Scar Tissue (59 page)

But we woke up to papers and radio stations vilifying us for inciting the crowd by playing “Fire.” We ignored these ridiculous charges, though it did turn out that the promoters were assholes and it had not been a user-friendly environment. We should have paid closer attention to that and not been so isolated from the fan’s point of view. I guess it was irresponsible to just show up, play, and leave, without taking a closer look at some of the details surrounding the show.

Now it was time to go to Europe to play. Q-Prime was ideologically built on touring. Their basic philosophy was that after you put out a record, you had to crisscross the globe ten times if you wanted it to do well. We were used to touring, but not to that degree. The longer you’ve been in a band and the more times you’ve toured, the more difficult it becomes to say “I’m going on tour for two years and I’m going to sleep in a different bed every night and be in buses, trains, cars, taxis, shuttling and shifting and pushing and pulling and not eating normally and not sleeping normally and not being around loved ones.” Flea had a young daughter, which made it even harder. But Q-Prime were very into it, and it had been a long time since we’d been there, so we were a bit more willing to hit the road incessantly than we would be in the future.

We started by doing a free show in Moscow on August 14, 1999. As part of Russia’s glasnost awakening, they’d embraced MTV, and we were tapped to inaugurate MTV’s Russian debut with a huge free concert in Red Square. The first problem was that John had to be talked down from his concern that we might be kidnap victims, because next to Colombia, Russia had become the kidnap capital of the world. After getting assurances for our personal safety, and getting assigned a contingent of security personnel, we agreed to do the show.

You’d expect that Moscow, Russia’s biggest city, would be run efficiently, maybe even in a military fashion, but that wasn’t the case. There was no order at all, and shakedowns were the norm. The cops, the military, the airport personnel, everybody wanted our rubles. It was the first time any of us had been to Russia, and we did feel a little unsafe there. We stayed at the Kempinski Hotel, a five-star gaudy, gilded, marbled oasis in the middle of a strikingly poor economy. Everything in Moscow was gray, gray, gray. The sky was gray, the buildings were gray, the streets were gray, the bushes were gray. There was this heavy cloud of Stalinesque gravity that suffocated the place.

We took a couple of days to decompress and tour the city. The day before the show, by some horrible stroke of fate, I wrecked, wracked, twisted, turned, sliced, and diced my back. I saw a physical therapist, but it did no good. I could see the enormous stage they had built from my hotel window, and I was bummed at the prospect of playing before all of Russia on MTV with a whack back.

The day of the show, Red Square was so filled with wall-to-wall Russians that we needed a police escort to get near the stage. By the time we went on, my back was still not happening, even though it was better than the day before. Still, I was able to stand up straight and present the songs. Nothing buck wild, no ability to do my song-and-dance thing, but we made the best of it. Then we hightailed it out of Russia, but we got pulled over and extorted by the police on the way to the airport. As a final indignity, Chad got shaken down for all the money he had on him right before boarding.

I’d never really liked Austria, mainly because the people I met there were so arrogant and pompous, but when we stepped off the plane in Vienna after a week in Russia, it was like going to Disneyland for the first time as a kid. The sun came out, the clouds opened, you could smell flowers, there was snow on the mountains, it was just heaven. However, the rest of this leg of the European tour was not my shining moment. It’s difficult to keep a relationship prospering when you’re in Europe and your girlfriend is in America and you’re both relatively newly sober and you haven’t worked through a lot of control issues and jealousy issues and insecurity issues and dependency issues. There was a lot of emotional frying going on.

It was hard being gone for months at a time, and so far away that the time difference became a huge obstacle. You want to communicate, but then you aren’t able to, and days go by. You get mad and try to call her and you can’t find her and then you finally do catch her and she’s been out doing something stupid that she shouldn’t have been doing, because she should’ve been there waiting for your phone call, but she blew you off and then she starts to get suspicious and “Who’s that girl’s voice in the background?” “Oh, that’s my masseuse or my friend or whatever.” I wasn’t good at it, and Claire was no better, and together we equaled stubborn. These things always took a lot of repairing, and we’d have to wait until I got home.

