The Red Hot Chili Peppers Beyond Good And Evil

California: Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It is the edge of the continent, it is the apocalypse state, and it is the subject of many songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, though fewer than you might think. California is one of Californian rock bands’ favorite things to sing about. The dreamy surface and its seedy underbelly, the all-consuming city and the bone-dry wastes of the valley, the homeless encampment outside the library-themed cocktail bar that is decorated with fake books: This is good material for rock music. See “Welcome to the Jungle”; see “California Uber Alles.” Even the songs that are supposed to highlight the sunny side end up saying something about the shitty side, if sometimes unintentionally. The sighing minor chords in Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco” make the flower-power anthem sound a little like a funeral dirge for an already vanishing age, or like the song has a bad conscience about selling a dream it suspects might be false. Phantom Planet’s “California,” the theme song for The O.C., repeats its chorus—“California, here we coooooooooooooooome”—so many times that it starts to sound a little desperate, as though the band is trying to convince itself that the trip will be worthwhile. When you’re away, California evanesces into fantasy; when you’re there, you remember that it’s just a place. There is a special insularity to a lot of Californian music. California, the mythic land of cults and communes, perfected the art of rock-as-subculture. No region, with the possible exception of Manchester, has produced a higher volume of what I’ve taken to calling "You had to be there" bands. The biggest two are the Bay Area’s Grateful Dead and L.A.’s Black Flag.

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