Deep into a Golden State of mind

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Stadium Arcadium

Warner Bros.

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THE difference between the Hollywood dream and the California dream comes down to a question of scale. Hollywood is about the quick flash of stardom and the instant gratification of excess. California is more epic, a glowing, limitless ideal based on the promise and deliverance of the West. Both are risky ventures. Both can kill you. But of the two, California is the better bet: There will be earthquakes and fires, but you just might wake up saved on the beach, with nothing but endless horizon in front of you.

When the Red Hot Chili Peppers formed in 1983, they were a Hollywood band. Though not natives, the Fairfax High grads became synonymous with Hollywood as if it was their motherland (they suggested as much in 1985 when they covered the Meters’ “Africa” and changed it to “Hollywood”). A playground for their nudist escapades and drug binges, Hollywood was not a place for the Chili Peppers as much as it was the freak-show centerpiece of a post-punk worldview rooted in reckless hedonism, overheated sexuality and the Lakers. They bragged of being “the funky young kings” of the West and sang about riding saber-toothed horses through the Hollywood Hills.

By 1991’s “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” though, the ravages of addiction and death had taken their toll (their founding guitarist, Hillel Slovak, overdosed in 1988), and gradually the Chili Peppers traded the one dream for the other. They became a California band.

They tried to formulate it as a philosophy on 1999’s “Californication” (“Destruction leads to a very rough road,” they sang on the title track, “but it also breeds creation”) and then carried it out with the kind of lyrical introspection and musical grace that few thought the Chili Peppers -- once responsible for songs such as “Catholic School Girls Rule” -- were capable of on 2002’s sun-kissed “By the Way.” You could practically hear waves breaking between every song.

All this seems to have just been practice for “Stadium Arcadium,” their ninth album and by far their most accomplished California recording to date. Full of stories of destructive sunshine, dead dreams and water that will wash it all away, “Stadium” nods to some obvious lyrical and musical influences from the California audio pantheon -- the Mamas and the Papas, X, the Beach Boys -- without ever getting lost in them. It opens full-throttle with “Dani California,” a windows-down Pacific Coast Highway cruise that’s a ready-made summer anthem. Anthony Kiedis sounds like a John Fante character when he sings “With a name like Dani California, the day was gonna come when I was gonna mourn ya.”

Produced by longtime Chili Peppers affiliate Rick Rubin and spread out over two discs and 28 songs (there were 10 more that didn’t make the cut), “Stadium” is big, majestic and mature. It overflows with the kind of music the Chili Peppers do best: a physical, often psychedelic mix of spastic bass-slapped funk and glistening alt-rock spiritualism. Only they’ve never sounded this good as musicians. The use of analog tape lends a raw, organic touch to the whole album and the Chili Peppers come off more assured and confident than they ever did back when they made a career out of bragging.

Much of the credit goes to Kiedis, who used to confuse singing with shouting and slurring. On “Stadium,” he doesn’t just dabble in melody, he’s a glutton for it, imbuing almost every song with layers of vocal emotion. He plays a hippie folk singer on “If,” goes trashy disco on “21st Century,” and proves he’s gotten only better at spewing brash, light-speed funk verse on “Warlocks” (where Billy Preston drops in on clavinet) and “Hum De Bump,” two of many “Stadium” tracks that hark to the pelvic thrusts of the band’s first few albums.

Kiedis’ drug haze has long lifted and you can hear the rehab in his increasingly elastic voice. “I’ve had a chance to be insane,” he sings on “Slow Cheetah,” “I’ve had a chance to break.”

“Stadium’s” real star, though, is guitarist John Frusciante, who plays like a possessed pointillist, dotting “Stadium” with prismatic rock solos, spirited jazz fills and an ambient array of squiggles, squeals and slides. Flea has always been a bass virtuoso but he outdoes himself on “Torture Me,” where he percolates his way through Chad Smith’s churning hard-core drum blast and then slows into a pop chorus before the whole thing gets dressed in regal horns.

Elsewhere on “Stadium” there’s a cello, a French horn and even a big choral singalong, but part of the album’s charm is how unaware it is of its own grandeur. Who has time for posturing when there are lives to rebuild? “We could all come up with something new to be destroyed,” Kiedis admits on “Desecration Smile.” With Stadium, the Chili Peppers take pleasure in leaving destruction behind, and rolling the dice on their beloved California one more time.