‘The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel’ Review: A Blistering Portrait of the Band’s Early Years Melts Into an Overdone Lament
In “The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel,” there’s a thrilling moment where we hear the band perform together for the first time. It’s Dec. 16, 1982, and three of the band’s members — the guitarist Hillel Slovak, the drummer Jack Irons, and the bass player Flea — have been playing in a group called What is This? It was Gary Allen, a musician, fashion maven, and gay Warholian scenester, who suggested that for a lark the three perform a short gig with Anthony Kiedis, their buddy from Fairfax High School, as lead singer.
Kiedis, a good-looking club kid who liked to do drugs and write rap poetry (he was in his homeless couch-surfing phase when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” spun his head around), had never thought of himself as a musician. That’s why he’d always stayed on the sidelines. But for this night, he agrees to get up onstage with his friends at the Grandia Room on Hollywood Boulevard. The song they’re doing is “Out in L.A.,” and the sound is instantly electrifying. It’s fast — not fast like hardcore L.A. punk (which is so fast it’s almost non-musical), but fast in a speeded-up-martial-beat way that makes one of Led Zeppelin’s vandalistic jams sound genteel.
Irons pounds the drums like Bam-Bam smashing on two garbage-can lids. Slovak adds a chicken-scratch guitar that sounds like Nile Rodgers stuck in a psychotic loop. As for Flea, he’s doing the closest thing the song has to a melody, playing the bass like he’s dancing on burning coals. The sound is red hot, all right, but it’s Kiedis’s jacked vocals that turn up the flame. He spits his rhymes as if they were coming out of a machine gun (“The town makes me jump, it’s got a bunch of bad chicks,/Well sure, it’s got some chumps, but I still get my kicks”). The white-boy percussiveness of his rap is mesmeric.
Hearing this clip, I flashed back, ironically, to a line from the “Partridge Family” theme song (“And it really came together when Mom sang along”). Because what we’re hearing is how the Red Hot Chili Peppers got fused — as sound and image, as a new brand of rock ‘n’ roll violence — in just two minutes, from the moment Kiedis joined them. The effect they had on the crowd was part of it; the people in the club went nuts. In that moment, the smash-and-grab sound and head-bangers-on-overkill vibe of the Red Hot Chili Peppers was born.
“The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel,” which premiered today at SXSW and drops next week on Netflix, is a documentary that lives up to both halves of its title. And that’s both good and not-so-good news. The director, Ben Feldman, offers a more or less definitive look at how in the early ’80s, three delinquent Los Angeles teenagers soaked up the ferment of the L.A. music scene — hair metal, punk, hip-hop, electronica — and turned it into their own revolutionary brew. Flea, interviewed today, says, “We’d go to a Black Flag show, and it was, like, you were going to get the shit kicked out of you.” He means that in a positive way.
The members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers felt numb enough to groove on mayhem and drugs. But they were also, as we see in the documentary, canny and sensitive dudes who were reaching for an expression that was artful. The person they looked up to was Hillel Slovak, a founding member of the band Anthym, which became What is This? Anthony and Flea, raised in abusive homes (Anthony’s single father was a drug dealer who introduced him to cocaine and pot when he was 11), wanted to be wild and shocking; they were punk freaks who would do anything. Flea worked in a veterinarian’s office, from which he’d steal animal pharmaceuticals, arranging the pills like an art installation for parties. Hillel, on the other hand, was a serious and poetic Israeli-American. He was tall and beautiful and Byronic, with an insolent pout that was like Paul Stanley and Anthony Bourdain poured into one, and he was both a visual artist and a gifted musician. At heart he was a nice Jewish boy, raised by a mother who revered the arts and became a den mother to the whole gang.
The documentary traces their journey in three parallel bands — What is This?, Lee Ving’s scary nihilist punk group Fear, who Flea abandoned What is This? to play with, and the Chili Peppers, who existed for a while in tandem with the other two bands. In fact, the Chili Peppers landed their first recording contract, with EMI American and Enigma, in the same week that What is This? signed with MCA. There were torn loyalties across the board.
