June 2003, Sound Advice Amphitheatre, West Palm Beach, Fla.
If you’re looking back for years with great albums, 1991 is a pretty good place to stop. Nevermind, Gish, Out of Time, The Low End Theory, Actung Baby, Ten, Girlfriend, Loveless and Metallica’s Black album were released, a veritable list of all-time greats, albums defining entire genres.
Sometimes lost amidst this list is Blood Sugar Sex Magik, a tour de force from the Red Hot Chili Peppers which also defined its genre. Rock-rap was not much a thing before the Red Hots turned it into art, and Blood Sugar Sex Magik influenced more good (and bad) albums than can be listed. I didn’t think it was possible for the band to make a better album.
But By the Way, RHCP’s 2002 album, came pretty close in my book. It’s a more mature album than BSSM, both lyrically and sonically, but has enough bite to be fully a Chili Pepper classic. I listened By the Way endlessly, there was something about it which captured my heart.
So seeing the band on tour was a foregone conclusion. I’m not one for amphitheater shows, they can be impersonal and underwhelming with the wrong band. But with the right band they can be electric — 15,000 people delirious in unison.
I went with my wife Kristen and we had decent seats, enough to get the power coming from the stage. Amphitheater stages aren’t for every band, but they were built for the Chili Peppers.
They came out with “By the Way,” Anthony Kiedis’ familiar voice and Flea’s classic bass setting the tone before Chad Smith’s drums and John Frusciante’s guitar sent the song into overdrive. If you’re looking for a song to best encapsulate the Chili Peppers, “By the Way” has all the elements — a building start, a drum-infused rock-rap portion, a bass-laden bridge, and a soaring sing-along chorus. The band followed with “Scar Tissue” and “Around the World,” from the band’s excellent Californication album, then back to “Universally Speaking” from By the Way.
The first half of the show was a back-and-forth between the two albums, with a brief interlude that saw Frusciante, on solo guitar in a high-falsetto voice, sing a portion of “Maybe,” a cover from The Chantels. He would later do this with a Funkadelic song, making for an unusual but wholly Chili Peppers’ moment. Blood Sugar Sex Magik came through in force in the set’s second half, with “I Could Have Lied” and “Breaking the Girl” warming the audience for “Give It Away”.
Here’s is the pull a great band can have on the audience. It was a hot summer night in West Palm, and as “Give It Away” geared up, Kiedis told everyone in the audience to take off their shirt and wave it like a helicopter over their heads. Everyone did it, happily — men, women (perhaps some children were there as well). No one cared they were baring themselves to the world. This is what music, done well, can do.
The four encored with “Under the Bridge” and “Me & My Friends,” the lone song from the band’s earlier albums (this one from Uplift Mofo Party Plan). The selection was apropos — it really was a night among friends.
