The chord showed up seven months after Frusciante came back
The word had been sitting with Anthony Kiedis since late 1992, after John Frusciante left the band. He told Q in October 1999 that the pun, California plus fornication, first occurred to him then, and that he turned it into a lyric years later on a boat in the Andaman Sea, a satire of a place at “the edge of the world and all of western civilization.” When Frusciante agreed to come back, Californication was the first song they tried to write together. It was not finished. Frusciante said he did not have the skill yet to find the chord, and that it arrived only just before the studio.
The album was recorded from December 1998 to March 1999 at Cello Studios in Los Angeles, with Rick Rubin producing again after a brief argument about whether to change producers. The title track runs 5:21. Frusciante’s intro is a clean, fingered figure, quiet enough that the chorus feels like a door opening. Kiedis told Guitar World he liked the solo in the middle because it used “the perfect amount of notes to tell a story.” The lyric names the merchandise of the place: a surgeon paid to break the spell of aging, celebrity skin, a Hollywood basement where space is built, Kurt Cobain, Alderaan, David Bowie’s Station to Station. Flea, in Rock Sound that summer, put it more bluntly: Hollywood taking people’s conscience and keeping other cultures from growing their own.
Warner Bros. released the album on 8 June 1999. Scar Tissue was the first single. Californication waited until June 2000. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, through Bob Industries, made the video as a fake open-world game: each member as an avatar in San Francisco and Los Angeles, an earthquake at the end, then the live band. It went out on 5 June 2000. On 5 December 2022 the official upload passed a billion views, the band’s most watched clip.
I didn’t have the skill to figure out what chord God wanted until right before we went in the studio.
(John Frusciante, Q, October 1999)
The single reached number one on Billboard’s Alternative and Mainstream Rock charts. The Hot 100 stopped at number 69. Britain took it to number 16, New Zealand to 8, the Dutch Top 40 to 9, Iceland to 1. A radio edit ran 3:26. The master of the album, by Vlado Meller, is the one engineers still cite when they talk about the loudness war: the quiet guitar at the start makes the clipped chorus easier to hear. The song itself does not need that argument. The arpeggio is the part people play first.
Kiedis told Rolling Stone the track was about California and Hollywood having a profound effect on the planet, “the good and the bad of that,” a magical place that is also “the Western Hemisphere’s last stop.” That is the angle, not a sex song with a winking title. Frusciante was back, still thin, playing fewer notes than the 1991 solos and making them count. The chord he had waited seven months to find is the one the song stands on.
