The Red Hot Chili Peppers are an institution unto themselves, playing their unique brand of rock and roll for 32-plus years. They were an almost instant success, and have been riding a bullet train to the top ever since.
However, they got off to a shaky start with their first, self-titled album, which they felt was too polished and failed to represent who they were as a band. With their second album, Freaky Styley, which came out 30 years ago today, they were still searching for their collective voice.
While the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ sophomore effort didn’t move a ton of units, it did prove to be a sort of calibration point that the band used to refine their sound afterward. The band wasn’t satisfied with the producer of their first album, Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill. Gill kept insisting that the band simplify their songs to make them more radio-friendly. So, for their second album, they decided to shoot for the moon, requesting Parliament Funkadelic founder George Clinton produce their second album.
After listening to some demos, Clinton agreed to take the job. Unlike Gill, and everyone else the band was considering, Clinton didn’t push for a more easy-to-consume sound. Clinton and the Chili Peppers, fueled by lots of cocaine, decided to go for broke. They got along famously, and Clinton proved to be a heavy influence on the album. Flea described his experience in an interview with the Guardian shortly after the album’s release:
The only click track we had was George clapping, stamping and dancing around us. And when he was in the control room, he’d scream into the mic: “Yeah, kick it! Do it! Get Deep! Throw it down!” When George is doing that in your ear while you’re playing, you just go [emits a pop-eyed, speed-crazed yelp!] “whooooho whoooheeeooh!” That’s great. George is really spiritual like that, which is why he’s 43 and still blowing it out.
In addition to a new producer and an unnaturally large amount of drugs, guitarist Hillel Slovak returned to the band after leaving before they recorded their first album. He brought with him a complex, nuanced style of guitar playing.
While Freaky Styley more closely represented what the band wanted to be doing, it failed to impress the masses. Its punk-rock take on funk and soul proved to be too strange a brew for the radio-listening public. But below the surface of the sea of radio plays and MTV videos, the Chili Peppers were picking up speed.
Around this time, the Chili Peppers were cultivating a reputation as perpetually horny, rude jokesters with a sense of humor that stopped developing sometime during puberty. That impression was bolstered by the song “Catholic School Girls Rule”:
Freaky Styley also contains a few covers, including their take on ’70s funk group the Meters’ Africa, which they titled “Hollywood (Africa)”:
With Clinton at the production helm, the Chili Peppers had access to some amazing resources, including funk legend James Brown’s horn section. The horns are especially effective in the the straight-up funk song, “The Brothers Cup”:
While Freaky Styley didn’t sell many copies, it did set the stage for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ eventual rise to legend status. Sadly, Slovak would record only one more album with the band before succumbing to heroin addiction.
But the Red Hot Chili Peppers live on, now enjoying a spot among global rock royalty.
