Red Hot Chili Peppers: 05/20/03 - Madison Square Garden; New York, NY

[davepeck]

jam
By The Way >
jam >
Scar Tissue
Flea Solo >
Around The World
Maybe*
Universally Speaking
jam >
Paralell Universe >
I Feel Love*
The Zephyr Song
Havana Affair
Ride Into The Sun*
Breaking The Girl
Throw Away Your Television >
jam
Otherside
Don\'t Forget Me
London Calling >
Right On Time
I Could Have Lied >
jam >
Can\'t Stop
jam >
Californication
Cosmic Slop**
Give It Away

ENCORE:

Chad Solo
Under The Bridge
Me And My Friends

* John solo.
** Funkadelic cover; incomplete; started with just Flea jamming the main riff. John & Chad eventually joined, and just as it seemed it was going to fizzle, Anthony sang the first verse.

[Evelyn]

I guess when you hit the big time you can play the same song list for three consecutive shows....God I hope PB is never that comp-lacent

[davepeck]

yeah, it sucks that there\'s not more variation, especially with the amount of material they have.. it was good to see them change things up a little bit the second night, but the 1st and 3rd were nearly identical... but they\'re not selling out madison square garden because of die-hards like me... they\'re a band with a lot of radio songs, and they\'re playing to 80-90% radio fans... thus, they cater to them. but they rock while doing so.

thing is, i\'d go see them again tonight if they were local, and i am more than looking forward to driving all the way to raleigh to see them on june 5th..

[DocEllis70]

dave..how are their "jams" do they usually start one up before going into the next song...extend a song longer than normal  or just get totally out there with cool improv?  
   Yea..it must be nice to not sweat what youre gonna play out there and make 80-90% of the crowd satisfied with hearing 2 or 3 songs, but i bet it gets old...how many \'under the bridge\' encores can you hear in consecutive nights. RHCP get the finest of the ladies i bet...some nice californication chicks that like the FUNNK! How was the shark pool there?

[davepeck]

aruny -

rhcp shark pool = :hump:  unreal!

i would describe their jams as "ser cockteases". they\'re fucking incredible, but they\'re usually pretty short.. a lot of times they\'ll take one out of the last note of a song, and a lot of times they just start them up from scratch.. good shit though.. definitely good shit..

i\'ve got an extra ticket for the 6/5 raleigh show with snoop if you wanna hop in the truck with us...

[davepeck]

California Steamin\' Warms Up Garden
Review from the New York Post by Dan Aquilante.[/i]

You can make a big deal about how the Red Hot Chili Peppers have ditched drugging and their manic funk-punk assault for love ballads, but you\'d be dead wrong if that\'s what you expected in concert.

At Madison Square Garden for a one-night stand Tuesday, the Southern California quartet seized the fans with a performance full of entertaining raw energy.

The desire to entertain in concert may seem obvious, but some musicians lack it. Not the Chili Peppers.

There wasn\'t a moment during the nearly two-hour performance when they weren\'t living up to the Red Hot part of their moniker.

The concert was like a three-ring circus - there was always something that drew you further into the show.

Take when John Frusciante ripped through a stinging guitar solo for "Throw Away Your Television."

If his fast-fingered fretwork didn\'t attract you, in a ring of light toward the back of the stage, bassist Flea and singer Anthony Kiedis faced off with eyes locked - like two cats about to fight.

That weird tension popped as if a switch were thrown when Frusciante finished.

The versatile Kiedis has an unusual melodic rap style that is loved even by those who hate hip-hop.

And his baritone has the same wishful, sinful Morrison quality that makes good girls writhe as if they\'re auditioning for Flashdancers. The guy is also a pretty good Dervish dancer.

Near-naked Flea may be the most commanding flamboyant bassist since Bootsy Collins. He\'s a top instrumentalist who\'s willing to set aside his four strings to cross the stage walking on his hands or call a few jerks to task for rudely throwing stuff at an opening act.

Toward the close of the band\'s set, the muscle-bound, tattooed and shirtless bass boy walked up to the crowd stage left, looked at the area of the floor from where the projectiles were launched and said menacingly, "F - - - you."

You\'ve gotta love this Californian for his clenched-fist New York attitude.

Despite the inclusion of a few love songs and power ballads like their famous "Under the Bridge" that was played in encore, the Chili Peppers\' spring is still wound tight after 20 years of making music.

There\'s nothing laid back in their state of Californication.

[davepeck]

The Red Mellowed Out Chili Peppers
A review in the New York Times by Kelefa Sanneh.



Looking for an easy way to ruin your band? Try this: grow up, chill out, dig in. Shed your we-use-"party"-as-a-verb reputation and rededicate yourselves to musicianship. Embrace balladry. Allow the guitarist to sing.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers, now celebrating their 20th anniversary, have done all of these things. And yet somehow, the results are spectacular. On Tuesday night, the band came to Madison Square Garden for an extraordinary two-hour performance, full of wildly inventive playing and — even better — lovely songs.

It has taken the band a long time to get this good, and perhaps it couldn\'t have done it any faster. Its previous incarnation as a jovial punk-funk act gave the members lots of opportunity to blow off steam. Then came a hit album ("Blood Sugar Sex Magik") and a disappointment ("One Hot Minute," made without the virtuosic guitarist John Frusciante).

When the group was reborn in 1999 with "Californication," the old manic energy had mellowed into an appealing restlessness. Instead of furious bass riffs and squealing guitar parts, the new Red Hot Chili Peppers emphasize loosely tangled instrumental lines. Anthony Kiedis — who, like two other band members, Flea and Chad Smith, is 40 — has mainly switched from rapping to crooning, often joined by Mr. Frusciante\'s falsetto.

