The Alternative Number Ones: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Soul To Squeeze”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

This is the one where he's like, "Diddle doodle dingle zingle dog bone, bading badam basummadrumma kong gone bad." It's the serious and heartfelt addiction song where he's like, "Diddle doodle dingle zingle dog bone, bading badam basummadrumma kong gone bad." If you really need to put a serious and heartfelt addiction song on the Coneheads soundtrack, then maybe it should be the serious and heartfelt addiction song where the guy can't stop himself from launching into the goofy-gibberish scat zone. But here's the thing that nobody considered in 1993: Maybe the Coneheads soundtrack didn't need a serious and heartfelt addiction song. Maybe the Coneheads soundtrack, and the movie attached, didn't need to exist at all.

I sometimes wonder about the effects of a childhood spent singing along, blissfully unaware, to radio hits that were all about the euphoric and destructive embrace of heroin. In the early '90s, so many of the big, generational alt-rock hits were all about heroin. Sometimes, the silly throwaway soundtrack songs that became random hits were also about heroin. What did that do to us? How did it affect us? Is it any different from my son, who's about the same age now that I was in summer 1993, singing along to rap songs about Xanax comas? Maybe every generation is full of musicians sneaking drug references onto the airwaves, parents pretending they don't notice, and kids who actually don't notice. Maybe that's the natural order of popular music.

But yeah, that's what happened. Coneheads, a recurring sketch about silly aliens from the early Saturday Night Live years, became a mid-budget studio comedy in 1993. This seems like a terrible idea, but Wayne's World was a surprise blockbuster one year earlier, and Lorne Michaels and Paramount Pictures thought maybe they had another winner. They did not. But Coneheads needed a soundtrack album, and Warner Bros. had a roster full of artists with extra songs that could be thrown away on the Coneheads soundtrack. The Red Hot Chili Peppers had a track on the double platinum Wayne's World soundtrack, and they were in the process of becoming household names thanks to Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the 1991 album that arrived at the exact right moment. So the Chili Peppers took an outtake from the Blood Sugar Sex Magik sessions, which they'd already released as a B-side on a couple of singles, and they gave it to Coneheads. The movie was a gigantic embarrassment for everyone involved, but the Chili Peppers got a stray hit out of the deal.

The whole thing seems perfectly insane. The Red Hot Chili Peppers might be the goofiest, most antic band ever to achieve the highest levels of alt-rock stardom. But when they had to submit a song to a goofy, antic movie, they came out with something soft and wounded and tremulous. The world had just learned how much it loved soft, wounded, tremulous Red Hot Chili Peppers songs, so "Soul To Squeeze" served as a big off-cycle record for the band. When I say that "Soul To Squeeze" transcended its origins, I'm really not saying much of anything at all. "Soul To Squeeze" is not entirely devoid of antic silliness; Anthony Kiedis lapses into scatman mode even when he's at his gravest. But if the Chili Peppers ever had any dignity in the first place, they were the only people to come out of Coneheads with their dignity intact. I don't think "Soul To Squeeze" is all that great, but the mere fact that the Chili Peppers' Coneheads soundtrack song doesn't suck dog dick is a minor miracle.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers weren't just between albums when "Soul To Squeeze" got its big push; they were also between guitarists. Original Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak died of a heroin overdose in 1988. A year later, the band recruited John Frusciante, a willowy and sensitive teenage guitar genius. Frusciante developed his own terrible heroin habit after joining, and he was horrified when the band blew up to arena level. He wasn't ready for all that attention, and he shied away from the spotlight, quitting the band mid-tour in 1992. It happened right after a Saturday Night Live performance that Anthony Kiedis thought Frusciante sabotaged by playing the "Under The Bridge" intro too weirdly.

Guitarist Arik Marshall spent the rest of 1992 as the band's fill-in guitarist. Marshall was with the Chili Peppers when they headlined the second Lollapalooza tour, played "Give It Away" at the VMAs, and recorded their Simpsons guest appearance. But Marshall was gone from the band by 1993. Only three Chili Peppers appear in the "Soul To Squeeze" video because there only were three Chili Peppers at the time.

"Soul To Squeeze" comes from the Blood Sugar Sex Magik sessions, and given that the final album is 17 songs and 77 minutes long, it's wild to think that it didn't make the final cut. Maybe the Chili Peppers simply could not bear to cut "The Greeting Song" or "Mellowship Slinky In B Major" from the tracklist. Maybe the second half of "Sir Psycho Sexy" was sacrosanct. But I think it was more a matter of self-perception. Anthony Kiedis has talked about how reluctant he was to record "Under The Bridge," the smack-addict power ballad that remains the band's biggest-ever hit. (Weirdly, "Under The Bridge" wasn't that big on the Modern Rock chart, where it peaked at #6. It's an 8.) Maybe he couldn't wrap his mind around the idea of including two smack-addict power ballads.