The band worked our asses off touring that year. Claire finished school, and we decided that it would be a good idea for her to move to L.A., which meant I’d have to get a place to live. I’d always fancied a gorgeous old building in West Hollywood called the Colonial House, which was a stone’s throw from the Chateau Marmont. When Jennifer Lopez moved out of the penthouse, I grabbed it. Claire moved to L.A. in September 1999. She had the use of my nice new Cadillac Esplanade and all her expenses paid, but she didn’t have a job, and she didn’t know that many people, and I was about to leave again for Europe.

On the way to Europe, the band stopped in New York and did a gig at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center for K-Rock radio contest winners. The show was lively and energetic, but the sound system was horrific: All I heard were drums and guitar and no vocals for the entire show. I ended up screaming my lungs out and losing my voice, which was a drag.

We flew to Finland and began crisscrossing Europe. When we got to Spain, Claire decided to come out for the last week of the tour. I loved the girl, I was happy to see her, happy to have my woman in my bed, in my arms, but she was hard to get along with on a daily basis, as was I. She never did come to a comfortable understanding that a lot of the people who were fans of the band happened to be girls, and for some reason, she held me responsible. There were times when we played shows and I’d be with her and we’d have to walk from the arena to wherever the car was, and frenzied people would charge me. A lot of times they were girls, and there were crazy screamings of “I love you, I love you, I want to be with you, please hug me.” I have no reason to be mean to these people or to explain to them, “I have a girlfriend, you must not approach me with such sentiments.” Their interaction with me is just an illusion. I’m like “Thank you very much, hello, good-bye, God bless, enjoy the night, carry on.” If I was with Claire, she’d say, “No, you can’t let those girls come up and say those things to you. They have to know that I’m your girlfriend.”

Claire and I had this historical antagonism. When we were apart from each other on the road, we antagonized each other, and when we got together on the road, we antagonized each other. It was because all we wanted was each other’s constant love and attention and for no one else to receive that love and attention, which is a selfish and difficult place to be in a relationship. We were emotionally retarded, and that was the best we could do at the time.

We played in Barcelona, and Chad had made friends with a Barcelonan sweet tart who was cute as a button. She came backstage, and when Chad introduced her, I stood up, gave her a European-kiss greeting, and welcomed her to sit down and grab a bite to eat. This, of course, infuriated Claire.

When the girl left, I looked up and said, “Bye-bye, sweetie.”

“‘Sweetie’? Did you just call her ‘sweetie’?” Claire fumed. “Oh, so now she’s
your
sweetie?” Although she was making an ass out of herself, I was right there with her, because the next day it would be me saying, “Did you just say ‘good-bye sweetie’ to that guy?”

By the time we got to Madrid, the wheels had fallen off. We got into another unmemorable bickering match, like something off of
I Love Lucy
but without the happy ending. We were in this beautiful hotel suite in Madrid, madly in love, out there on a fun successful tour in the middle of Spain, and we started fighting about the dumbest thing on earth. And we brought it down the elevator, into the lobby, into the bus that was taking us to our plane.

Unfortunately, that carried on throughout Lisbon. Then we went home and fought there. I loved living in this cool penthouse apartment with her, but it was never smooth sailing. We’d both been such fucking dope fiends for so long that we never had a chance to grow out of our childish behavior. We must have loved the drama and the constant rush of fighting and making up and starting the whole cycle over again. It was just crazy.

I know that I had nothing but love for this girl. I had no interest in chasing any other girls. My only interests were in seeing her get well and in taking care of her, which turned out to be one of the problems. I took care of her so much that she just expected a constant “Oh well, Anthony will do it for me.” I’d pay for everything she needed, I’d try to find her a job, I’d try to find her a friend, I’d try to find her a sponsor, always doing everything for her. Once she started expecting that response, I was like “Fuck that. Don’t go expecting shit. Earn your place in life, earn your respect, just do your thing.” So she was in a terrible place, because she probably felt resentful toward me for giving her stuff and then thinking that she should earn her own place in life. It was a lose-lose situation, and I wasn’t very good at handling it.

