Sunday Music: The Scent Of Green Palmolive, And The Sound of Red Hot Chili Peppers

My job was to wash the dishes.

Thanks to the invention of the Walkman, I could do my chores AND get some listening in.

Thanks to a limited budget and probably Parental Advisory stickers, I had a small number of my own tapes to choose from, which included several I knew should primarily be consumed via headphones.

Do I still know every audio inch of Blood Sugar Sex Magik?

Does Pinocchio have wooden… never mind, I won’t cross those streams right now. The answer is yes. YES I DO AND NO I DO NOT WANT TO RECITE ANY LYRICS FOR YOU.

But there’s something special about the limited quantity of music, the no-skip features of early 90s cassette-walkmen, and just how visceral half hour increments of mindless teenage tasks can imprint on you.

A short list of mostly non-lyrical content based things the album Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chili Peppers both taught and brought me:

It’s the first place I saw Rick Rubin’s name to start pattern matching him on other tapes, CDs, and records - which carried over to…

What Hits!? the (also Rick Rubin sanctioned) “greatest hits” of pre-Magik Chili Peppers stuff. I could play some of that out loud. “Higher Ground” and “If You Want Me To Stay” got me to pull out my parents Stevie Wonder and Sly Stone albums. The cover of “Fire” elevated my already budding young guitarist Hendrix obsession to a whole new level. Plus, the band had enough MTV credit for another Hendrix-affirming nod on…

The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience, which is definitely a Jimi hat tip, and not only got me fully into The Stooges (the Chili Peppers covered “Search and Destroy”), but further confirmed my love for - almost everybody else on that tape to be honest (and I even wrote more about it, specifically the Beastie Boys cover Anthrax did, here).

I don’t know how I talked my parents into letting me buy Blood Sugar Sex Magik. I don’t know how many times I listened to it. I don’t know how many partially formed but further directionally oriented ideas it gave me.

But it was… just so many.

I would wash dishes, and listen to that tape.

We got some green Palmolive for the first time in a long time the other day.

Every time I was out the coffee pot or clean some dishes in this past week, I can smell it.

And every single time I smell it - OK these are the only lyrics you’re getting out of me in public:

Hey, batter batter, hey, batter, hey, batter batter

Hey, batter batter, hey, batter, hey, batter batter

Hey, batter batter, hey, batter, hey, batter batter

Hey, batter batter, SWING!