Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Californication’ Is One Of Rock’s Great Comebacks
If you watched Paramount Plus’ recent Lollapalooza documentary series — or if you were around during the early ’90s — you know how massive the alternative rock explosion of that era was. But as the decade was coming to a close, times were changing.
A lot of the more popular bands had run their course: Jane’s Addiction, Nirvana, Alice In Chains, and Soundgarden were all gone, and other bands like Pearl Jam, Hole and Nine Inch Nails weren’t as popular as they had been five years earlier. TRL was incredibly influential in pop culture; the MTV show leaned heavily into Nu-metal, “post-grunge,” and teen pop. Music and culture was in a new phase.
Things were particularly dark for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. By 1998, they found themselves without a guitar player, again. Dave Navarro from Jane’s Addiction had joined the band for 1995’s One Hot Minute, which had some great moments, but was a letdown after the massive critical and commercial success of 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik. But In 1998, Navarro and the band parted ways.
As Anthony Kiedis tells it in his memoirs Scar Tissue, Flea was about to leave the band at that point. And what are the Red Hot Chili Peppers without Flea? However, the bass player said he would continue if John Frusciante rejoined. Frusciante was a huge part of why Blood Sugar Sex Magik was such a massive success. But the guitarist had gone through harrowing substance abuse issues (as you can see in scenes from this disturbing 1994 documentary). Kiedis, who also had struggled with substance abuse, doubted that Frusciante would even want to join the band. He also had doubts that they could get back their magic from the early ’90s. That is, until Frusciante cleaned up and the band set up shop in Flea’s garage and started playing. “Every day, he came up with something spectacular,” Kiedis wrote. As he started writing with Frusciante again, he recalls, “It was incredible to once again have one of the great musicians of our time so telepathically connected to me.”
They introduced the album to the public with the ballad, “Scar Tissue.” As Kiedis recalled, “‘Scar Tissue’ was another song where you open up the top of your head and it comes dusting down from outer space. [Producer] Rick Rubin and I had been talking about sarcasm a lot. Rick had a theory that it was an incredibly detrimental form of humor that depresses the spirit of its proponents… We vowed to try to be funny without using sarcasm as a crutch. All those ideas were in the air when John started playing this guitar riff, and I immediately knew what the song was about.”
The video showed the band looking beaten up (a bit of a metaphor) driving through the desert. The song was a hit, topping the rock and alternative charts, and hitting #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Chili Peppers were back.
Like Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Californication was filled with great singles (including “Around The World” and “Otherside”) and deep tracks. “Porcelain” is particularly great. But the title track is the centerpiece of the album. The video, which used avatars of the band as players in a video game about California, was a massive hit on MTV2 and has gone on to become one of their most popular songs.
That song didn’t have such an easy birth. As Kiedis recalled, the song “Was so important to me but less important to everybody else.” He explained to them that the song was the “anchor of the whole record.”
And it almost got ditched, because the band couldn’t seem to come up with the right music for Kiedis’s lyrics. “In the last moments of recording,” Kiedis wrote, Frusciante came up with the music. “He sat down and plucked this incredibly sparse yet haunting combination of notes. It was so different from any other approach that we’d taken for the song that I didn’t quite hear it. Then he started singing it.” In 2022, Rolling Stone named “Californication” the best Chili Peppers song of all time.
Californication the album became one of their most successful releases, and was certified seven times platinum in the U.S. It not only provided them with a new bunch of classics to add to their already great legacy, but it helped them to transcend the ’90s. After years of headlining arenas and ampitheaters, in 2022, they headlined their first stadium tour of the U.S. But without Californication, that probably would not have happened. The album elevated them to a different level: like the Rolling Stones, they’ve been relevant through different decades, a rarity for any rock band. Much less one who nearly dissolved over twenty years ago.
