Twenty thousand seats is a long way for a performance to travel. The back of the Schottenstein Center sits closer to the parking lot than the stage, and most bands lean on spectacle to close the distance — IMAG screens, runways into the crowd, fireworks on the downbeats. The Red Hot Chili Peppers had the screens and used them sparingly. What they brought to close the gap was a bassist.
Flea came out in a sleeveless patchwork vest and matching pieced pants — hot pink, teal, and striped green panels stitched into something closer to a quilt than a costume. The cut of the vest framed a portrait tattoo of Jimi Hendrix on his upper right arm, visible from the pit and implied from the seats. His hair carried faint leopard spots, small and deliberate. Teal Adidas sneakers with red laces finished the outfit, and those shoes did real work. Over the course of "Snow ((Hey Oh))," twosongs in, he left the ground often enough that a single photographer in the pit — working one camera, one lens — came away with five separate jumps clean in the frame, knees tucked into his chest, bass held at a different angle in each one. Five leaps, five decisions to be ready, five shutter clicks that caught him suspended before his own weight could catch up. He was legible from the rafters, which is the job when the room is this size, and he made the job look like a choice.
That physicality would be a novelty act if the playing underneath it were ordinary. It was the opposite. Flea's runs on "Suck My Kiss" carried both muscle and slack, shaping the pocket in real time, pushing Chad Smith forward on some phrases and settling behind him on others. "Dark Necessities" turned on his melodic line, which carried the song's weight while Anthony Kiedis worked the hook above it. Kiedis arrived in a red tee, dark shorts, a black ball cap, and knee-high patterned socks covered in daisies, peace-sign hands, and '60s flower-power motifs. He let the songs and the socks do the costuming.
That physicality would be a novelty act if the playing underneath it were ordinary. It was the opposite. Flea's runs on "Suck My Kiss" carried both muscle and slack, shaping the pocket in real time, pushing Chad Smith forward on some phrases and settling behind him on others. "Dark Necessities" turned on his melodic line, which carried the song's weight while Anthony Kiedis worked the hook above it. Kiedis arrived in a red tee, dark shorts, a black ball cap, and knee-high patterned socks covered in daisies, peace-sign hands, and '60s flower-power motifs. He let the songs and the socks do the costuming.
Then there was Smith's kit. The kick drum, front and center, carried the official Michigan block-M logo. Smith himself was in a scarlet sleeveless shirt and a scarlet backwards cap — the color of the Ohio State Buckeyes, in the arena the Buckeyes play in, in one of the two cities where the Ohio State–Michigan rivalry hits hardest. Smith was raised in the Detroit area and is a lifelong Michigan fan, which makes every Columbus tour stop a kind of home-field provocation for him. When he closed the night with a solo drum coda of "Michigan Fight Song" — "The Victors," track 19 on the setlist — it was the punchline to a bit he had been telegraphing all evening: wear their color, play their arena, beat their rival's fight song out of a drum that bears their rival's logo. The crowd's groan was the warm kind, the groan you save for an in-law you actually like, and it was the loudest sign of the night that the band was playing to Columbus rather than at it.
Josh Klinghoffer deserves his own paragraph, because he earned it. Stepping into a guitar chair previously held by a generational player is a real job, and Klinghoffer spent the night playing his own game. One frame of him catches his hair mid-flight, a half-smile on his face, bathed in deep purple wash, working the fretboard of a beat-to-hell Stratocaster whose finish had been chewed down to bare wood around the pickups — a guitar that had clearly lived a life. On "Otherside" he handled the familiar figures with a light touch that let the room sing the chorus back louder than the PA. His solos across the night were conversational — he answered Flea's phrases, set up Smith's fills, and stepped forward when the arrangement asked him to. The cover of Looking Glass's "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)," mid-set, landed because of his touch on the verses, a soft-shoe chord voicing that gave Kiedis room to croon the thing straight. Then came the encore. The band left him alone on stage to open it with "Heaven" — a Talking Heads cover, played solo, and a live debut at that. Handing a guitarist the opening slot of the encore, unaccompanied, on a song the band has never performed before, is a vote of confidence that travels. He cashed it.
The lighting design worked in long washes and slow color shifts, which gave the stage the quality of weather. "Goodbye Angels" sat second in the encore and pulled the band into a deep wash that made the four players look like silhouettes of themselves. The Schottenstein Center is a college basketball arena; across nineteen items on the setlist, it became a club with bad sightlines, which is the highest compliment an arena show can earn.
Nineteen tracks, two covers, one meticulously staged rivalry joke, and a bassist who treated every measure like it was being photographed.
