Red Hot Chili Peppers

Continuing my look at the performers being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, I turn to Red Hot Chili Peppers. I certainly know of them, as many of their songs have punctured the bubble of popular culture around me and had considerable radio airplay, but I had never liked any of their songs well enough to buy their music. I did pick up a copy of their greatest hits, which I listened to several times this week.

My first reaction was that RHCP wasn't as I thought they were. They do have a reputation for being bad boys, with heroin addiction and performing in their underpants. Some of their lyrics would set Pat Robertson's hair on fire, such as "There's a devil in my dick and some demons in my semen."

But the cuts on the greatest hits CD, which was released in 2003, are far tamer than that. They present the front kind of like Eddie Haskell did to Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. Most of Red Hot Chili Pepper's hits were ballads, and, dare I say, kind of pretty.

Of course they're not all that way. Their biggest hit was "Give It Away," which is here, and best represents their mixture of rock, funk and hip-hop. Also "Suck My Kiss" earns the album and explicit lyrics label, due to a dropping of the word motherfucker.

But the rest is guitar-strumming stuff, readily familiar to anyone who listened to rock in the '90s. The band formed in 1983, but didn't hit it huge until 1991 with the release of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, which contained "Give It Away" and "Under the Bridge," a lovely song about loneliness and love for Los Angeles. My favorite is "Breaking the Girl."

The band would later release their biggest selling album in 1999, with Californication. The title track is again a ballad, with minor adjustment it could be played on a stool in a coffee house, and is ripe for parody with all the rhymes with "-ation":

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

Though the lyrics stretch the rhyme scheme, it's a very effective song about alienation in Hollywood. Other delicate songs include "My Friends," "Otherside," and "Road Trippin'." The one cover is of Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground," not exactly rebellious.

The band has had many lineup changes through the years, though lead singer Anthony Kiedis and bassist Flea have been in the group from the beginning. The guitarists have changed often; the original one was Hillel Slovak, who died of a heroin overdose. He was replaced by John Frusciante, who left after the band achieved success, and was replaced by Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, who only made one album with them. Frusciante, after going through his own drug problems, returned.

For most of their history, the drummer has been Chad Smith, but the original drummer was Cliff Martinez, who is now a well-respected film score composer. Smith, in the liner notes on the album, recalls David Bowie's dictum that a rock group in known for three things. Smith figures for RHCP they are: drugs, socks (the band has a habit of posing naked for pictures, except for white tube socks) and being "progenitors of funk-rock." I think he's pretty much nailed it.