Me and My Friends - Learning about friendship from the Red Hot Chili Peppers

A new documentary exploring the band's early years has me reevaluating my relationship with Kiedis, Flea, et al. A part 2 side journey on the male friendship express.

Me and My Friends

In Part 1 of this series on male friendship, I mentioned that I didn’t think there was a song that better expressed this topic than “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers.

I’ll stand by that statement, but while walking my dog one morning this week, another song about friendship, which I’d completely forgotten about, suddenly appeared, unprovoked. I began to sing, in a loud, punk-rock bellow, “Me and my me and my me and my me and my friends.”

It took me a full block to put two and two together and realize that this was the chorus to the 1987 Red Hot Chili Peppers song, “Me and My Friends.” It’s off the band’s third album, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan.

It’s one of the few tracks from the record that isn’t completely puerile and juvenile, lyrically speaking. In fact, I dare say that it’s one of the most honest, unironic songs about male friendship I’ve ever heard.

Check out the first verse:

Like two sweet peas in an even sweeter pod
Well, that’s my friend and my friend’s name is Bob
Like the devil knows Hell, I know Bobby well
Well enough to tell you ‘bout his sixty-seven smells
Well enough to tell you he’s a hella swell-a fellow
Well enough to tell you that we know each other better than we know ourselves
Like freaks of a feather, we rock together
I know Bobby well, but I think he knows me better

There’s no one named Bobby in the band (Flea’s real name is Michael Peter Balzary), but from what I’ve read, the song is about Anthony Kiedis’ friendship with original RHCP guitarist Hillel Slovak. Hillel is name-dropped in the second verse, but I always read that as Kiedis’ way to cue Slovak’s funky-ass guitar solo.

It’s a raucous song on a raucous album from a band at the height of their raucousity. Celebrating friendship to its fullest, taking note of each other’s 67 smells, knowing each other better than they know themselves.

He's as close to me, as a friend can be
I'll be standin' by my buddy, he'll be standin' by me
Just another half of a two-headed freak
But I need him like my heart needs to beat

I was nothing like Keidis, Flea, or Slovak when I discovered RHCP as a high school junior. The trio (as well as drummer Jack Irons) presented as wild, extroverted, and unconcerned with how others perceived them. I wished I could live with such abandon, but that was not how I was wired. I was the quiet observer. The Chili Peppers (to my young eyes) were loud participants. Was some of it an act, a release valve from tough childhoods? Sure, but being an extrovert isn’t something you can “fake it ‘til you make it.” At least it wasn’t for me.

I certainly had my moments of juvenile lunacy (some of which will be revealed in part 3), but I was far too self-conscious, too careful and fearful, to let my mulleted hair down. (I held on to that hairstyle for far too long.)

Our Brother, Hillel

It didn’t take long for me to realize that “Me and My Friends” did not, in fact, appear in my head unprovoked. I’d already had early-era Chili Peppers bouncing in my noggin’s RAM. A few weeks prior, I’d watched a new Netflix documentary, The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel.

The film covers the band’s early years. From Flea’s move from Australia to Southern California, where he would attend the same high school (Fairfax) as Kiedis, to the two of them becoming an inseparable dynamic duo, to expanding to a trio when they met Hillel Slovak, a guitarist in a popular school rock band. Flea, who was into Jazz and played the trumpet, would be recruited to play bass when the bassist in Slovak’s band couldn’t make a gig. Kiedis, at the time, played the role of host with the most, MC’ing the gigs, getting the crowd suitably riled up.

The documentary does a great job of recounting the early days of one of the world’s biggest rock bands. But more than that, it focuses on the love these three friends had for each other.

Unfortunately, with success comes excess, and this was especially true with the RHCPs.

Guitarist Slovak would die from a heroin overdose in June 1988.

Anthony Kiedis took the news especially hard and, as a heroin addict himself, also came close to OD’ing. Drummer Jack Irons left the band. Flea was distraught.

Eventually, Kiedis cleaned himself up, and he and Flea decided to rebuild the Chili Peppers. John Frusciante, an 18-year-old RHCP superfan, took over on guitar, with Chad Smith manning the drums.

