Advertisement
Anthony Kiedis is keeping busy without his Red Hot Chili Peppers ("We're disbanded for the moment," he tells Rolling Stone — for more on the band's year-long break, keep reading). The California dad recently pulled together Bob Dylan, the Raconteurs and more bands for Pittsburgh's New American Music Festival (sponsored by American Eagle Outfitters), which takes place August 8 and 9. Kiedis dialed up RS to explain what exactly a festival curator does, where the RHCPs are at and whether he's putting any thought into the ever-evolving business end of the music biz.
Tell us about the
New American Music Festival. I've heard you're curating and
I've heard you're hosting. Which is right?
Curating is more accurate, but I guess curation is a word that
could be defined differently by many. It's kind of vague. You think
of it a little bit more in term of the visual-art world.
How did you get the job?
Basically, American Eagle came to me saying, "Do you want to
curate a show?" And I've known people that have curated festivals
before and I thought, "Hmm. Is it real? Do I really get to choose
the music? Because if I do, I'm in." I was listening to a lot of
very exciting music. I thought, "What a great opportunity for me to
basically design a concert for myself, that I would want to go to."
So I kept asking, "Do I really get to choose the music? Are there
strings attached?" I didn't really want to get into something where
I signed on and then suddenly they flipped the switch on me and it
wasn't real. And they were incredibly gracious about allowing me to
have the final say in choosing.
How did you find the experience? Was it
difficult?
It's not as easy as it sounded. It was kind of an interesting
experiment because at first I was kind of like a kid, who wanted
what he wanted, when he wanted it. And then I realized, "Okay,
that's just not how this works." I'm an absolute die-hard LCD
Soundsystem fan and they're one of these bands that are completely
dismantled and some of them are in England and some of them are on
tour with other bands. I got to engage in e-mail conversation at
length with James Murphy, and that turned out to be a really
incredible experience. He is an excellent human being and is very
smart and I have to say, his music gets to my good nerve. For every
kind of door that closed, another wild or totally fascinating door
opened, like Bob Dylan.
I wouldn't have pegged you as a Dylan
fan.
Well, you really can't argue with Bob Dylan's music. I put him in
the top 10 of all-time greatest musicians that I have ever
encountered. I also loved the idea of getting Ringo Starr and his
All Star Band to be on this bill, which we couldn't do. But I
wanted to expose this college-aged audience to the greats while the
greats are still being great. So Bob Dylan, after much negotiation
and deliberation, made himself available for this festival which
was enough said at that point. I knew everything was going to be
all good from there. The same for the Raconteurs. They were very
busy and all over the place. People forget musicians are very
giving people. They give this music and their time and their energy
and their heart and their soul to the public, but they also have
families and lives and friends and homes and sometimes they want to
go experience that. And all we want them to do is to keep giving us
their music. Fortunately, Jack and his Raconteurs were willing to
go one more time because they kind of wanted to go on vacation and
do the family thing, but in the end they were kind enough to come
around and play this one more show for us, which I'm totally
grateful about.
Advertisement
Did you run into any other major problems during the booking?
For some reason, this is the summer of bands getting married. I ran into that twice. I'm very keen on M.I.A., I think she's a rocking live performer. She wanted to play, she was very into it and it seemed like a great deal and suddenly she's getting married. Same with Hot Chip. They have a real groove; they write good songs and have an interesting personality. Except for the fact that they're getting married. Undone by matrimony, but not really undone.
Are you involved in other aspects of the festival
besides the booking?
I definitely discovered along the way that I wanted to throw my two
cents in to other aspects on how they ran the festival. There were
several appealing points, one that it was actually in the streets.
That reminded me of when I was a kid and we used to have the L.A.
Street Scene, which was a phenomenal experience where I saw James
Brown and the Minutemen and the Circle Jerks and all these really
cool bands.
What's the status of the Red Hot Chili
Peppers?
We're disbanded for the moment. We actually took a very long time
to make the Stadium Arcadium record, because we wrote a
lot of songs and then got way too married to them and decided we
need it to be a double album. Which was a great experience, but it
took forever. It was really a grueling, long haul and it followed
two other very long hauls, Californication and By the
Way. So we kind of started in 1999 with the writing and the
recording of Californication and we didn't really stop
until the tour ended last year. We were all emotionally and
mentally zapped at the end of that run. Cooler heads prevailed and
the discussion at the end of our last tour was, "Let's not do
anything Red Hot Chili Peppers-related for a minimum of one year,
and just live and breathe and eat and learn new things." I was
about to have a brand new son. Flea is very inspired to re-up his
musical direction and ability and skill and he wants to learn new
stuff. John [Frusciante] has been firing away on his own, making
different solo projects. And Chad [Smith] joined a jazz band and
went to Japan. I'm just home, hanging out with this really cool
little kid, learning how to surf. But I'm starting to get just a
little bit of a tingle that it would be nice to start thinking
about songs and pieces of music. But just pieces.
With a lot of your contemporaries like Radiohead and
Nine Inch Nails revising how they handle their business, do you see
the Chili Peppers doing anything different with distribution when
you get back together?
I don't spend that much time trying to figure out that puzzle. One
of my friends is Rick Rubin and he lives around the corner from me.
Every now and then I get into talks with him about what's happening
in that world because he's much more involved and he's trying to
figure it out. I'd rather put my energy towards music itself. It is
interesting and it's wild to see it changing in our lifetime. I
think there is always going to be inspired music and there are
always going to be inspired listeners and there is always going to
be an inspired method of getting it from A to B. I really don't
know what it is and I really don't even care that much, but my mind
is totally open to contemplating something completely different and
new than as we knew it in the past. But I'm not worried about being
the guy who invents the most unique and dynamic method of
distributing music. I figure that's going to work itself out.