“Taste The Pain” by Red Hot Chili Peppers

"Taste the Pain" came off Red Hot Chili Peppers' 1989 album Mother's Milk as its third and last single, and it marks a changing of the guard: it was the first song John Frusciante ever recorded with the band. Chad Smith had already joined on drums by then, but the sticks on this one belong to Philip "Fish" Fisher of Fishbone, which only adds to its loose, slippery feel.

This is the Peppers at their moodiest, a slow-burning funk rock grind rather than a sprint. Flea handles the bass and steps out for a trumpet solo, David Coleman's cello darkens the corners, and Anthony Kiedis sounds more wounded than usual. There's a sly trick up front, too: run the opening backwards and you hear Kiedis singing the chorus. Michael Beinhorn produced, Dave Jerden mixed, and the writing credit is shared by Flea, Frusciante, Kiedis and D.H. Peligro.

A slightly longer take turned up first on the soundtrack to Say Anything..., a film that starred Kiedis's girlfriend of the time, Ione Skye. The video, directed by Tom Stern and Alex Winter, puts the band in an art room while painters work on a mural. In Britain the single climbed to number 29, the highest the band had reached there up to then, and it came backed with two new B-sides, including "Show Me Your Soul", later heard in Pretty Woman.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.