The Red Hot Chili Peppers recently had a sit down with ‘60 Minutes’, and they managed to leave reporter Jon Wertheim stunned after playing some solos just for him.
Wertheim starts the segment (which is actually a bonus segment to the actual, full interview) by applauding the Chilis for their unreal energy on-stage, even as they enter their sixties, comparing them to sports stars.
“Doing this story I sometimes felt like it was doing a sports story with a better soundtrack,” he says. “These guys are incredible athletes, not for vanities sake but because they realise that’s what’s required of the job. The way they play and perform, it’s almost like performance art…. This is a very physical rock band”.
To find out how they maintain being so chaotic and energetic on stage, Wertheim sits down with bassist Flea, guitarist John Frusciante, and drummer Chad Smith individually, and watches them warm up. Instead of discovering the mystery of radical energy six decades into your life, Jon just gets his mind blown by the band’s musical prowess.
He compared watching Flea riff out on bass to watching “LeBron James shooting jumpers”.
As the reporter sat not even a metre away, John Frusciante played an unreal solo, as was the same with Chad Smith.
“Sitting alongside Chad Smith an hour before the concert as he put himself through his paces it was very reminiscent of watching an athlete before a competition,” he said about the stickman’s warmups.
Lead singer Anthony Kiedis then told Wertheim just how hard the band prepares for a concert, as they “don’t wanna lose ‘it’.”
“John spends hours getting his forearms and his hands ready - he needs to, to play the way he plays,” he says. “Chad is a natural-born athlete with so much God-given coordination, it’s unfathomable. And he plays all day every day.”
“Flea loves to run. I like to imagine myself to be a world-class mixed-martial artist, I fight with my dogs only and I haven’t won a match yet.”
