Scar Tissue (58 page)

He taught it to Flea and Chad, and we rehearsed it a couple of times and recorded it. It was such a sensation of relief and gratification, to know that the song didn’t end up in the same trash bin as “Quixotic Elixir” and a number of other songs that I had high hopes for.

“Californication”

Psychic spies from China

Try to steal your mind’s elation

Little girls from Sweden

Dream of silver screen quotations

And if you want these kind of dreams

It’s Californication

It’s the edge of the world

And all of Western civilization

The sun may rise in the East

At least it settles in the final location

It’s understood that Hollywood

Sells Californication

Pay your surgeon very well

To break the spell of aging

Celebrity skin is this your chin

Or is that war you’re waging

Firstborn unicorn

Hard core soft porn

Dream of Californication

Dream of Californication

Marry me girl be my fairy to the world

Be my very own constellation

A teenage bride with a baby inside

Getting high on information

And buy me a star on the boulevard

It’s Californication

Space may be the final frontier

But it’s made in a Hollywood basement

Cobain can you hear the spheres

Singing songs off station to station

And Alderon’s not far away

It’s Californication

Born and raised by those who praise

Control of population

Everybody’s been there and

I don’t mean on vacation

Firstborn unicorn

Hard core soft porn

Dream of Californication

Dream of Californication

Destruction leads to a very rough road

But it also breeds creation

And earthquakes are to a girl’s guitar

They’re just another good vibration

And tidal waves couldn’t save the world

From Californication

Pay your surgeon very well

To break the spell of aging

Sicker than the rest

There is no test

But this is what you’re craving

Firstborn unicorn

Hard core soft porn

Dream of Californication

Dream of Californication

One of the reasons I was able to sing “Californication” with little trouble was that I’d been taking vocal lessons with an amazing teacher named Ron Anderson. Over the years I’d tried a number of vocal coaches. Before
Mother’s Milk,
I took lessons from a white-haired crazy lady from Austria, whose claim to fame was that she had worked with Axl Rose before
Appetite for Destruction
. Her whole thing was to stand in one place and press your belly a certain way, which didn’t resonate with me, since I was ragdolling all over the stage.

Around
Blood Sugar,
I took some lessons with Michael Jackson’s vocal coach, but I didn’t like him much and bailed out after two sessions. For
One Hot Minute,
I took lessons with a pleasant fellow who played piano and sang in bars for tips. I don’t know if I improved my vocalizing abilities, but it was a lot of fun. Instead of doing scales, we’d get out one of his hundreds of songbooks and sing Beatles songs. Then I found Ron Anderson, who was a classical teacher possessed of an operatic voice. It wasn’t fun to sit there and sing scales, but I could feel immediate results and had much more control over my voice. I worked with him every day during the recording of the album, which we ultimately called
Californication
. My biggest mistake was not to continue working in his style, so I’d lose my voice a lot when I was out on the road. It reached a breaking point while we were on tour in New York. Ron flew out and worked with me all day, and I was well enough to make the gig. He gave me a strict regimen of warming up my voice, which I do religiously to this day.

We were all thrilled when we finished work on the album. We felt like a forest that had burned to the ground and then new trees had sprouted from the ashes. Flea was still in his emotional wringer, but John and I and even Chad had been through our own wringers, so there was a real bond between us, and seeing this project through was a real unifying process. Having gone through it all had changed our outlooks. You can’t be as much of a bitch as you were before, you can’t be as much of an egomaniac, you can’t feel as much like the world owed you something, you can’t be the “where’s mine?” guy. The “where’s mine?” was that I was alive and getting the opportunity to play music with the people I most like to play music with. One of the most mystifying aspects of this era of our band was that we were as enthusiastic as we were when we started, if not more so. And when we started, we had cornered the market on enthusiasm.

We mixed the record, and people started coming by to hear it, and we were over the moon with the reactions. Things were going well on the home front, too. I was going back and forth to New York to visit Claire, who was now the Sober Girl. She wanted to go back to school, so I’d set her up at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and she was doing well. The light in her eyes was back, and we were getting along spectacularly.

The only snafu the band ran into was when we played the finished album for our new management team. Cliff and Peter flew to L.A., sat in the studio, listened, and were so unimpressed we couldn’t believe it. We played them “Scar Tissue” and “Otherside” and “Californication,” and they sat there saying, “Okay. We might be able to work with that one. I don’t know about the other one. It’s not a home run, but we might be able to get on base with that.” They’re still like that, they still underreact to things. We found it almost humorous that they were receiving the fruits of our labor with such a low-key reaction. We weren’t worried about it. We believed in the record, and we loved it and wanted to share it, but we weren’t anticipating its reception so much as we were just pleased with what we made.

