Contrary to other fellow Gen-Xers, my path with Red Hot Chili Peppers didn’t start with Higher Ground, Give it away, or Under the bridge. It was the melancholic Soul To Squeeze, from the box office bomb Coneheads, what made me a fan.

I usually ran into their “What hits?” compilation at the listening stations at Mix Up, but never got convinced to actually buy it. Blood Sugar Sex Magick was too expensive, and I don’t believe my dad would’ve buy me that one…or Mother’s Milk.

When I started my university degree in 1995, I was at a crossroads: I wanted something creative, but I also loved science. I somehow convinced myself I could do something artistic, and did one semester of Communication Studies, and halfway I was done with it. The syllabus at uni focused on marketing and the like, not what I wanted, which was writing and cinema. I couldn’t find a place in any other universities, so I switched to Telecomm by the end of 1995.

With that said, I had some fun during that sole semester. Read a lot on McLuhan, and the book on Joseph Campbell’s Hero Journey that I bought in my last year of high school did some tremendous carrying on essays. Alas, my creative side will always be a “what if” it seems.

One rainy afternoon at the cafeteria, I was writing some crappy short story when I overheard the people on the next booth. “Man, that sucks” said one dude “they’ve gone metal or BDSM or something”. The other dude agreed between mouthfuls of huarache de bisteck. I looked up and it was Red Hot Chili Peppers with Warped. The sound was off but the visuals stroke a chord.

Once I got back home, I sat on the sofa watching MTV latino, waiting for the song to come up. It was disturbing, sonically different to everything and I was hooked. I saved for that album and once the winter vacation came, I went to Tampico to VIPS, as their CD section sometimes had cheap import CDs. I found a copy of One Hot Minute and my first semester in Telecomm engineering was a marathon of both One Hot Minute and Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness.

One big mob has this eerie interval, both psychedelic and experimental, with Dave Navarro’s baby crying and moaning in the back. It’s a strange track but definitely my fave by them. In time, the band distanced themselves from the album, and I understand why: it’s a dark, gloomy affair full of hopelessness. It felt just right for me, as I faced a 5 year stretch of engineering and science instead of the creative side I wanted to cultivate.

I guess, in time, I managed to veer into creative, with a few self-published things and this Sloucher thing, I guess. Swings and roundabouts.

-Sam J. Valdés López