Tattooed Love Boys

But the real show is the one the Chili Peppers give for themselves: Flea, Smith and Frusciante improvising in high gear, eyes glued to one another, while the crew is still setting sound levels and camera angles. Smith keeps tight, hard time under Frusciante's sunbursts of wah-wah guitar; Flea violently bobs his head in time to his brute-R&B bass lines. When Kiedis bolts into the room, he warms up his voice with guttural chanting and loses himself in the rhythm around him, breaking out in spastic pelvic thrusts and a high-stepping war dance. ''It's not acting,'' he'll claim later. ''All I have to do is close my eyes and listen to Chad. It'd be acting if I didn't do it.''

''It's a fucking racket,'' Smith admits. ''But it's not just everyone blowin' and not listening. We've taken it a little further'' -- into songwriting. The Chili Peppers compose as a family, by unanimous vote, mostly in jam sessions where the band will, according to Rubin, ''create one main element, a verse or a chorus, and from that find pieces to make other parts of the song. Most bands write a lot of riffs, then see how they fit together to make a song. The Chili Peppers are more organic: creating pieces to go with other existing pieces.''

''They don't make it easy for me,'' Kiedis says of the other three. ''They could be an amazing jazz-fusion trio. But somehow I find songs'' -- Kiedis writes the words and vocal melodies -- ''in the bigness of what they're doing. It's not like I get to decide: 'I want this.' It's this unspoken moment of consideration, where as a unit we listen to these parts and meditate on what serves the song best.''

That day in the Laurel Canyon house, the Chili Peppers tear through ''Can't Stop,'' from 2002's By the Way, and Stadium Arcadium's first single, ''Dani California,'' with a force that is funk, punk and heavy metal all at once, but also evokes the intuitive might of classic-rock institutions like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Live at Leeds-era Who. ''Flea and I had it the first time we played together,'' says Frusciante, who was only eighteen and an ardent Chili Peppers fan with no prior band experience when he joined the band in 1988. ''There was something there. But we developed it. Flea once read something [jazz drummer] Elvin Jones said about having chemistry with somebody: 'You gotta be willing to die for a motherfucker.'

''That struck a chord, for all of us,'' Frusciante goes on. ''The more we love each other, the more we understand each other, the deeper our stuff gets.'' The Chili Peppers also know they will never entirely live down the naked-knuckleheads stigma of their early years and records. Smith recalls a recent interview he did with another magazine: ''The guy said, 'Thanks for Limp Bizkit.' He said this to me -- in my house!''

''They misinterpreted us from the beginning,'' Kiedis snaps when asked about ancient history: the stripping onstage, down to nothing but tube socks; raging-hormone anthems like ''Party on Your Pussy,'' on 1987's The Uplift Mofo Party Plan. ''Enough time has passed and enough has been revealed about what we are capable of that you really have to be a fool to limit us to one thing: 'Oh, those are the assholes who go naked.' It was a spiritual experience,'' Kiedis insists, ''from note one.''

Flea confirms that. Even before he and Kiedis formally started the Chili Peppers in 1983, with Israeli-born Fairfax classmate Hillel Slovak and drummer Jack Irons, Flea says he and Kiedis were ''together, always, every day'' from their first day of class in 1977: ''I was a weird kid with no friends. Everybody called me a faggot. But my mom remembers me coming home from school and saying, 'Mom, Mom, for the first time, I've found someone I can really talk to.' ''

Both came from broken homes, by different paths. A native of Melbourne, Australia, Flea was four when he emigrated to New York with his mother, older sister and stepfather, a jazz musician. The family moved to L.A. when Flea was eleven -- the same age when Kiedis, born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, arrived in the city to live with his divorced father, John. A part-time actor also known as Blackie Dammett, Anthony's dad quickly initiated his son into the Hollywood noir life of music, sex, film and drugs -- a bizarre adolescence Kiedis later described in vivid detail in his 2004 memoir, Scar Tissue.

From the start, Kiedis and Flea had no secrets from each other. They talked about ''everything,'' Flea says, everywhere. ''We'd go backpacking, except we carried our stuff in paper bags. We'd be in the mountains for ten days, just walking, with one sleeping bag between us.'' The two also got into petty burglary -- breaking into back yards in Hollywood, stealing pots of homegrown marijuana. They ate in restaurants and ran off without paying the bill. They flashed old women and did hard drugs.

''We were trouble,'' Flea admits sheepishly. But there was ''a lot of love between us.'' And it ''never felt transient,'' even after Kiedis got deeper into heroin while Flea dabbled, then backed off altogether. ''I guess I've always been willing to deal with the bummers. Many times I've wanted to quit'' -- most recently, he reveals, during the recording of By the Way, when creative tensions between Flea and Frusciante got personal.

''John was set on doing things he wanted to do,'' Flea explains. ''I felt like he didn't give a fuck about what I wanted to do. I didn't feel like it was my family anymore.'' Flea quietly decided to leave after touring for the record, telling only his best friends outside the band and swearing them to secrecy. But in an airport one day, ''I mentioned something to John. He said, 'I know I hogged the overdubs on the record. I wouldn't listen to anyone.' '' Flea decided to stay.

It is a measure of how much -- and how little -- has changed between the Chili Peppers, in middle age, that Flea never told Kiedis until recently that he nearly split for good: ''Anthony and I have been in and out of being close, especially since we became successful. But the most painful part of quitting, and the thing that stopped me, was the idea of telling Anthony.'' (Smith had no idea Flea had come so close to leaving until I asked him about it: ''Really? Quit the band? No! I didn't know that.'')