Episode 11: ‘Naked in the Rain’ b/w ‘Almost Cut My Foot’

Are you a risk-taker? And what, specifically, does risk look like to you? Is it skydiving? Psychedelics? Saying “I love you?” Or is risk more about being yourself and suffering the consequences, or say, being honest no matter the cost?

I started thinking about risk, and age, and my own mental stop signs while driving around and listening to an old cassette of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik. I never thought I’d get into cassettes again – in fact, I told myself I wouldn’t. But I never thought my wife and I would own a Chevy Silverado pickup truck either. I grew up with cassettes and trucks. Until the age of 14, when I spent my summer mowing lawns and saving up to buy a CD player, the cassette was my go-to format. I started with DJ Jazzy & the Fresh Prince in fourth grade, went through a brief Bon Jovi/Def Leppard phase in middle school, then ultimately found my way to Public Enemy, Nirvana and, thanks to the fine folks at Columbia House, a baker’s dozen starter pack of early-’90s alternative. My father has owned pickups since I was a toddler, and in order to drive myself to school I had to learn how to operate an Isuzu P’up with manual transmission. Dad took me to the parking lot behind the abandoned Children’s Palace out on Old Route 8, put the keys in my hand and helped me figure it out the only way one can – by failing at it, firsthand, until you get the hang of it. It’s all about feeling. You can’t learn to drive stick by watching someone else do it; you have to Pinball Wizard that shit for yourself.

When Erica’s father died in 2018 and his stuff got divvied up, my brother-in-law took the guns and we took the truck. In the end, brother Joe will come out ahead, but it was and remains a fair, functional trade for us, and far better than a monthly car payment. The Silverado’s factory stereo system consists of an AM/FM radio, a broken CD player and the cassette deck. I’m amazed that in 2005 you could still buy a vehicle that plays tapes, but I’m grateful it does. Cassettes are having a bit of a moment in the independent music world, but I didn’t buy in until the Silverado entered our lives. Beyond the novelty/kitsch factor, cassettes are compact and cheap to produce which, contrasted with the rising manufacturing and retail prices of vinyl, have made tapes attractive to cash-strapped musicians and listeners alike. As a music format, the cassette is awesome and awful all at once. It has a unique sound – hissy analog with a muddy low end – that is more or less the by-product of poor quality but often to the benefit of the listening experience – my tapes of In Utero and Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary attest to that. More than any other format, the cassette can take abuse – which makes a tape the perfect truck companion as long as you keep it out of the sun – and it’s still the best way to make a mix. Spotify and iTunes playlists just don’t cut it, and burning mixes to CD-Rs wasn’t nearly as fun as spending hours – literally hours – selecting, sequencing and dubbing (in real-time, mind you) 90 minutes of music onto a high-bias blank cassette. I made dozens and dozens of mixtapes as a teenager and maintained a notebook for compiling songs, adding up time lengths and otherwise scrutinizing the details in my quest for the perfect mix. I doubt I’d be a professional DJ today without all those reps on my Sony dual cassette deck.

In middle age, holding a cassette feels good and jogs the memory in nostalgic ways, much like picking up an old Mad magazine or flipping through a stack of baseball cards. It’s cheap time travel in the palm of your hand. Which brings us back to Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are a goofy-ass band, and this album is the apex of their goofy appeal. The Chilis wallowed in obscurity for eight years before its release in 1991, relative no-names outside of the American underground, then “Under the Bridge” hit the airwaves and suddenly your mom knew who they were. “Under the Bridge” is an outlier, though, on an album that has sold more than 13 million copies in 30 years mainly on its strengths as a freaky, funky, aggressive, sexually-charged melting pot of Black music influences and ’90s alt-rock. In terms of legacy, the Chili Peppers are at least partially to blame for the rise of nu-metal, clip-art tribal tattoos and that goateed kid from study hall who wore hockey jerseys and peppered every sentence with an F-bomb. Without the Chilis, we probably wouldn’t have 311 to kick around either.

