freaky styley 👽🖖🏽

A friend of ours, Denise Zoom, called up Flea and told him that she had a drummer for us. According to her, this guy Chad Smith was the best drummer she’d ever heard, and he ate drums for breakfast. Anytime someone calls you up out of the blue talking about some dildo from the Midwest who eats drums for breakfast, you’re like “Save me the time, please.”

But we let this guy come down and audition. We were waiting and waiting for him to show up, and he was late. I went outside to see if anyone was there, and I spied this big lummox walking down the street with a really bad Guns N’ Roses hairdo and some clothes that were not screaming “I’ve got style.” I had already decided against the guy, based on how he looked, but he came in and we were all business. “There are the drums. Get ready to play. You’ve got ten minutes. We’re going to jam for five, and then we’re going to try a song or two for five.” Chad was not in the least bit intimidated by all this attitude we were giving him. Every other poor bastard who had sat down at the drums would look over at Flea, who would launch into an aggressive, hard-core, slapping funkrock bass line, and the drummer would fall over himself trying to follow. Flea would wash them away with his intensity.

Flea started playing something hard, complicated, fast, and awkward to see if the guy could follow. Chad instantly not only matched him but started leading him and caking him for a ride. He overaggressed Flea, and did it with finesse, and did it some more and some more and some more. We couldn’t believe what was happening. I was so turned around from my initial impression of this guy that I started laughing hysterically. Now Flea was looking at him like “Whoa, what do I do? Where do I go? What the hell’s happening here?” Chad wasn’t stopping for a second to let Flea catch up and figure it out. He was screaming like Art Blakey did behind the drums, when you’re getting your gusto up for the moment, because there was a lot of energy being released at that moment between Flea and him.

It was a big eruption of sound and energy, and all I could do was laugh hysterically, howling at this fucking guy with the bandanna and the puffy hair-spray hair and the bad Venice Beach muscleman shores, thinking how funny was this that the goofiest guy we’d ever seen blew all of us away right in our own rehearsal studio. It was genius, and everyone loved it.

Kiss me

And hurt me 

And kill me

And touch me

And lick me

And love me

And eat me