RHCP was back as a quartet. They would go on to make their biggest album yet, Mother’s Milk, which contained their biggest hit yet, “Higher Ground.”
All right, back story out of the way, let’s talk about the song. When I mentioned the jams that Flea & Frusciante did, I actually understated them as they proved to be pretty beneficial to the band’s setlist for the next album. The bass riff for “Nobody Weird Like Me” was made up in these jams by Flea and the very initial jam between the two musical legends was actually remembered and re-done in the studio as the song “Pretty Little Ditty” as a throaway instrumental between odes to Hendrix & punk rock. The song, in my opinion, is pretty amazing especially for the initial session between the two, but it was obviously never released as a single and like most songs on album, most people never gave it much mind or even heard it.
Thirteen years later, nu metal (which many artists pay tribute to RHCP for) was taking the musical scene by storm with bands like Linkin Park & Limp Bizkit dominating the laughable things that people listen to in the car. In 2001, one nu metal band became a complete one-hit wonder with a song when their frontman wrote a song about his ex-girlfriend. Despite being a nu metal band, the band, named Crazy Town, recorded an unmistakable pop song called “Butterfly” and scored a crossover hit at the beginning of this decade. Butterfly dominated Cuba Gooding Jr’s mentally-challenged character and enjoyed much success. But the catch is that that memorable hook that everyone remembers to this day from the song…wasn’t theirs. Lifted right from that initial jam between Frusciante & Flea in 1988. To even grab more from RHCP, the band reportedly told their producer to make the song mellow sounding like “Under The Bridge.”
A crossover hit all thanks to the guitar prodigy John Frusciante and you know what’s funny? Well yeah, radios, but you know what else is? That jam that nobody paid any mind to…it was never ranked as one of the worst songs ever. In fact, it’s been on many best guitar tracks of all time lists. Funny, huh?
Song: Pretty Little Ditty
Artist: Red Hot Chili Peppers
Album: Mother’s Milk
Year: 1989
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