Even when I financed her start-up fashion business, that became a troubled area of contention. As soon as I saw her stuff, I thought, “These clothes are so amazing. She’s got mad style.” I got on the phone with my managers in New York saying, “I need the names of all the major department-store buyers.” But Claire was never satisfied, never grateful, and never comfortable with it. She was always on edge and discontented about something. I was equally maladjusted to life at that point. I had been off my gyroscope for so long that I didn’t know how to handle any of life’s basic scenarios with any clarity or intuition.

There were also some fun things happening at the time. Our sex life had started off pretty slowly, but it had developed over time into a spiritual attraction after we finally figured each other’s bodies out. She had a depth to her sexuality that I had never experienced before. There was no question about our love, though we were both combustible personalities.

That year we visited both of our families at Christmas. It was the first time that my parents had met her. It’s funny, my male friends were always terrified of Blackie. When they met him, they’d try to shake his hand, and he’d just look at their hands and walk away. But he was never like that with my girlfriends. He was always incredibly gracious and welcoming to whatever girl I happened to have in my life. He couldn’t wait to hang out with Claire and go through the family photos with her. But Claire was not the warmest of people. Even though she might feel it on the inside, she didn’t communicate any of it to anybody. That was how it was with her and my mom. My mom was very happy that I had this person I was in love with, but she could never tell if Claire had any love or compassion for her or the rest of our family, because Claire wouldn’t wear her emotions on her sleeve.

I had a lot to be thankful for that Christmas. The album was continuing to sell phenomenally. Every so often I’d get a call from Gail at Q-Prime, and she’d tell me, “
Californication
’s number this in this country, and it’s still in the top ten there.” I’d jump around, skipping and hooting and hollering. It’s a shame that my personal life wasn’t flourishing in the same way my professional life was. Professionally, we were on fire. Besides the record sales, we were playing great. We had figured out how to breathe life into these new songs that had tapped into a deeper and more haunted emotional realm than we’d ever visited before.

Watching the constant evolution of John was also a movie unto itself. When we went out at the beginning of
Californication,
he was shy and withdrawn onstage, not going in for overt emoting. Over time, he developed into this hambone who just couldn’t get enough. “Let’s start the show with me soloing for ten minutes.” He wasn’t doing it out of narcissism, he was doing it out of his love for playing music and his desire to commune with the spirits, both invisible spirits and also the spirits of the people who were there to experience music and love. Watching him spread his wings was a delight.

We brought in the millennium at a concert at the Forum in our hometown. The Forum always had these great memories for us. Flea and I had sneaked into the Forum to see Queen back in the day, and more recently, when we came to Warners Bros., we hit the jackpot as Laker fans because Mo had four tickets at center court on the floor. After
Blood Sugar,
we were the number one perk-getters at Warner’s. Flea and I and two of our friends were always sitting pretty at center court.

We’d played the Forum once with Dave Navarro, and it was one of our best American dates with him. It’s always hard to do well when you’re playing in your hometown. There are such high expectations, and then you have the added stress of arranging tickets for family and friends. So it can go two ways. Instead of doing what you do best, which is going out there and rocking, you might get too hung up on all these outside issues, and wanting the show to be the best ever, and end up sucking. Or you might hit the jackpot and rock your hometown like it’s never been rocked before.

This show was somewhere in between. We were good, but we weren’t unbelievable. The nice thing was that my sister Julie and her husband, Steve, flew out to spend New Year’s Eve with me. That was also the memorable show when John Frusciante would get shot by Cupid’s arrow and fall for Milla Jovovich, who had been rehearsing her band next door to us at Swing House. That night she came to the show wearing a wedding dress, and she put the whammy on John’s flim-flammy.

We had a few days off after the New Year’s show, and then we went from beautiful, sunny California to dismal, cold, gray Tokyo, Japan. It was the first time we’d played Japan since John was back in the band, and we wanted to leave a new taste in their psychic palates, since it was where John had played his last show before quitting the band. But the Japanese shows weren’t much fun, and we weren’t at our best. One of the problems was that by then, I had developed a chronic case of shin splints, and anytime I was out onstage, moving around would be “Ooh, ooh, ah, ah.”