Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea remembers exactly what he was doing on the evening of June 27, 1988. Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell had called over to his home in Los Angeles to play him his band’s new album, Nothing’s Shocking, and then he and his wife Loesha went to a friend’s house to watch the Mike Tyson versus Michael Spinks world heavyweight boxing title fight on TV. When the couple got back home, Flea saw “39 messages” on their phone’s answering machine, with friend after friend asking him to call them back. When he made the first call, he learned that his bandmate Hillel Slovak was dead.
“It was devastating,” Flea recalled to MOJO magazine. “Just unbelievable. When it happened I was so shocked I just fell on the floor, gasping for air.”
Slovak had died at home in Los Angeles on June 25 as the result of an accidental heroin overdose. A former school mate of Flea and Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kieidis, and a co-founding member of the Californian punk-funk band, the Israeli guitarist was 26 years old.
Slovak’s bandmates knew that he had been using heroin: he and Anthony Kiedis had shot up together numerous times in the past. But on the quartet’s first European tour in the spring of 1988, the pair had an open and frank conversation about their drug use, and promised that they would make the effort to get clean.
“A lot of what we talked about was drugs and heroin,” Anthony Kiedis recalled, “and where we were with our addiction and what we wanted to do about it… We agreed that the band was going really well, and we vowed to make a concerted effort to stop the drugging.”
Latest Videos From Louder
When he heard the news of his friend’s passing, Kiedis went into his bathroom, and immediately shot up.
“Of course he was shooting up,” his then girlfriend, actress Ione Skye recalled in her 2025 memoir Say Everything. “He’d just lost his best friend. Who wouldn’t numb that blow if they could?”
Drummer Jack Irons was similarly devastated, and immediately quit the band. But Kiedis and Flea decided to keep going, to keep their friend’s dream alive. The recruitment of 18-year-old guitarist John Frusicante, a huge Hillel Slovak fan, helped pull them out of the abyss. In the spring of 1989, the new-look band, completed by drummer Chad Smith, began work upon their fourth studio album, Mother’s Milk. One of the first songs that their new guitarist presented to the band would become a tribute to Slovak.
“John was a prodigy- there’s really no other way to call it,” producer Michael Beinhorn recalled during a Reddit AMA. “It was amazing working with him- he was fun, childish to a fault, but musical and technically capable beyond the rest of the band. He pushed them all to excel just by being there. It was a revelation working with him and I’m not surprised at all to have watched him become wildly successful and even greater. He could be really irritating at times and a couple of his shenanigans almost got us kicked out of the studio, but everything worked out in the end.”
Frusciante and Kiedis worked closely together on their tribute to Slovak, Knock Me Down, written as a duet, and described by Kiedis as as “love letter” to his friend.
“It was a major departure from the RHCP sound up till that point,” recalled Michael Beinhorn. “John sang the song (or rather, his voice was louder in the mix) because the song was melodic and Anthony was / is tone-deaf (ie- he can’t hear pitch). At any rate, John essentially wrote the song, including the melody, so it wasn’t entirely inappropriate for him to song it… plus he somewhat idolized Hillel.”
Knock Me Down was released as the second single from Mother’s Milk in August 1989. The song reached number six on the Billboard Modern Rock chart, and would help push its parent album to one million US sales. Its success, however, would always be bitter-sweet, and the Chili Peppers retired the song from their live setlists before the close of the Mother’s Milk tour.
“Nothing compares to the low of losing Hillel Slovak,” Anthony Kiedis once said. “We were young men, living hard and out of control, and we lost the heart and soul, the architect, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers far too early.
“He was just getting ready to keep changing the world with his music. He left us with something: a band, love, the desire to go on – and in everything we do, he’s always with us.”
