Red Hot Chili Peppers keep the hits coming at SoFi
A few songs into the Red Hot Chili Peppers show at SoFi Stadium on Sunday, bassist Flea took a moment for a lovingly profane acknowledgment of the band's deep roots in Los Angeles and Southern California.
“We (bleepin') love you; we breathe you in every (bleepin') day,” he declared to a roar from the audience in Inglewood. “We are you.”
This was a homecoming show in the truest of senses for a band that formed in Los Angeles in 1983 and gigged around town for most of that decade before its commercial breakout with the 1991 album “Blood Sugar Sex Magik.”
Add to that opening sets by Beck and Thundercat, who grew up in Los Angeles and Compton, respectively, and the hometown vibes ran deeper still.
It had been nine years since I'd last seen the Chili Peppers; that night, as Coachella headliners in 2013, the band struggled due to the gnarliest dust storm in Coachella's history. (Their second-weekend show was reportedly a much more successful set.)
On Sunday, the Chili Peppers were on fire from the moment Flea bounced on stage shirtless in a black skirt, purple knee-high socks, and his hair dyed yellow, pink and black for an instrumental jam with drummer Chad Smith and guitarist John Frusciante.
That got the crowd revved up fast. Singer Anthony Kiedis's arrival as the jam slipped into the funk-rock rhythms of “Can't Stop,” the first of eight songs in the set to reach No. 1 on the alternative rock charts, kicked the energy up even higher.
While the band released its new “Unlimited Love” album this year, the show continued with older hits a bit longer. “Dani California” opened with its swinging rock groove and Kiedis' smooth vocal before Frusciante finished it off with a crowd-pleasing solo. “Scar Tissue” slowed things down a little and — as happened throughout the night — the crowd erupted at first familiar notes.
“Unlimited Love” did provide four songs to the set, the same as the band's “Californication” and “Stadium Arcadium” albums, and those songs, which arrived first with “Here Ever After” and also included “These Are the Ways” and “Black Summer,” fit nicely alongside the more familiar tunes.
This was the first big local Chili Pepper show to feature Frusciante since he returned to the band in 2019, and it felt clear that his past experience playing on the band's biggest records and the chemistry he brings is
The Red Hot Chili Peppers perform at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on Sunday. From left are Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Chad Smith and John Frusciante.
Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers performs at Sofi Stadium.
working well with Flea, Kiedis and Smith, whom we should note here is a true beast of a drummer.
All four seemed not just locked into the music but to be having fun. The eminent arrival in October of a second 2022 album, “Return of the Dream Canteen,” recorded at the “Unlimited” sessions, also suggests a kind of rebirth for the band.
The band's also been mixing up its sets significantly from night to night on tour this year. Each show looks to include a core of eight new songs and older hits with another nine or 10 songs swapped in and out from city to city. Sunday's lessoften played numbers included “Throw Away Your Television” and “Charlie.”
Highlights later in the show included “Otherside,” with its slow guitar and bass lines that open it before Kiedis's crooning vocal drops in, and “Black Summer,” a new song that feels like a classic rock track.
“Californication,” one of the band's loveliest melodies, opened with an extended bass-and-guitar duet from Flea and Frusciante before Smith and Kiedis — and a backing chorus of pretty much
the whole stadium — joined in. “Give It Away,” the 1991 single that gave the band its first No. 1 on the modern rock charts, closed out the main set with one more rush of energy.
The encore opened with Flea walking on stage on his hands, his black skirt upside down to reveal a tight pair of purple-andgold Lakers basketball shorts.
“Under The Bridge” is one of the hits the band is often leaving out of its sets on the current tour, but you had to know it would be played here, given how very specifically its tale of loneliness, addiction, hope and redemption is set on the streets of L.A.
It went down gangbusters with the crowd — no way it wasn't going to. When “By the Way” ended the show with another huge crowd singalong, the night wrapped up as bleepin' fantastic as Flea, Kiedis, Smith and Frusciante could have ever dreamed.
Beck, who played a 45-minute set of greatest hits before the Chili Peppers came on, also talked about how much fun it was to have such an L.A.centric trio of artists on stage Sunday.
“Thundercat, Red Hot Chili Peppers, myself, we're all bands who started our musical careers here in Los Angeles so this is a hometown show for all of us,” he said between playing such songs as “Devil's Haircut,” a mashup of “Qué onda güero” and “Nicotine & Gravy,” and “Debra,” which gives the Glendale Galleria its place in local rock history.
“I remember when I was a teenager, the Chili Peppers played everywhere, they were a local band,” he said. “They were one of those bands that were our band, so it means a lot to be here tonight.”
The crowd, which was maybe three-quarters full during Beck's set, loved his performance — his only local show with his band this year — and a set that wrapped up with hits including “Loser,” “EPro,” and “Where It's At.”
The bassist-singer Thundercat had the tougher role of going on at 6:30 p.m. when the stadium was still sparsely populated, but he's such a charismatic and talented performer his half-hour set was a treat even without the energy of a larger crowd.
Like his friend Flea, Thundercat wore a skirt — possibly by designer Vivienne Westwood.
(His wildly eclectic fashion sense included sparkly Gucci barrettes in his yellow-highlighted hair and a Sonic the Hedgehog necklace.)
But his virtuosity on a six-string bass is why you should see a Thundercat show when you can, with songs Sunday including “Dragonball Durag” and “Them Changes” a tasty mix of funk, jazz, and R&B.