What can you say about the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the year 2024?
Formed way back in 1982, the Los Angeles band first made waves with their eccentric blend of funk, punk and hip hop, and their outrageous live performances. Miraculously, the quartet managed to survive the tumult of its early years, climbing through a haze of drugs and scandal to become one of the biggest and most commercially successful rock outfits of the 90s and early 2000s.
And yet for the past two decades, the Chilis have existed in a sort of ahistorical vortex, magically shielded from evolving tastes and changing mores.
The band continues to make new music — in 2022, they released two studio albums that were quickly memory-holed — but the charm seems to have faded away. They can still jam, their fans will assure you — they can still rock. But even the most loyal RHCP devotee will concede that their new music is merely comfort food with a little bit of spice, like a burger place that offers pickled jalapeños .
On Monday, following a weekend marked by an assassination attempt on the U.S. President and horrific political violence overseas, I was eager to escape into an alt-rock vortex, and to bask in the nostalgia of my youth.
The last time I saw RHCP was 17 years ago. As a teenager, I was a Chili Peppers fanatic — I owned every CD; I watched the DVD of their epic performance at Slane Castle on repeat; and I could play most songs from “Californication” on my guitar. I considered their 2006 performance at Skyreach Centre in Edmonton among the greatest moments of my life.
Entering the Budweiser Stage for the first of two sold-out Toronto shows on a muggy Monday, I felt that familiar flutter of excitement as I waded through a sea of enthusiastic fans — mostly men in baseball caps, young and old — many decked out in old T-shirts bearing the band’s iconic red logo, many, like me, drinking 740 ml beer ($20.22 before tip). Could the boys still tap into that excitement? Did they still have enough juice to draw my soul aloft?
Unfortunately, no.
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The Chilis took the stage at 8:45 p.m. sharp, looking almost exactly the same as they did nearly 20 years ago. Were these dudes cryogenically frozen? Wearing long yellow shorts and no shirt, the ever-wiry bassist Flea, 61, literally cartwheeled onto the stage. Guitarist John Frusciante, 54 — the band’s MVP, who rejoined the band in 2019 after a decade-long hiatus — channelled the post-grunge era with long jean shorts and a flannel shirt. Drummer Chad Smith, 62, wore his signature blue jumpsuit and backwards baseball cap.
Then there was Anthony Kiedis, 61, the ageless frontman — who is apparently addicted not to the shindig, but to the weight room — wearing a mesh top and white denim cutoff shorts embossed with a large Playboy Bunny logo.
As is tradition, the band opened with a five-minute instrumental jam, before launching into a frenzied rendition of their 2003 hit “Can’t Stop.” With the sun still out and folks still settling into their seats, it was a dizzying start to the show, which then proceeded with brisk efficiency and surprisingly awkward stage banter.
“The first time we played ‘Scar Tissue’ live was here in Toronto,” Flea suggested, about the band’s 1999 hit.
“Are you sure it was the first time?” Kiedis asked.
“One of the first times,” Flea responded.
OK then.
For the next hour, the Chilis stayed mostly in their comfort zone, relying on a predictable mix of hits spanning their commercial peak, which lasted from 1991’s “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” to 2006’s “Stadium Arcadium.”
The song selection, it quickly became clear, seemed to be a choice borne not of fan service, but of survival — aside from the minor hit “Black Summer,” the handful of tracks from the band’s 2022 albums, “Unlimited Love” and “Return of the Dream Canteen,” fell completely flat. (The fan next to me, who sang every word to “Parallel Universe,” literally sat down and went on his phone when the new songs came on.)
“On drums, Alanis Morissette!” Keidis quipped at one point, sending a ripple of momentary confusion through the audience. He quickly tried to salvage the joke, introducing the rest of the band as Geddy Lee, Gordon Lightfoot and Venetian Snares.
Fortunately, the band seemed to find their footing with relative deep cuts like “Parallel Universe” and “I Like Dirt,” though the first half of the show felt clunky, and lacked a sense of coherence.
Midway through the set, my mind began to wander — why wasn’t this working for me?
The band sounded good enough — particularly Frusciante, who remains one of the greatest living guitar players, and whose scorching solos provided the sole source of catharsis throughout the evening. Flea’s distinct physicality has not waned, nor has Smith’s hard-hitting percussion. As for Kiedis, he can still … rap.
But something about these songs — songs I used to love — suddenly felt flat and edgeless. The band, once known for its irreverence and unshakable rock and roll spirit, suddenly seemed boring and impossible inert — music for your friends who stopped listening to new stuff after high school. “Support Your Local Freak,” read a sticker on Flea’ bass guitar — a lovely sentiment, but one that felt out of touch with the largely vanilla, conspicuously freak-less audience at Bud Stage.
Are we to pretend that it’s “freaky” to sing along to songs that have been on heavy rotation on alternative rock stations for a quarter century now?
“When will I know that I really can’t go / To the well once more time to decide on,” Kiedis sang during the band’s performance of “Snow,” a non-sequiturial nightmare from 2006.
I began to wonder, what does this music represent? What does it stand for? Is this band just a canvas for Frusciante’s shredding?
But perhaps I am being cruel. Perhaps I am jaded.
About two-thirds of the way into the show, the band finally provided a jolt of energy with “Me & My Friends,” a raucous deep cut from 1989’s “The Uplift Mofo Party Plan,” before transitioning into a cover of the Ramones “Havana Affair.” Next, Frusciante treated the audience to a lovely solo rendition of David Bowie’s “Soul Love.”
A couple songs later, the show reached its pinnacle with an extended intro to the 1999 megahit “Californication.” Performing face-to-face, Flea and Frusciante — who swapped his signature Fender for a hollow-bodied jazz guitar — served up a beautiful improvised jam that felt refreshingly playful and genuinely passionate, offering a reminder of the unique chemistry between the two musicians, a chemistry that works as the foundation of the band’s success.
After closing their main set with a blistering performance of 2002’s “By The Way,” the massive screens of the Budweiser Stage lit up with the joyous faces of fans demanding an encore — an older man holding up a Brazilian flag, a beaming couple, a young teenage boy who, like me back in the day, could barely contain his excitement.
It was a lovely moment, one that melted my cold heart just enough to enjoy the two-song encore, during which the band performed two cuts from “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” — “I Could Have Lied,” a slow-jam ballad about Kiedis’s relationship with the late Sinéad O’Connor, and the seminal funk-rock jam “Give It Away.”
I left the concert feeling disappointed, but grounded. Over the past 17 years, I have changed. The Chili Peppers have not. (Out of morbid curiosity, I pulled out my phone and Googled the set list from the last time I saw the band in Edmonton. It was nearly identical to the show I just witnessed.)
As we poured out of the venue around 10:30 pm, we came upon a group of buskers performing “Under The Bridge”’ in the parking lot. Drunken, happy, sun-burned, the crowd shouted along to every word.
