If there’s one song that represents the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ long, colorful, checkered, impossibly resilient career, it has to be “Me and My Friends.” The song from 1987’s Uplift Mofo Party Plan, the band’s only album featuring the original lineup, encapsulates the Peppers’ spirit, and has been played on the European leg of 2022 Global Stadium Tour that leaps into Allegiant Stadium Saturday night with special guests The Strokes and King Princess.
“I am here today to tell you about the Uplift Mofo Party Plan,” declares frontman Anthony Kiedis in “Fight Like a Brave,” the album’s lead track, as bassist Michael “Flea” Balzary lays down his trademark heavy four-string finger slaps. “A band based on a plan, a plan based on a band.”
Ambiguous as it is, that manifesto was inspired by the spirit that drove the Chili Peppers from its Hollywood jam beginnings and took it to its most musically successful moments, largely achieved during guitarist John Frusciante’s tenures. The chemistry he has with Kieidis, Flea and drummer Chad Smith is inimitable, and resuscitated a band that had crashed and burned after the death of founding guitarist Hillel Slovak.
It was Slovak’s chance encounter with a pair of hitchhiking rapscallions he kind of knew from high school that led to the bond of friendship so essential to the fabric of the Chili Peppers. Other musicians would play on the first two albums (drummer Cliff Martinez would go on to become an A-list film soundtrack composer) but Frusciante got to see the Uplift Mofo lineup live multiple times and soaked up Slovak’s style as well as the inclusive atmosphere at performances.
“I’d felt the feeling of joy at concerts before,” Frusciante said in the April 1 edition of Rick Rubin’s Broken Record podcast. “But there was nothing in comparison to seeing that band when the original lineup had come back together but they hadn’t put out their third record yet. Everything I had heard about them, everything I had seen on videotape, did not prepare me for the intensity of that show.”
The Chili Peppers were wild and never stopped moving. They had the intensity of hardcore punk with the violence replaced by funk attitude songs that celebrated being young, wild and libidinous. The musicians, adorned with fluorescent body paint, and audience became one in an organic fashion that teenaged Frusciante found dreamlike and otherworldly as he jumped around with abandon.
As much as guitarists DeWayne McKnight, Arik Marshall, Dave Navarro, Jesse Tobias, and Josh Klinghoffer contributed to the nearly 40-year legacy of the Chili Peppers, it’s the lineup with Frusciante most capable of creating the magical spirit of camaraderie and chaos in concert he experienced as a fan. His playing on latest album Unlimited Love is supremely soulful and sublime, and his return to the band in December 2019 means music from Mother’s Milk, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Californication, Stadium Arcadium is once again generated by the same fingers that created it. The band with the uplifting party plan is back.
Allegiant Stadium, 6:30 p.m. Aug. 6, starting at $59.50 plus tax and fee. ticketmaster.com
Click here for your free subscription to the weekly digital edition of Las Vegas Magazine, your guide to everything to do, hear, see and experience in Southern Nevada. In addition to the latest edition emailed to every week, you’ll find plenty of great, money-saving offers from some of the most exciting attractions, restaurants, properties and more! And Las Vegas Magazine is full of informative content such as restaurants to visit, cocktails to sip and attractions to enjoy.
