This private performance was being taped as one of a series for Internet portals like Yahoo! and AOL as the music industry marketing machine ratchets itself up for the hype of their new album, worthy of an American Idol victor.  Stadium Arcadium was recorded in this house, what turned out to be 38 tracks refined into 28.  This house was also the birthplace of their biggest record, BloodSugarSexMagik, selling over 5 million copies.  On the BloodSugar VHS documentary, the band recalled that the Beatles all tripped together in this house.  Anthony said on this day he lived there in a commune in 1975, and that before then there was a gangster bootlegging out of this house.  Whatever the house’s history before today, what was apparent was that unlike other TV or web appearances all music stars go through, this eight-camera crew was the guest of the Peppers.  They didn’t need a green room; they just hung out in the kitchen.

So it was easy for them to jump into their performance.  Flea was late, took him two hours to get there from Malibu he said, and he immediately picked up his bass and started warming up.  It wasn’t even plugged in; he just started moving his fingers in a blur to make sure they were awake.  Once he was amplified, Chad jumped in on drums, and the resonance of a loud, authoritative rhythm section abruptly over-powered the hushed production talk of the people who’d been there all day lighting and setting up.  After a few minutes, John Frusciante, looking more like John Walker Lindh, strolls in, turns on, and starts a screeching guitar solo.

And then when they’re ready, they’re ready.  The producer scrambles to make sure the cameras are rolling; Anthony Kiedis strolls out in a faded army coat.  They launch into “Dani California” their new single whose video is premiering on MTV the following day.

Somehow you can smell the body odor immediately.  Flea lunges his head in his trademark bobbing thrust, the living room is now louder than god, and Kiedis is doing his little dance between verses that looks part Indian shaman ritual and part overacting in an improv sketch.  By the next song he’s taken off his shirt, and he’s still toned enough that even if he was purely overacting in some low-rent improv theater, he’d still get head after the show.  You start to wonder after living there in a commune and recording two albums there, how much sex he’s actually had in this place?.

It’s long been easy to hate on the Peppers.  What started as an obnoxious party funk punk band at Fairfax High crossed over with a sappy hit on BloodSugar, an album full of hard funk raps, and it seemed like the course through emo rock ever since was trying to replicate “Under the Bridge.”  It was like just because he was a rock star, Kiedis thought he could sing, and his tone-deaf croons over mellowed rhythms sold millions of copies of their next two albums to people who’d never heard of Uplift Mofo Party Plan.