CD Odyssey Disc 1180: The Red Hot Chili Peppers

With football season back in full swing I find my weekend hours more pinched than usual. I enjoyed having long Sunday afternoons over the offseason to read and listen to music. However, I also enjoy the return of football, particularly when my beloved Miami Dolphins are 2-0. Fins up!

There is still time for music though, and the latest review is from an album from far in my past. An oldie, but a goodie.

Disc 1180 is… The Uplift Mofo Party Plan

Artist: The Red Hot Chili Peppers

Year of Release: 1987

What’s up with the Cover? A very bad acid trip. I imagine this trip was at the beach, as the pink area looks a bit like sand (and the band is based in California. It is hard to say whether that circular part is an interpretation of the ocean or just someone’s really tough moment in the public washroom.

How I Came To Know It: My then-roommate Greg owned this album when I lived with him in the early nineties. I liked it and years later when I saw a used copy on sale I snapped it up.

How It Stacks Up:  I have three Red Hot Chili Peppers albums and I like them all. I had originally intended to score “The Uplift Mofo Party Plan” third but I was deeply mistaken. It is the best – I have bumped the other two albums down a spot as a result. As this is my last RHCP review, here’s a recap:

1. The Uplift Mofo Party Plan: 3 stars (reviewed right here)
2. Blood Sugar Sex Magik: 3 stars (reviewed at Disc 690)
3. Freaky Styley: 3 stars (reviewed at Disc 982)

Ratings: 4 stars

I came to “The Uplift Mofo Party Plan” late. The album had already been out five years by the time I finally heard it. Given this I don’t think I fully appreciated at the time just how good this record is. Like my last review, it is a fearless genre-busting musical experiment that – for all its risk-taking – still ends up being a genuinely enjoyable listen.

Thinking of the radio friendly pop-rock direction that the Red Hot Chili Peppers would go in more recent years it is easy to forget what musical pioneers they were back in the day. In 1987, when many bands were busy playing around with drum machines, synthesizers and fuzzed out production, the Peppers were cooking a west-coast gumbo of conflicting styles, funkifying everything in their path, and making no apologies along the way.

Funk, punk, surfer music and elements of rap are all blended together on “Uplift Mofo Party Plan.” I won’t say the blend is seamless, but that is a good thing. Too smooth an operation would have taken the edge off, and this music needs edge. There is an element of conflict in all these sounds, but that conflict is what gives the music a lot of its visceral energy.

On their previous album (1985’s “Freaky Styley”) all these influences were also present but the album didn’t have the same sense of direction. On “Mofo” the same tension of competing styles is present, but the band does a better job of keeping things cohesive. I was favourably reminded of other genre-busters of the day like the Beastie Boys’ “License to Ill.”

It helps that the greatest RHCP song ever – “Fight Like a Brave” – leads the record off. The combination of Hillel Slovak’s guitar riff, the perfectly placed chant of “rrrrock!”, the funky groove of Flea’s bass and Anthony Kiedis’ surf-rap is perfect. The song has a bass solo, a guitar solo and between them, Kiedis laying down the party logic of the band at the time:

“I'm here today to pump up the uplift mofo party plan
A plan based on a band, a band based on a plan”

Circular logic, but strangely compelling when you hear it.

Later they mix groove, punk and what sounds like an avante-garde musical on “Skinny Sweaty Man””

“Flashin’ lots of cash and spendin’ lots of loot

He’s sitting at the bar – then he’s sittin’ at the booth

Across the dance floor he does scoot

He’s the skinny sweaty man in the green suit.”

While the skinny sweaty man is no role model, the song is furiously fast and fun. It made me think of all the entertainment you get from people watching at a club. The weirder (or sweatier) the person, the better. Also, I wish green suits would come back in fashion. Not that double-breasted oversized look like my last green suit from the early nineties; just a nice slim fit green suit. It’s been a while.

But I digress…

Anyway, back to the album which after the schmaltzy pop single “Behind the Sun” (the harbinger of things to come later in their career) the band gets back on track with a rap/funk version of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.

The album ends with “Organic Anti-Beat Box Band” which, like a lot of the songs before it, is both a call to party and the band announcing just what kind of band they are, and why that is so good. The self-conscious self-promotion is a lot like rap of the same era, only with more rock guitar.

The alchemy of “Uplift Mofo Party Plan” is special, in part because it would be Hillel Slovak’s last full record before his untimely death. The band was never better and while they would go on to make more great records, this one is the best mix overall. It has catchy rhythms and the fearless clash of different influences that together provide a ready-made party mix that thirty years later remains fresh and fun.

Best tracks: Fight Like a Brave, Funky Crime, Backwoods, Skinny Sweaty Man, Subterranean Homesick Blues, Special Secret Sauce Inside, Organic Anti-Beat Box Band