A few years ago, John Fruciante went on Blood Sugar Sex Magik producer Rick Rubin's podcast and admitted that the band was "insane" not to put "Soul To Squeeze" on the album: "I remember clearly Flea's and my thinking. I remember us both particularly being like, 'No. Too much. As it is, we've got three songs like this, and that's already way more than enough,' or something like that." The Chili Peppers thought of themselves as a funky party-time band, and when you've decided that that's what you are, you don't want to slow down the party very often. "Soul To Squeeze" absolutely would've improved Blood Sugar Sex Magik, an exhausting and overstuffed jumble of a record with a handful of inspired moments. But the band clearly didn't lose any momentum by saving that song until later. Blood Sugar Sex Magik was triple platinum by 1993, and it's septuple platinum now.

The Chili Peppers originally released "Soul To Squeeze" as a B-side on the single versions of both "Give It Away" and "Under The Bridge," but the song didn't find its audience until Coneheads. I've never seen Coneheads, even though the movie came out when I was precisely in the middle of its 13-year-old idiot demographic. I was going to watch it to prepare for this column, but then I decided that I really don't want to do that. I pulled up a few scenes on YouTube, and they are just actively unpleasant.

The Coneheads were recurring Saturday Night Live characters in the late '70s; they made their debut on a 1977 episode where Ralph Nader was the host and George Benson was the musical guest. They're a family of aliens whose heads are big fleshy cones. They're stranded on earth, and they try to pass themselves off as regular humans, despite being weird and having cones for heads and everything. They try to explain away any cultural differences by saying that they're from France. Here's a sentence from the characters' Wikipedia page: "Dan Aykroyd said he was inspired to create the Coneheads by marijuana consumption." I don't know; maybe you had to be there. Ryan Reynolds just told a Coneheads joke on the SNL50 special, but it was right after he told a Ryan Reynolds joke, so I didn't even notice.

Why did anyone think that there should be a Coneheads movie? I truly have no idea. Maybe Lorne Michaels was just feeling himself after Wayne's World. For his big follow-up, Michaels brought back original Coneheads Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. Laraine Newman played their daughter in the original sketches, but in the movie, it's Michelle Burke, making her feature-length debut. (Later that year, Burke was in Dazed And Confused. Now, that's a good movie.) Lorne Michaels produced the Coneheads motion picture, and he brought in Steve Barron, a director who'd made hugely important music videos like Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing." Barron's previous directorial effort was 1990's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was then the highest-grossing independent film in history. (I liked that movie.) Michaels filled the Coneheads cast with past and present SNL players, as well as of-the-moment comedy stars like Sinbad, Michael Richards, and Eddie Griffin. But I don't think there's any collection of talent that could've turned Coneheads into a watchable movie.

Here's something funny that I just learned: Three years after the Coneheads movie came out and flopped, the movie's screenwriters Bonnie and Terry Turner created 3rd Rock From The Sun, the NBC sitcom about another family of aliens who try to pass themselves off as human while they're stranded on Earth. They even cast Jane Curtin, though she played a human, not an alien. 3rd Rock ran for six seasons and made a star out of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, so maybe there was some juice in the Coneheads idea. Maybe it just needed to not be so fucking annoying.

Anyway, the Coneheads soundtrack has a few songs that directly pertain to the movie. Dan Aykroyd's Beldar character, for instance, sings Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" while he's fighting a pretty-cool stop-motion monster in the film's climax, so that song is on the soundtrack. So is something called "Conehead Love Featuring Beldar And Prymaat," partly recorded by Dan Aykroyd's brother Peter. Don't listen to that song. It's not good. Most of the soundtrack, however, is made up of random-ass leftovers from Warner Bros. artists. R.E.M., a band that's been in this column many times, are represented by the "Drive" B-side "It's A Free World, Baby." k.d. lang and Erasure's Andy Bell sing a cover of Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer's "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)." I'm unbelievably sorry to report that there's also a Barenaked Ladies cover of Public Enemy's "Fight The Power." Don't listen to that one, either. (Barenaked Ladies will eventually appear in this column, but don't hold your breath for some big reappraisal.)

Maybe the Coneheads soundtrack producers just picked "Soul To Squeeze" because they needed a song for a mock-romantic scene. In the movie, "Soul To Squeeze" pops up when young Chris Farley is attempting to seduce the Coneheads' daughter. Farley tells the girl that he loves her, and he thinks he's about to get laid. Then she invites him to put a fuzzy hoop over her head. That's the joke. Look. I'm sorry. These are sketch-comedy jokes from before I was born, and Lorne Michaels tried to reheat them and sell them to kids my age. It was never going to work.

