This Day in American History: Red Hot Chili Peppers Release Their Debut Album
- ForAmerica
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
On this day in 1984, four high school friends from Los Angeles released a scrappy, funky, barely-produced debut album that a record label didn't even want them to make -- and quietly planted the seed of one of American rock's biggest bands.
Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Hillel Slovak, and Jack Irons had grown up together in Hollywood, playing a single one-off show under the name Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, before crowd response convinced them to keep going as the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Just two weeks before the band signed a seven-record deal with EMI America, Irons and Slovak jumped ship to focus on their other band, What Is This?, leaving Kiedis and Flea scrambling to find a new guitarist and drummer just as their big break arrived.
They recruited guitarist Jack Sherman and drummer Cliff Martinez, booked time at Eldorado Studios in Hollywood in April 1984, and found themselves clashing almost immediately with producer Andy Gill of the British post-punk band Gang of Four, whose polished, restrained vision for the record fought against the band's raw, chaotic live energy. Kiedis later said the finished album, released August 10, 1984 through EMI America and Enigma Records, lacked the fire of their original demo tape -- it failed to chart on the Billboard 200 entirely, only "bubbling under" at No. 201 for eight weeks that fall.
Still, the record's lone single, "Get Up and Jump," got the young band its first national television exposure and helped build a devoted underground following through college radio and MTV rotation. It's now recognized as one of the founding records of funk metal -- described by more than one critic as "the little spark that ignited the rap rock revolution."
Sherman was fired after the album's tour, and Slovak rejoined the band for their follow-up. It would take a few more lineup shuffles, and the tragic loss of Slovak to a drug overdose in 1988, before the classic Kiedis-Flea-Frusciante-Smith lineup finally clicked. But every arena-filling, Grammy-winning, Super Bowl halftime version of the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- the one pictured above, still packing stadiums nearly four decades later -- traces back to this scrappy, underappreciated debut and four kids from Hollywood who refused to quit.
Also on this day:
1927 -- President Calvin Coolidge dedicates Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
1944 -- American forces overcome the last Japanese resistance on Guam during World War II.
1993 -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as the second woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
2014 -- Rory McIlroy wins his second straight major golf championship at the PGA Championship in Louisville.
A record that failed to even chart launched a band that would go on to sell over 120 million albums worldwide. Sometimes the little spark is all it takes.
Source: Rolling Stone, Ultimate Classic Rock, Wikipedia. Live photo: Kreepin Deth, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
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