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#OnThisDay 25 years ago One Hot Minute was released and since no single body of music has ever meant more to me, I thought I’d write about it.
No-one bats an eye at the eighteen year old reading the CD booklet cover to cover on the train. Well, maybe they bat half an eye but that’s because eighteen year old me looks twelve and what’s a twelve year old doing on the rat run out of London.
I’m used to this by now but ignore them even more than usual today because here in my hands are lyrics that are finding me prone. I’m ready for this level of honesty, this darkness.
“My friends are so depressed,
“I feel the question of your loneliness” I read the lyrics before I hear the song. I’ve heard about it, tho, Raw Magazine says it’s this album’s Under the Bridge. We’re stopped outside Mill Hill. Train’s moving too slow. I need my room, my stereo
“I feel the question of your loneliness” I read the lyrics before I hear the song. I’ve heard about it, tho, Raw Magazine says it’s this album’s Under the Bridge. We’re stopped outside Mill Hill. Train’s moving too slow. I need my room, my stereo
“Alone and desperate on the prison phone,” my friends aren’t in prison, they’re in Hertfordshire, in bedrooms. Yet the pathos somehow works. None of us are that happy, I don’t think. I love all of them and I’m going to tell them. The song instructs me to.
Actually, I have heard two tracks. Warped was released a couple of weeks ago and was B-sided with Pea. I like the aural atmosphere of Warped and the simplicity of Pea:
“Big and tough and macho you can kick my ass,
“So fucking what?” Where I’m from how cool you are is how hard you are yet here’s Flea singing the riposte,
“So fucking what?” Where I’m from how cool you are is how hard you are yet here’s Flea singing the riposte,
That would be the Flea of FEAR, the bitchin’ bass player, the Flea of - and this would be the real street cred round our way - Back to the Future. Whatever, Flea’s definitely cooler than your average Hemel Hempstead hard-nut. Your average Hemel Hempstead hard-nut can kiss my ass
So I’m primed to like the CD but that’s happened before. You gotta spin the disk before you know and when it’s the Chilis you gotta do this a few times. The previous few albums have been lasting but not instantaneous.
The live version of Warped from the VMA’s outro’d with the bridge to Jane’s Addiction’s Three Days and whilst I’m sort of gutted the album version doesn’t I’m also pleased. You can go too far. Instead the incredibly smooth coda segues into Aeroplane.
“Songbird sweet and sour Jane,
“Music is my Aeroplane” I just love this. It’s funky like the Chilis but a nod to new guitarist Dave Navarro’s previous band. I discovered both bands at around the same time in autumn 1993.
“Music is my Aeroplane” I just love this. It’s funky like the Chilis but a nod to new guitarist Dave Navarro’s previous band. I discovered both bands at around the same time in autumn 1993.
It’s fair to say that 1993 me is not exactly surfing the zeitgeist. I mean Jane’s and the Chilis might be cool but by ‘93 the former is dead and, as far as new releases go, the latter might as well be.
(The other artist I obsess on around this time is Hendrix who is a billion times cooler than both, sadly he’s a billion times deader, too)
I do listen to other music but the connection’s somehow different. Like, My Walkman plays Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the Lemonheads (who are weirdly tagged grunge) throughout the morning paper round era. However all the flannel shirt doc martens kids seem to *own* grunge more.
My close mates are all into (happy)hardcore. I absorb this almost by osmosis but it’ll be years before I “get” it. They all wear rave clobber. I don’t really understand the prevailing fashion. I yearn for neither a glow in the dark tee nor a German army coat.
I also really like Guns ‘n’ Roses for whom I am simultaneously not cool enough for - “you? like them?” - and severely uncool for liking - “oh, you like them, do you?” G’n’R are somehow oxymoronic. No wonder teenagers are fucked up in the head.
The other group of bands I like are different. rock. Simply, they are the bands whose CD’s are on offer. A surprising number of my idols stole their early music collection. Actually, it’s not surprising - it’s what saved them searching for meaning in a Bon Jovi cassette.