This history is fascinating, and obviously the Chili Peppers won out. But what also won out was drugs. And that’s where the film is both honest about what happened and a bit frustrating to watch. The movie isn’t kidding about that subtitle — it treats Hillel Slovak as the group’s Brian Jones (its formative visionary), and its second half is more or less devoted to the story of how he became consumed by heroin, an addiction he shared with Anthony Kiedis. But Kiedis, who chronicled his own dysfunctional behavior with riveting candor in his 2004 memoir “Scar Tissue,” had the constitution to bury himself in drugs and then pull out of the messes he’d made. He tried several times to get sober. Slovak was a functional junkie (he would show up at recording sessions high, and it was hard to even tell), but the smack took a toll on him over time. It took his energy and depressed him; it began to devour him. He died of an overdose on June 25, 1988.
This was a tragic event that proved to be a wake-up call for the other band members. (Afterwards, Kiedis cleaned himself up for five years, though he continued to relapse until 2000, when he finally got sober.) Yet the decision to make Slovak’s downward trajectory — which mirrors that of so many other rock musicians who died from drug use — the heart of the documentary was, I think, a mistake. It’s a well-meaning one, but it reduces the Chili Peppers’ story instead of expanding it.
In the band’s heyday, Anthony Kiedis, with his bare torso and long girlish copper-blond hair, looked like a ’70s teen idol who’d become a Warhol hustler – a street-flesh god like Joe Dallesandro, except that where Dallesandro was in a daze, Kiedis was a live wire. He had an unstable energy; he was like the spiritual son of Iggy Pop, touched by James Brown. He’s 63 now, and in the documentary, where he’s all leathery brawn and sinew, with an ink-black bowl cut and been-around-the-block visage and that distinctive lisp, he’s eloquent about the band’s past, and about how much Hillel Slovak meant to him. Yet a subject that gets brought up, but that I think the film still understates, is how much residual guilt Kiedis felt for what happened.
And I have to say: I’m kind of over these music docs that restrict themselves to telling the story of a band’s formative days. Yes, they exert a specialty appeal for fans. Yet just as “Becoming Led Zeppelin” felt like it left us in the lurch by stopping short of “Led Zeppelin IV,” there’s something unsatisfying about how “The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers” ends by devoting a few rushed minutes to “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” the 1991 album that remains the band’s crowning masterpiece. Astonishingly, the film scarcely even deals with how “Under the Bridge,” the song that broke them into the mainstream, was such a haunting evocation of the spiritual isolation that drugs can create. “The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers” is totally worth seeing, but the film feels like an indirect act of contrition, which may be why it turns into an overdone lament.
Kiedis, a good-looking club kid who liked to do drugs and write rap poetry (he was in his homeless couch-surfing phase when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” spun his head around), had never thought of himself as a musician. That’s why he’d always stayed on the sidelines. But for this night, he agrees to get up onstage with his friends at the Grandia Room on Hollywood Boulevard. The song they’re doing is “Out in L.A.,” and the sound is instantly electrifying. It’s fast — not fast like hardcore L.A. punk (which is so fast it’s almost non-musical), but fast in a speeded-up-martial-beat way that makes one of Led Zeppelin’s vandalistic jams sound genteel.
Irons pounds the drums like Bam-Bam smashing on two garbage-can lids. Slovak adds a chicken-scratch guitar that sounds like Nile Rodgers stuck in a psychotic loop. As for Flea, he’s doing the closest thing the song has to a melody, playing the bass like he’s dancing on burning coals. The sound is red hot, all right, but it’s Kiedis’s jacked vocals that turn up the flame. He spits his rhymes as if they were coming out of a machine gun (“The town makes me jump, it’s got a bunch of bad chicks,/Well sure, it’s got some chumps, but I still get my kicks”). The white-boy percussiveness of his rap is mesmeric.
Hearing this clip, I flashed back, ironically, to a line from the “Partridge Family” theme song (“And it really came together when Mom sang along”). Because what we’re hearing is how the Red Hot Chili Peppers got fused — as sound and image, as a new brand of rock ‘n’ roll violence — in just two minutes, from the moment Kiedis joined them. The effect they had on the crowd was part of it; the people in the club went nuts. In that moment, the smash-and-grab sound and head-bangers-on-overkill vibe of the Red Hot Chili Peppers was born.
