Day 0898 - Californication

Red Hot Chili Peppers “Californication” (1999) – got it

Another album that I don’t necessarily have to listen to specifically for the list because it’s burned into my memory… but for completism’s sake I gave it another spin.

Following the departure of guitar prodigy John Frusciante, the Chili Peppers tried a couple of different guitarists and carried on with Arik Marshall for their Blood Sugar Sex Magik tour, but when they came to record music, Marshall wasn’t clicking.   They enlisted Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro and together made the album “One Hot Minute” which had a much heavier and more layered sound than BSSM.  Personally I love OHM, but fans, some critics, and even the band themselves were less enamoured.  It constantly gets held up as a commercial failure… which is odd as it sold at least a couple of million copies, but I guess that’s not BSSM numbers.

Anyhoo, the partnership with Navarro ended too and the band reunited with Frusciante who had, in the interim released a couple of interesting-to-difficult solo albums and almost destroyed himself with heroin (he had no usable teeth left and his arms were heavily scarred from improper heroin injection).  He managed to clean himself up and switched his obsessive focus from junk back to music.

Which brings us to Californication.  The band reconvened in bass player Flea’s garage and in a really low-key way just started jamming together and coming up with music.

From the opening track “Around the World” it might almost seem like the band were picking up where they left off with a tornado of funk giving way to percussive single-note guitar lines and bouncy bass, but then the melodic chorus with Frusciante’s backing vocals kicks in.   Of course the game had already been given away with lead single “Scar Tissue” that seemed to nicely sum up the band’s journey since BSSM and was a much more melodic direction for the band.  More harmony/backing vocal arrangements from Frusciante and his technique of breaking chords down to 2 or 3 separately plucked clean notes with a bass and treble thing so it's almost mimicking a kick-and-snare rhythm pattern on drums.

I like the album for its simplicity.  The band aren't really looking to play a million miles a minute like they did on Mother's Milk, and Frusciante had not played for a couple of years so was just finding his way back around his instrument.  They explore their new mature melodic side on tracks like "Porcelain", the title track and the lovely acoustic album-closer "Road Trippin" (and singer Anthony Kiedis acquits himself well despite the many criticisms of his singing ability through the years), but they still dip into their funk sound with "Get on top" "I like dirt" and the fun "Purple Stain".  

In subsequent albums Frusciante would become a force to be reckoned with, and would arguably become too controlling in his vision, but here he's back to finding his feet and the four feel like equal partners.

The album isn't perfection.  The band starts to be guilty of "chorus overuse syndrome" repeating hooks on certain songs ad nauseum.   The 'hits' here suffered from radio saturation.  I can't listen to the title track or "Otherside" in isolation any more, though as part of the album as a whole they are still tolerable.