Hillel Slovak

Well now, for the first time, the band has made the song available on streaming platforms.

Dave Grohl said he played Baker Street at an event honoring the late Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak at the Silver Lake Conservatory in Los Angeles, where he dedicated the song to all the people who were around in the 70s listening to AM radio when their mom and dad drove them around in their Ford Maverick, he said.

My Chemical Romance have teamed up with visual artist Lauren Tsai for a new short film titled Prelude to the End, featuring voice contributions from Billie Eilish, Phoebe Bridgers, and others.

You can watch it online.

If you haven't seen it, it's pretty good.

It's all about Hillel Slovaks.

They don't really get into post Hillel Slovak, but it's pretty good.

There were some troubled kids, those Chili Peppers.

He's in his 60s now, so he loves it.

He's like, so I always watched him play growing up and my mum is from New Zealand and all through that side of the family, so many guitarists and singers as well.

Like nothing like, nothing crazy but like campfire style, acoustic, like... singing chill kind of shit and I just grew up around it.

I loved it.

Well, there was that other guy, the, the Jewish guy that died that was, like, their hero.

Uh, Hillel Slovak?

Yeah.

Yeah, he died of a drug overdose.

In 1991, My Bloody Valentine's visionary second album, Loveless, which has been hailed as the birth of the shoegaze subgenre, was made amidst huge financial strain, nearly bankrupting their record label in the process, when guitarist Kevin Shields insisted his vision be honoured at whatever cost.

The same year, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' major breakthrough LP, Blood Sugar Sex Magic, was only recorded after tortuous negotiations secured them a label switch from EMI to Warner Bros. after they hired guitarist John Frusciante following the tragic death of founder Hillel Slovak.

Having extensively detailed their good fortune up to 1991, we then come to the matter of the drama's choice of album title.

Although a little random, this seems to have been one of their strokes of bad luck after the album's release.

If we go kind of individually through you, what's the, the toughest? What's your, the one on the set list that you're not looking forward to, or you are looking forward to but you know it's the one you gotta work, work on?

Oh, I, I can start this up, right? So, uh, on the vocals, right, the ones that tend to give me the most trouble without a doubt, um, tend to be the earlier stuff from, like, the Halal albums.

Because a lot of times he doesn't really follow a set vocal melody.

He'll switch it up from verse to verse, deciding on, like...

And he's like, you know, you think of him tough as nails, but he cries whenever he talks about that because he saw he appreciated potential with him and that brought it out of him.

And the other example I think of is Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, because they just did a Netflix documentary about Hillel.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers were founded by an Israeli man, Hillel Slovak, and unfortunately he died, but he founded the band, and the original bassist was some other guy.

It wasn't Flea, who's the famous bassist on the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but I think the original bassist quit, and so he was looking for someone new, and Flea was not a bassist.

He played the clarinet or something.

but Hillel saw something within him.

He said, you would be a great bassist.

You want to come play for the band? So Fleet learned.