The Red Hot Chili Peppers / The Uplift Mofo Party Plan

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The third album from the Red Hot Chili Peppers is a homecoming of sorts: It’s the first and only Peppers release recorded with the original quartet that founded the band in 1982, back when the Peppers were just four Fairfax High School oddballs performing as Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem. Five years later, <i>The Uplift Mofo Party Plan</i> would find chest-thumping vocalist Anthony Kiedis and slap-bass champion Flea finally reuniting with soaring guitarist Hillel Slovak and powerhouse drummer Jack Irons. The result was not only a culmination of years’ worth of work, but an ecstatic celebration of friendship itself. Nowhere is this camaraderie more evident than on the album’s most enduring track, “Me and My Friends,” an elastic, high-octane, punk-funk rap on which Kiedis pays loving tribute to buddies and bandmates, one by one (the track would remain a staple of Chili Peppers’ set lists for decades). “Skinny Sweaty Man,” meanwhile, is a speedy explosion that finds the singer enthusing over Slovak (“He’ll play a little guitar, sing a few blues/He’s the kinda guy that you can’t refuse”). And the closing track, “Organic Anti-Beat Box Band” is a boisterous party jam about—you guessed it—the Red Hot Chili Peppers. <i>The Uplift Mofo Party Plan</i> has a downright <i>brotherly</i> vibe, with gang-vocals permeating the record like soccer chants. It’s also the album on which many of the most Pepperish concepts properly coalesce. Presaging the giddy, slinky swamp-filth of <i>Blood Sugar Sex Magik</i>, the album’s funkiest, freakiest track, “Special Secret Song Inside” has the dirty lyrics of a Blowfly party record and a sticky groove that drips with sweat (EMI refused to put out the album with the song’s X-rated chorus as the title). “Fight Like a Brave” is the first of many Peppers songs that confront Kiedis’ struggles with addiction, a motivational rap written in a moment of sobriety: “You want to stop dying, the life you could be livin’/I’m here to tell a story but I’m also here to listen.” Most notably, “Behind the Sun,” built on spiraling Slovak guitar lines and sitar, was the first Peppers original to reach into deeply melodic territory (after the band hit mega-success with “Under the Bridge” in 1992, “Behind the Sun” was retroactively reissued as a single to promote <i>What Hits!?</i>, a greatest-hits package). Tragically, the original Chili Peppers lineup wouldn’t last long after the release of <i>The Uplift Mofo Party Plan</i>. After the band returned from their European tour in the summer of 1988, Slovak died of a heroin overdose at the age of 26. Aching over the loss of his friend, Irons quit the band. The Chili Peppers would eventually reinvent themselves and dominate radio for decades, but none of their multi-platinum successes would have the same manic mayhem or joie de vivre as <i>Uplift</i> version 1.0’s defining family reunion.

via Apple Music