“The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel,” which premiered today at SXSW and drops next week on Netflix, is a documentary that lives up to both halves of its title. And that’s both good and not-so-good news. The director, Ben Feldman, offers a more or less definitive look at how in the early ’80s, three delinquent Los Angeles teenagers soaked up the ferment of the L.A. music scene — hair metal, punk, hip-hop, electronica — and turned it into their own revolutionary brew. Flea, interviewed today, says, “We’d go to a Black Flag show, and it was, like, you were going to get the shit kicked out of you.” He means that in a positive way.
The members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers felt numb enough to groove on mayhem and drugs. But they were also, as we see in the documentary, canny and sensitive dudes who were reaching for an expression that was artful. The person they looked up to was Hillel Slovak, a founding member of the band Anthym, which became What is This? Anthony and Flea, raised in abusive homes (Anthony’s single father was a drug dealer who introduced him to cocaine and pot when he was 11), wanted to be wild and shocking; they were punk freaks who would do anything. Flea worked in a veterinarian’s office, from which he’d steal animal pharmaceuticals, arranging the pills like an art installation for parties. Hillel, on the other hand, was a serious and poetic Israeli-American. He was tall and beautiful and Byronic, with an insolent pout that was like Paul Stanley and Anthony Bourdain poured into one, and he was both a visual artist and a gifted musician. At heart he was a nice Jewish boy, raised by a mother who revered the arts and became a den mother to the whole gang.
The documentary traces their journey in three parallel bands — What is This?, Lee Ving’s scary nihilist punk group Fear, who Flea abandoned What is This? to play with, and the Chili Peppers, who existed for a while in tandem with the other two bands. In fact, the Chili Peppers landed their first recording contract, with EMI American and Enigma, in the same week that What is This? signed with MCA. There were torn loyalties across the board.
This history is fascinating, and obviously the Chili Peppers won out. But what also won out was drugs. And that’s where the film is both honest about what happened and a bit frustrating to watch. The movie isn’t kidding about that subtitle — it treats Hillel Slovak as the group’s Brian Jones (its formative visionary), and its second half is more or less devoted to the story of how he became consumed by heroin, an addiction he shared with Anthony Kiedis. But Kiedis, who chronicled his own dysfunctional behavior with riveting candor in his 2004 memoir “Scar Tissue,” had the constitution to bury himself in drugs and then pull out of the messes he’d made. He tried several times to get sober. Slovak was a functional junkie (he would show up at recording sessions high, and it was hard to even tell), but the smack took a toll on him over time. It took his energy and depressed him; it began to devour him. He died of an overdose on June 25, 1988.
This was a tragic event that proved to be a wake-up call for the other band members. (Afterwards, Kiedis cleaned himself up for five years, though he continued to relapse until 2000, when he finally got sober.) Yet the decision to make Slovak’s downward trajectory — which mirrors that of so many other rock musicians who died from drug use — the heart of the documentary was, I think, a mistake. It’s a well-meaning one, but it reduces the Chili Peppers’ story instead of expanding it.
In the band’s heyday, Anthony Kiedis, with his bare torso and long girlish copper-blond hair, looked like a ’70s teen idol who’d become a Warhol hustler – a street-flesh god like Joe Dallesandro, except that where Dallesandro was in a daze, Kiedis was a live wire. He had an unstable energy; he was like the spiritual son of Iggy Pop, touched by James Brown. He’s 63 now, and in the documentary, where he’s all leathery brawn and sinew, with an ink-black bowl cut and been-around-the-block visage and that distinctive lisp, he’s eloquent about the band’s past, and about how much Hillel Slovak meant to him. Yet a subject that gets brought up, but that I think the film still understates, is how much residual guilt Kiedis felt for what happened.
And I have to say: I’m kind of over these music docs that restrict themselves to telling the story of a band’s formative days. Yes, they exert a specialty appeal for fans. Yet just as “Becoming Led Zeppelin” felt like it left us in the lurch by stopping short of “Led Zeppelin IV,” there’s something unsatisfying about how “The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers” ends by devoting a few rushed minutes to “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” the 1991 album that remains the band’s crowning masterpiece. Astonishingly, the film scarcely even deals with how “Under the Bridge,” the song that broke them into the mainstream, was such a haunting evocation of the spiritual isolation that drugs can create. “The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers” is totally worth seeing, but the film feels like an indirect act of contrition, which may be why it turns into an overdone lament.