The best of the bargain bin cassettes is the soundtrack to the Doors. The movie may be fictional to the point of slander and one might hope to have encountered the Doors by happenstance by the age of seventeen but never mind.
It was probably quite easy to soundtrack that movie about highly successful rock band The Doors, but at least they included some poems.
Back to One Hot Minute then and when Deep Kick begins with a spoken word intro it has me at hello (not a saying yet) for me it *is* spoken word Jim Morrison. It’s Hollywood, California, baby. “Two young brothers on a hovercraft” plus an invisible me riding shotgun.
I spent last summer reading Dave Thomson’s biography of the band,
True Men Don’t Kill Coyotes. In song these same stories transform into something else: a Mohawk sporting, Coke snorting, hitchhike riding drive up highway one.
True Men Don’t Kill Coyotes. In song these same stories transform into something else: a Mohawk sporting, Coke snorting, hitchhike riding drive up highway one.
I’m there before I’m ready. These are journeys for brave people not like me. Me? I’m playing this CD too loud in my bedroom (especially if anyone heard Aeroplane’s “mother fucking”). I’m not in my bedroom by the time Flea - yeah Flea! - sings the ending to Deep Kick. I’m west.
“Like the butthole surfers say,
“It’s better to regret something you did,
“Than something you didn’t do”
I might not be there yet, Flea, but I’m With You
“It’s better to regret something you did,
“Than something you didn’t do”
I might not be there yet, Flea, but I’m With You
What should happen next (and indeed what should happen to this thread were it prose): track by bittersweet track, I get drawn into the LA Noir of the rest of the album. Prison, friends’ deaths, a million more lives, all while dancing like Iggy Pop,
What actually happens: “Peter, your tea’s ready.” A moodier me will get angered when he breaks my reveries. Not this year, tho. Dad’s been heroic. Neither of us know what we’re doing yet but he’s learned to cook. Least I can do is eat the food. It helps to have a full stomach.
I consume the rest of the album piecemeal. No-one’s invented a CD Walkman so I have to wait. Yet each time I return it delivers. The four tracks from Coffee Shop to Walkabout are one long party.
Even the dark bits are entertaining, Pea’s got a deeper message but it’s a fun song and when the baby’s crying in One Big Mob and you hear the dictaphone being rewound it fits the song. And Dave’s there now, another mourning son, there should be dark bits.
This darkness is one of the reasons One Hot Minute doesn’t sell well. It ain’t Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik II. Warped is the earliest heard song on the record and it’s the first single and it’s track one. Warped is moody as fuck.
Make Tearjerker the first single from One Hot Minute it sells double. I will die on this hill.
Tearjerker is the album’s equivalent to Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters, GnR’s November Rain and, hell, the band’s own Under the Bridge. Forget My Friends, this is the timeless one. To their colossal credit the band don’t let the world know it’s about Kurt Cobain for years.
Obviously this lack of hitness makes the song better.
“I’m feeling sick now, what the fuck am I supposed to do?” is still the line that goes through my head when things are really bad. And I’m not talking about diarrhoea.
“I’m feeling sick now, what the fuck am I supposed to do?” is still the line that goes through my head when things are really bad. And I’m not talking about diarrhoea.
One Hot Minute the song might have been a B-side had it not been the title track (although you can be both, see Siamese Dream). It’s metal, in fact the back end of the album has the guitars turned up. Really that’s the criticism of the whole thing: too much Dave, not enough Flea.
I get it but I am, by now, in love. By the time the beautiful opening riff to Transcending kicks I’m already lamenting the lack of further tracks.
Post script: Twenty five years on and I listen regularly. Not least because the little girl pictured loves it to a surpassing degree. She doesn’t call it One Hot Minute, to her it’s “The Fairy One”. It’s her most requested record. Aeroplane’s her favourite song.