I could never tell if I should be taking the Chili Peppers seriously. In any case, they never resonated with me the same way that Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins did, and as far as quote-unquote funk metal from L.A. was concerned, my heart already belonged to Jane’s Addiction. Nonetheless, the Chili Peppers were hard to ignore, and when “Give It Away” hit heavy rotation on MTV, they finally got away with my 15 bucks. Twenty years before Spotify, parting ways with $15 – the average cost of a new CD in 1991 – was a huge risk, especially in the context of adolescent economics. I don’t know how many times I got burned by the Buzz Bin, buying an album for the one good single and soon discovering the rest of the album was shit. Fortunately, Blood Sugar Sex Majik was chock full of musical thrills. Stylistically, it’s all over the road – rap-rock, throwback funk, acoustic ballads, epic jams – yet it somehow avoids the ditch, even when a song abruptly changes course, which is often. “Sir Psycho Sexy” is a perfect example. After riding a water-bong bass groove for five-and-a-half minutes, just when you expect the Chilis to pimp-strut this P-Funk ripoff into the sunset, they break out the mellotron for an extended coda that sounds like Zeppelin blowing off steam in the studio before getting serious about “Kashmir.”

It’s not just a personality crisis in sound, either: Lyrically, the Red Hot Chili Peppers of Blood Sugar Sex Magik are capable of sweet tenderness and genuine introspection, yet they spend a great deal of time redirecting attention to their penises. Even a non-album instrumental cut from the sessions surfaced as a B-side titled “Flea’s Cock.” Subsequent albums took the Chili Peppers on a less horny, more mainstream path, but on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, these guys can’t walk by a telephone pole without rubbing up against it to see how it feels. Even amid pleas for social justice and equality, the songs end up stage-diving back inside their tighty whities.

Ironically, “Naked in the Rain” is one of the least sexual songs on the album. The narrator, presumably frontman Anthony Kiedis, laments his life among humans and flees to a world where he can run through the woods in his birthday suit, skinny-dip in a river and lick a whale for some reason. As a back-to-nature fantasy – or is it reality? – “Naked in the Rain” is wholly effective, even with, or perhaps because of, Kiedis keeping his package out of the picture.

I don’t know how old you are, but I’m guessing you probably don’t spend much time naked in the rain. And maybe you never did. I know I don’t. I skinny-dipped once in Loch Ness while it was overcast, but that’s the closest I’ve been, and that was almost 20 years ago. It’s a nice thought, a romantic notion, but here at 43, as I attempt to liberate myself from the anxious apprehension that often stops me from living and imagine a circumstance where I would find myself willfully naked in the rain, even in a fantasy my mind keeps wheeling back to questions like, But what if there’s glass on the ground and I cut my foot?

Aging is weird, a process of alternately hardening and softening, and living on the edge looks a lot different when you’re starting to lose yours. From 16 to 21, I rarely shied away from the mosh pit, but these days, if I’m in a certain mood, I can take the accidental bump of my shoulder from a passing stranger as a personal affront. It confounds me to think that I’m the same person who once jumped off a decommissioned railroad bridge into the Cuyahoga River, but maybe it’s telling that, after cutting my foot on a jagged piece of industrial concrete as I climbed out of the muddy water, I never took that leap again.

Every band exists somewhere between myth and reality. There’s a spectrum of falsities and truths, and I imagine the Red Hot Chili Peppers of Blood Sugar Sex Magik lived somewhere in between, and that the truth, if we knew it, would mostly be boring. Music can inspire, it can help us face the world with a sock on our cock and scream “THIS IS ME!,” but it’s risky business searching for an ideal for living within a pop song. Maybe Anthony Kiedis used to run naked in the rain or maybe he didn’t, but either way, it’s likely that now, at 58 years old, it’s not part of his daily routine, just as it’s not part of mine at 43. Which isn’t to say that he and I are no longer capable of risk. Filmmaker Olivia Wilde has said that, “Only the really young are fearless, have the optimism, the romanticism to take unimaginable risks,” but as I ease into middle age while keeping my eye on the ground for glass, I’m finding it’s not so much that I’m risk averse, but that the definition of risk has changed, and that real risk, the important risk, has little to do with physical challenges or feats of cunning stupidity. It’s harder to boast about being true to yourself, and it probably looks boring by comparison, but the nice thing about aging is, you’re less likely to have idiot friends around trying to get you to jump off a railroad bridge. And I’m happy to give that away now.

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