Cliff decided that we should lead with “Scar Tissue” as the single and the first video. We decided to do a special small tour to unveil the album. Since it was being released in June, my friend Chris Rock suggested we play proms around the country to promote it. That got me thinking about my high school days and how exciting it was to turn out to see bands that came through, so we decided to do a bunch of free shows for high school students. Then Columbine happened, and a firestorm of fear swept over all these high schools. We felt it was more important than ever to do the shows, so we came up with the idea of having high school students write essays on how they could make their schools better, safer, happier, more rocking places, so that they didn’t have to go to school afraid. If you wrote the essay, you got a free ticket to the show. We went out in May and played, and it was an absolutely magical grouping of shows, because they were small and for kids who clearly wanted to be there, who had taken the time to write the compositions. There was so much love coming off these kids, we couldn’t have asked for a better reception.

We knew that the album was connecting with a lot of people when we went on a European press tour in June. We were in Italy, and John and I were riding in the back of a Mercedes with the window open. A scooter with two Italian guys on it pulled up next to us. They looked inside the car and started screaming, “Hey, Californication, Californication!” then started singing “Scar Tissue.” The record had been out for five days. Everywhere we went, every shop was playing our record. Italy had caught fire. We went from selling a handful of records to selling more records than anyone that year in Italy. How does an entire country decide to start loving you in one day?

In July we began a series of huge shows. In the short amount of time since our record came out, there had been a huge buzz all over the world. The record was getting received in a much larger and warmer way than we ever expected. Somewhere along the way, we were asked to close Woodstock ’99. That was perfect, because we had been asked to play an outdoor show on Younge Street in Toronto the day before. It was supposed to be a low-key show, but the whole town turned out. This massive expanse of humanity filled the street and every building and rooftop. It was another indicator that the world was with us and that we had reawakened the sleeping Red Hot fans from their Rip Van Winkleism. They all came out of the woodwork to rock with us for this record.

The next day we went to Woodstock. We planned to fly in, get on a bus, get to the venue an hour before our set, get focused, play, and get the hell out of Dodge before the mass exodus began. Before we got there, we’d heard reports that this event was less organized and the crowds were getting out of control. When we pulled onto this old military base way up in upstate New York, it was clear that this situation had nothing to do with Woodstock anymore. It wasn’t symbolic of peace and love, but of greed and cashing in. The little dove with the flower in its mouth was saying, “How much can we overcharge the kids for this T-shirt and get away with it?”

We got backstage and were all hell-bent on getting straight into our rituals—the physical warm-ups, the stretching, the meditating, the finger exercises, the vocal warm-ups. It was about seven, so we would be taking the stage during an explosive and dramatic upstate New York sunset. We hadn’t heard any reports about people getting abused or raped or anything like that. It just seemed to us like another big rock festival, with no particularly evil elements about it.

Our sacred hour of preparation was interrupted when Jimi Hendrix’s sister came backstage and pleaded with us to do a song by her brother. It seemed that an all-star Hendrix tribute had fallen apart, and she was mortified that Woodstock would forget him. It had been a long time since we played a Hendrix song, so our first inclination was to say no. But she kept telling us how much it would mean to her, so ten minutes before we were to go onstage, we decided to do “Fire.”

I reviewed the lyrics, and John reacquainted himself with the chords. Right before we were due onstage, Flea came to me and said, “I’m thinking of doing the show naked. What do you think?”

“If that’s what you’re thinking, then don’t even question it. Go let your freak flag fly, brother,” I said. In that setting, it seemed natural for him to be naked, and no one let it be a distraction. We played a fluid, dynamic show.

As night fell, we saw this giant column of fire far back in the audience. We’d been through tons of festivals where bonfires had been started, so this one didn’t seem out of the ordinary. When it was time for our encore, we started into “Fire,” not because there were fires raging, but as a palliative for poor Jimi’s sister. And the old shoe fit. Then we ran offstage, drove to the plane, landed in Manhattan, and checked in to our home away from home, the Mercer Hotel. It was only midnight, but we started hearing this ruckus about the riots and the rapes and the fires raging at Woodstock. That was so weird, because to us, it had seemed like a normal rock-and-roll show.