On Tuesday night, some of the only misfires were old songs — the concert ended with a tuneless version of "Me and My Friends," from 1987. By contrast, the new stuff sounded great, especially the songs from the group\'s most recent album, "By the Way" (Warner Brothers).

There was an exhilarating version of "Can\'t Stop," which re-enacts scenes from the band\'s musical history: it struts, it swoons, it lilts, it explodes. On "Don\'t Forget Me," the bassist, Flea, strummed chords, while Mr. Frusciante contributed a gorgeous guitar line that bubbled and hissed like some sort of chemical reaction. And "Throw Away Your Television" used Mr. Smith\'s polyrhythmic drumming to anchor Flea\'s restive bass line and Mr. Frusciante\'s severe guitar part, which consisted largely of silence.

Mr. Frusciante makes an unlikely star: at 33, he isn\'t an original member (the founding guitarist, Hillel Slovak, died of a heroin overdose in 1988), and he\'s the one band member who has an easy time keeping his shirt on. And yet he was as riveting onstage as he is on record, sometimes bending in half in time to the music and sometimes skipping in circles, but never missing a note.

While Mr. Frusicante seems to be happily ensconced in his own world, Mr. Kiedis is an irrepressible showoff, with a fondness for ridiculous mime-meets-break-dance poses. His antics ensure that the group doesn\'t take itself too seriously, just as his limited vocal range ensures that the band keeps its melodies simple and sweet.

Mr. Kiedis is also that rare singer who sounds best in an arena; the noise and echoes make it hard to hear his lyrics, which remain the band\'s greatest weakness. It\'s easier to enjoy the breezy drum-machine beat of "The Zephyr Song" when you can\'t hear him deliver doggerel like "Rebel and a liberator/ Find a way to be a skater/ Rev it up to levitate her/ Super friendly aviator."

Even so, Mr. Kiedis deserves much of the credit for his band\'s evolution. By yielding the spotlight a little bit, he has helped his bandmates explore new ideas. And if the shy Mr. Frusciante has not become the band\'s new leader, he has nevertheless become its guiding spirit.

Early in the night, Mr. Frusciante approached the microphone between songs, warbling the chorus from Donna Summer\'s disco hit "I Feel Love." Mr. Smith struck up a robotic beat and Flea did a nimble imitation of the song\'s electronic bassline. If the band had tried this 10 years ago it might have come across as a joke, but on Tuesday night it sounded like the beginning of yet another musical adventure.

[davepeck]

The Chilis Take Manhattan
Taken from RollingStone.com written by David Fricke.

The light bulb goes on inside my head every time I see the Red Hot Chili Peppers live -- and it happened again on Tuesday when they hit the stage at New York\'s Madison Square Garden: That rhythm section has to make an instrumental record. Guitarist John Frusciante, bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith opened the night as a trio, with a funk-metal-fusion show of force that rattled the Garden rafters like an impossible dream -- the military rhythm precision of the Meters blown up with the desperate energy of late-Seventies L.A. punk and the screaming rainbow soul of Jimi Hendrix\'s Band of Gypsys.

Then singer Anthony Kiedis leaped into the fray -- alternating between manic hip-hop calisthenics and the crisp, bright vocal melody of "By the Way" -- and I could see why that side-project dub record won\'t happen any time soon. As a threesome, Frusciante, Flea and Smith are the best arena-worthy backfield in modern rock. But with Kiedis, the Chili Peppers are a complete treat: technique, might and cheer, a matured rock band that has found a second wind as a knockout pop group. Their 1992 breakthrough BloodSugarSexMagik made alt-rock stars of the Chili Peppers; it remains the standard by which most rap-metal still fails miserably.

The Chili Peppers, however, are now much bigger than that, in quality and hits, because they figured out how to fit Blood Sugar\'s split personalities -- the funk mechanics of "Give It Away" and the bittersweet appeal of "Breaking the Girl" -- into single multiple-thrill songs like "Around the World" on Californication, which tonight careened from speedcore riffing and Flea\'s stuttering bass blend of Larry Graham and Dee Dee Ramone to a sweet bouncy chorus and that endearingly nonsensical moment when Kiedis just sings a few lines of sheer "ring-a-ding-ding" because, well, it fits. In comparison, "Breaking the Girl" sounded like a preliminary sketch for the quantum leap in classy action to Californication and By the Way.

One of the no-longer secret weapons in the Chili Peppers\' arsenal is Frusciante\'s voice, a high-harmony wonder that frames Kiedis\' non-rapping tenor with a minimalist Beach Boys flair. Frusciante got to show off on his own during the show as well: taking near-falsetto turns through the Chantels\' 1958 hit "Maybe" (a street-harmony classic that was already twenty-five years old when most of the fans in this crowd were born) and the vintage electro-disco of Donna Summer\'s "I Feel Love," with Flea playing the racing sequencer line live on bass. The Chili Peppers also played their minor-key, warped-tango treatment of the Ramones\' "Havana Affair" as well as snatches of the Clash\'s "London Calling," "Ride Into the Sun" by the Velvet Underground and Funkadelic\'s "Cosmic Slop" -- evidence of both their covers prowess and now-encyclopedic range as a pop band.

Another thing that occurred to me, during the closing blaze of "Californication": Today, a band like the Chili Peppers, whose first two major-label albums were unfocused and sorely under-produced, would not get a chance to make a third. It took a decade for the Chili Peppers to get to BloodSugarSex Magik, and another one to get through personnel and rehab dramas to become the killer pop band they are now. The Chili Peppers had the time, facilities and opportunities -- maybe more than their share -- to reach fulfillment, and they didn\'t waste it.

Which proves that the only thing wrong with the music business is the business.

DAVID FRICKE