Frusciante talks in the film about how hard it was to replace Slovak, whom he idolized. He also knew how deep Anthony, Flea, and Hillel’s friendship went. After Frusciante joined the band, RHCP blew up, first with the success of 1989’s Mother’s Milk, and then with the multi-platinum Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

Frusciante admits that he tried to channel Slovak when he performed and wrote songs, as it was the only way he could deal with the challenges of replacing someone so iconic. What critics and fans saw as Frusciante bringing the band a unique new voice as a guitarist and songwriter, he saw as simply the highest form of imitation. He was writing the songs Hillel would have written had he been alive.

The music for “Under the Bridge,” the band’s highest charting single (#2 on Billboard Hot 100), was written by Frusciante, which inspired Kiedis to pen the lyrics for the song. It’s about Kiedis’ struggles with addiction and feelings of alienation, but it’s also about his friend Hillel and his old bandmate’s struggles, which mirrored and paralleled his own.

Even though Flea and Anthony have distanced themselves from the documentary (for reasons not worth getting into here), I imagine that participating in the filming might have brought some old feelings to the surface.

It’s been almost 40 years since Slovak died, but death, especially when it happens to those in the prime of their life, has a way of leaving a permanent mark. Scar Tissue is what Kiedis called it in his excellent memoir of the same name.

My Friends

It wasn’t only death that left a mark on the members of Red Hot Chili Peppers. Life did its fair share of damage, too. They were a band that lived life to its fullest, who would perform with socks on their cocks and nothing else. The volume knobs on their inner amplifiers were stuck on eleven.

They’ve toned down the antics a bit over the decades (how could they not?), but the wisdom and perspective expressed in many interviews with the band were always there. Their external nakedness often disguised the internal naked emotion expressed in many of their songs.

One song about friendship that most RHCP fans are probably familiar with is 1995’s “My Friends.” From their One Hot Minute album, “My Friends” could be viewed as the “mature” sequel to “Me and My Friends.”

My friends are so depressed
I feel the question of your loneliness
Confide, ‘cause I’ll be on your side
You know I will, you know I will

Ex-girlfriend called me up
Alone and desperate on a prison phone
They want to give her seven years
For being sad

I love all of you
Hurt by the cold
So hard and lonely too
When you don’t know yourself

My friends are so distressed
And standing on the brink of emptiness
No words I know of to express
This emptiness

There’s a reason Kiedis leaves himself out of “My Friends.” What he’s seeing in the lives of his friends is depressing. He says as much in the first line. Where “Me and My Friends” was all about celebrating friendship, “My Friends” is all worry and sadness.

When he sings “No words I know of to express, this emptiness,” it’s unclear whether he doesn’t know how to help his friends or is feeling the emptiness himself and can’t find the words to express it. Maybe it’s both.

It’s a harsh reality to reckon with, and a scenario that is sadly still relatable 30 years later. It’s heavy, but Kiedis ends the song with some perspective and a bit of hope.

I heard a little girl
And what she said was something beautiful
To give your love no matter what
Was what she said

Leave it to the kids to show the adults true wisdom.

Give it away now, indeed.

• This was not at all what I had intended to write about. I had started an essay about Roy Orbison and my friend Sid, and the next thing I knew, I was writing about the Chili Peppers!

• I didn’t include this in the essay because it felt like it was diminishing, but I’m actually not much of a fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers anymore. I was a big fan during their early years, which the new documentary brought to the surface for me. Seeing all the brotherly love on display between the bandmates made me sad, as I didn’t have anything like that in my life back then.

• I stumbled across this article from Nick Digilio about his feelings regarding Red Hot Chili Peppers, and they mirror my own so completely that I wonder if I have an alter ego named Nick Digilio that I’m unaware of.

• It also made me think about my college band, Snack Pac, and how I am not in touch with any of the members anymore. Which I think is okay — who said friendships are supposed to last a lifetime?

• After watching the doc and even more so after writing this, I came to appreciate RHCP’s later catalog, and I can see why most people prefer the post-Slovak era of the band. I don’t, but that’s what makes us unique and special.

• I’d love to hear your thoughts on anything I wrote. Your opinions on Red Hot Chili Peppers, if you saw the doc, what your thoughts are on friendship, on losing friends far too young. Really, you can simply tell me what you had for lunch. I just like hearing from you!

• If you didn’t get a chance to read part 1 of the friendship series, click the box below.