David Bowie Turned Down Producing Red Hot Chili Peppers, Anthony Kiedis Says
Photo by L. Cohen
Earlier this week, Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis stopped by Los Angeles’ KLOS to chat with radio host and Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones during his show, “Jonesy’s Jukebox.” At one point, the two reflected on David Bowie‘s passing.
As Alternative Nation points out, Kiedis revealed that his band had reached out to Bowie on several occasions to work with him. They asked Bowie to produce two of their albums, 2002′s By The Way and 2006′s double album Stadium Arcadium. Bowie turned them down.
Kiedis also revealed that Bowie’s frequent collaborator Brian Eno rejected them eight times when asked to produce a Chili Peppers album. Listen to the interview here; Jones and Kiedis begin discussing Bowie’s interactions with the Peppers at the 24:36 mark.
“Every record we ever made, we had the band discussion: ‘Who should we get to produce this record?’ ‘I don’t know, we have to try someone new. Let’s get David Bowie!”
He continued:
So in the beginning we would call him, and he would say no, respectfully. Then, later, we would write long e-mails explaining everything, and why it was time for us to really get our ships on—and he always respectfully declined… For two minutes I was heartbroken, and then I would hear Chad Smith play drums, and I’d be like, ‘We’re good, we can go do something else.’”
We asked him to produce By the Way, as we were writing By the Way, and then we asked him again for our next record, which was Stadium [Arcadium]. He said no to us like, two or three times, but his mate [Brian] Eno, who we’ve also been asking our entire career to please produce a record for us, has said no eight times. All good. You gotta ask. And by the way, “no” is a reasonable answer. It’s one of a couple of answers you could get, and it’s acceptable.
Red Hot Chili Peppers—who are currently working on the follow-up to 2011′s I’m With You—aren’t the only artists who reached out to Bowie and got turned down: he rejected a collaboration with Coldplay too, telling them, “it’s not a very good song.”
Read our “Afterword” feature on Bowie, plus tributes from Nile Rodgers, Bradford Cox, Carlos Dengler, Thurston Moore, Carlos Alomar, and Jonathan Lethem.
Watch Red Hot Chili Peppers cover David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” at a 1995 concert:
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