Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2006 album Stadium Arcadium was originally conceived as a “short and sweet” “Meet the Beatles-like record”, but when the band started writing, the ideas overflowed. They ended up with 38 songs and planned to release them in three installments (a similar model to 2022’s Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen), but eventually a 28-track mammoth was agreed upon.
‘Mercy Mercy’ wasn’t chosen for the album, but released on certain versions of the ‘Tell Me Baby’ single (along with ‘A Certain Someone’ and, on the digital release, a jam recorded live in Lyon).
Guitarist, singer and songwriter (and producer and engineer and...) John Frusciante’s creative output from 2004 to 2006 included five solo albums, two with Ataxia, and Stadium with the Chili Peppers.
Stadium was often portrayed as a Frusciante-led record and while it’s true his 1960s- and ‘70s-style guitar heroics and studio experimentations sometimes dominate, there are plenty of compositions and song parts where Flea’s bass and trumpet are just as important. (Check out the grooves of ‘Charlie’ and ‘She’s Only 18’, on which the bass is a lead instrument; the raucous trumpet on ‘Hump de Bump’; and the mournful, beautiful bassline on ‘Hey’, to name a few.)
On ‘Mercy Mercy’, Flea’s gut-deep bass fills much of the space, letting Frusciante skirt around the edges for much of the verses’ time. Then in the choruses, Frusciante’s downstroked chords, Chad Smith’s kick drum and Flea’s sustained notes, and Anthony Kiedis’s sustained syllables (“Forever”, “Feel this”, “Defender”, “Feel this”), all contribute to lovely moments of release after the verses’ restlessness.
Kiedis has admitted being guilty of being “by nature, an oversinger”, but here (and on other songs like ‘Hey’) he shows restraint in letting instrumental passages shine and his vocals have extra impact on return. From 2:12, Frusciante warbles and bends his way through an improvised solo, before Flea’s trumpet restores some order.
When Kiedis does sing a lot on this song (really, a lot), it works because his rhythms are so infectious. He’s not saying an awful lot with his lyrics (really not a lot)—what does “Acrobatic, the static is getting too dramatic” or “Rejuvenating the fading but never dilating” mean? Who cares!—but it sure feels good. Kiedis has rarely returned to that type of sing-rap since 2006, but some rare instances (‘Go Robot’, ‘Here Ever After’, ‘Aquatic Mouth Dance’, ‘Fake as Fu@k’) provided some of the the band’s funnest moments.
Top image from Discogs.