How the Chili Peppers Got Hot

When a deejay played records to entertain the crowd at U2’s Los Angeles Sports Arena concerts, the selections included some potent choices:

Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.”

James Brown’s “Sex Machine.”

The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.”

Nirvana’s “Come as You Are.”

So what got the biggest cheers?

None of the above.

The crowd’s surprise favorite: the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ballad “Under the Bridge.”

Sure, the Peppers have long been underground faves in hometown Los Angeles, but the response underscored that the Peppers are now red hot in the mainstream.

“Under the Bridge” is currently No. 24 on the national pop charts, and the group will headline the prestigious “Lollapalooza” tour, which begins in June in San Francisco.

On one hand, the Peppers’ success is a surprise. After all, here is a band that dealt for much of the ‘80s in an edgy, experimental, funk-punk style and was maybe best known for appearing on stage wearing nothing but strategically placed socks (!).

Yet the Peppers’ mesh of party-minded irreverence and kinetic musical drive seemed to strike enough of a nerve with a young, aggressive teen/collegiate audience that record companies locked in a bidding war in 1989 when the group’s EMI contract expired.

Warner Bros. was the winner--over the likes of Geffen, which rarely loses, and Epic--and hopes were high when the quartet’s “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” album was released last summer.

The irony is that it’s not the edgy, experimental, funk-rock sound that is now taking the Peppers to a new sales level. It’s a ballad. Where “Blood” album sales were estimated at 650,000 to 700,000 before the single was released in late March, Warner Bros. now estimates the sales at nearly 1.3 million.

“It’s the same thing that happened with Metallica,” says Carol Davis, sales manager of Pacific Coast, a Chatsworth company that distributes records to independent stores and small chains. “What better artist to prepare (mainstream) radio for ballads from a band that would normally have made them go yuck ?”

But will fans who respond to the single embrace the more aggressive side of the Peppers’ sound?

Bill Richards, program director at pop-oriented KIIS-FM, has some doubts.

“I think what happens with a band like this, for the mass audience, is this is just another new song,” he says. “For the 30-year-old female listener who doesn’t know who the band is, it’s like hearing something (they like) by anyone else who has made a record they like . . . Right Said Fred or Color Me Badd. It’s a song-to-song industry that we’re in.”

Lindy Goetz, who has managed the band since seeing it perform in an L.A. strip bar nine years ago, thinks the single will expand the band’s following within the rock world, but he doubts that there will be a big pop crossover.

“I would say there are some housewives in the Midwest who hear this song and buy the album and go, ‘Whoa!’ ” he says. “But mostly the kids who are fans know what it’s about.”