Red Hot Love

Sometime in the summer of our youth—aka the early 90s—Details ran a fashion spread starring Anthony Kiedis and his then-girlfriend Sofia Coppola. Details followed the couple all over New York City: shopping for vintage jackets, drinking beers with Debbie Harry, slamming around at a Sonic Youth show, generally embodying the kind of rock-and-roll glamour that my high-school-confined heart so badly ached for. Sofia was still years away from directing movies and hadn’t even started up the Milk Fed line yet, but despite her lack of cred she did some weird, ineffable magic on those pages: She made the head Chili Pepper look really, really cool.

Although I have long loved Red Hot Chili Peppers more than almost anything else in the world, I am very much aware that coolness is a quality that most often eludes the band. They’ve spent a lot of their 23-year career making funny faces, wearing bad clothes, saying boneheaded things, writing cringe-worthy lyrics—stuff that I tend to overlook because their crazy exuberance and increasingly awesome music make me superexcited to be alive. One thing the band members have consistently gotten right, though, is their taste in ladies. In addition to Sofia, Anthony’s gone steady with Ione Skye and Sinead O’Connor, while John Frusciante’s past sweethearts include Stella Schnabel and Milla Jovovich. And Flea’s recently gotten hitched to model Frankie Rayder, whom we spotted in a vegan café in Santa Monica last fall when she was still hugely and cutely pregnant with their new daughter, Sunny Bebop.

Of course you should go out right now and get the Chili Peppers’ new 28-track double album Stadium Arcadium, which has lots of songs about girls, as well as some of the most gorgeous guitar work and prettiest melodies the band has ever come up with.

(Sofia with old flame, 2002)

Posted by Liz in Soundtracks
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