This Red Hot Chili Peppers story from the mid-’80s involving Rick Rubin and the Beastie Boys will make you wish you were a fly on the wall to experience it.
Anthony Kiedis appeared on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience where he recalled Rubin and the Beasties attending a Chili Peppers band rehearsal. To the shock of probably no one familiar with the Chili Peppers and their ’80s antics, drugs played into the whole moment.
Kiedis explains, “I was basically a junkie, but still showing up to work from time to time, which was the basement of the EMI studios on Sunset Boulevard. They gave us a little basement to rehearse in. They had signed us, but we were going nowhere very slowly – couldn’t get out of our own way. But we were still making a buzz; there was still something exciting about us that caught people’s attention, and it caught Rick Rubin’s attention.”
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The RHCP frontman continued, “Rick brought the Beastie Boys to our dingy little rehearsal spot, and he sat there, and we rehearsed while they watched. They’re on these little dirty couches, watching us, and we went through our songs. And Rick stood up and said, ‘We’re gonna go now.’ I was like, ‘Okay, do we talk again? What’s going on?’”
It turns out Rubin and the Beastie Boys thought danger was afoot.
“He was like, ‘I thought somebody was gonna get murdered in that rehearsal space. I thought somebody was gonna die. I had to leave.’ That’s how dark we had become. That’s how dark I had become,” said Kiedis. “He was afraid someone was gonna die and it was time to leave. That’s what he said. He’s like, ‘You guys were terrifying, you were scary and it felt like somebody was gonna die. We had to go.’”
Of course, we all know that eventually Rubin got over this alarming incident and went on to produce eight of their 13 studio albums overall.