New Album Haunts the Chili Peppers

One night an old piano in the living room started shaking back and forth. During the middle of a warm afternoon, an upstairs room suddenly went drafty and cold. There have even been reports of a mysterious presence, following people up and down the stairs.

Welcome to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ spooky new recording studio, an aged, ramshackle Laurel Canyon home located, aptly enough, down the street from Houdini’s old abode.

“What can I say? We’re making our album in a real haunted house,” says Flea, the group’s colorful bassist. “From what’s been going on, you’d have to figure there’s a ghost here. I haven’t seen him yet, but I’m trying not to scare him away. I want to meet him!”

With Def-American Records chief Rick Rubin on hand as the band’s producer, the group is recording its first album since leaving EMI Records and becoming the focus of a heated bidding war, which resulted in the band joining Warner Bros. Records. “Since we’d just had a gold record, we were in a great place,” Flea said. “Everybody was courting us.” Early reports had the band signing with Epic Records, but the group changed its mind at the last minute and went with Warners.

One key reason: Band members were impressed when each received a congratulatory phone call from Warners Chairman Mo Ostin. Even though he assumed he’d lost the group, he still offered his best wishes. “That was a great thing to do and it made us think twice,” Flea said. “We started looking at Warners and all the great artists they’d been associated with, whether it was Talking Heads, Devo or Frank Sinatra. That made us start thinking about art instead of business. And when we started thinking about art, we realized Warners was the place to be.”

What makes pop fans particularly intrigued by the Peppers’ project is the band’s involvement with Rubin, the Def-Jam Records founder who has produced such rap and hard-rock luminaries as LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys and the Cult. “We’ve really hit it off,” Flea said. “Rick has a lot of clarity and focus and keeps a clear head.”

To hear Rubin tell it, he was wary of working with the band, which has weathered several drug-related problems, including losing guitarist Hillel Slovak to an overdose several years ago. Rubin says he’d initially been asked to produce the band four years ago--and declined.

“When I met them and came to a rehearsal four years ago, it was a bad scene,” he recalls. “It was very uncomfortable. There was a lot of tension and anger. But I went to see them at the Greek Theatre last year and they really blew me away, so I decided to give it another shot. And it’s amazing how different the band is today. They have a lot of musicianship and they put enormous care into their craft.”

Except for rare forays out into the real world, the band has been holed up in its haunted studio. Rubin says the group has already recorded 24 possible songs for its new album.

“It’s been great, because we really wanted to get away from the sterile, recording studio atmosphere,” Flea says. “It’s really inspiring because we have so much freedom. We have our amps down in the basement, which is like a dungeon. And the control room is in an old library. And I can’t wait to get to the overdubs--we’re thinking about doing ‘em on the roof!”