Critics hated Coneheads with a burning passion, and it didn't even earn back its budget at the box office. I spent way too much time in my middle-school years studying other kids' CD collections, and I don't think I ever encountered the Coneheads soundtrack. But then there was "Soul To Squeeze," which was all over the radio in a moment when people evidently really wanted another Red Hot Chili Peppers power ballad. The Chili Peppers were already done with the Blood Sugar Sex Magik album cycle, but alt-rock radio still wanted more. Late in 1992, the Chili Peppers previous label EMI released a pre-Blood Sugar best-of collection called What Hits!? The label pushed the band's vaguely psychedelic 1987 song "Behind The Sun" as if it was a new single, and it reached #7. (It's a 5.) The demand was there.

"Soul To Squeeze" really feels like a John Fruciante song. His fingerprints are all over the track -- the weirdly emotive intricacy of the central riff, the bent-note murmuring that communicates more than the actual vocal, the dramatic flare-up near the end of the track. Throughout the song, Frusciante sounds like he's having a deep musical conversation with Flea; their guitar and bass wind around each other in busy but intuitive ways. Brendan O'Brien, the producer who engineered Blood Sugar Sex Magik, plays some soft organ, and that makes for a nice addition. In the context of a marathon like Blood Sugar, a song like that would've probably felt like a nice reprieve from all the socks-on-dicks theatrics. But the problem with "Soul To Squeeze," as with so many Chili Peppers songs, is Anthony Kiedis.

He's not terrible -- not on this song, anyway. Kiedis can be genuinely affecting when he's in his guilty, vulnerable mode. He opens "Soul To Squeeze" muttering almost sheepishly: "I've got a bad disease/ Up from my brain is where I bleed." He's talking about addiction, right? I suppose you could read the song in other ways, but I don't know why you would. Kiedis would love to settle down and find some time to breathe, maybe even to fall in love, but his disease won't let him. He wants someone to take away his self-destruction. Even at his most open and communicative, though, Kiedis can't restrain himself from talking about "take me to the river, let me on yo' sho'." I loved Blood Sugar Sex Magik when it came out, but by the time "Soul To Squeeze" hit, I was really sick of that guy. My friends and I used to mercilessly mock the "Soul To Squeeze" scat part whenever it came on the radio. The song itself is real-deal pretty, but its beauty simply cannot survive that level of silliness. The silliness doesn't bother me quite as much today, but it keeps the song from achieving the genuine catharsis that the Chili Peppers found with "Under The Bridge."

The "Soul To Squeeze" video is pretty good, though. Director Kevin Kerslake had already made a bunch of non-"Teen Spirit" Nirvana videos, as well as Faith No More's "Midlife Crisis" clip. He casts the Chili Peppers as dust-bowl tramps at a black-and-white traveling circus. They hang out with freaks and clowns, and they wear fedoras tilted off to the side. Flea rides an elephant. Anthony Kiedis plays with a chimpanzee. Chris Farley shows up as a cigar-chomping circus boss. In a few scenes, Kiedis dresses up as Medusa, with lipstick and actual snakes in his hair, and he looks great. The video feels more cinematic than any of the actual Coneheads scenes to which I've subjected myself. (Unlike Steve Barron, Kerslake never jumped into feature films, but he does have a bunch of music documentaries to his credit now.)

"Soul To Squeeze" helped keep up the Red Hot Chili Peppers' momentum. It went top-10 in a few countries, and it reached #22 on the Hot 100. At the time, it was the Chili Peppers' highest-charting single other than "Under The Bridge." Soon afterwards, the Chili Peppers brought in former Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. The first time that they played with Navarro was at Woodstock '94 -- the one where they wore the silver lightbulb costumes. The Chili Peppers didn't play "Soul To Squeeze" at that Woodstock set. In fact, they didn't perform the song until 1998, after John Fruciante rejoined the band. The Dave Navarro era didn't last too long, but it had a few hits of its own. Soon enough, the Chili Peppers will in this column again, and then they'll be back so many more times.

GRADE: 6/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's fan video of the Gaslight Anthem covering "Soul To Squeeze" scatting part and all, at a 2024 Los Angeles show:

(The Gaslight Anthem's highest-charting Modern Rock single, 2012's "45," peaked at #11.)

THE NUMBER TWOS: Björk's first solo single "Human Behaviour," a hypnotic brew of madly ping-ponging drums and ecstatic wails, peaked at #2 behind "Soul To Squeeze." You'd better be ready to get confused because it's a 10.