Uplift Mofo Party Plan
RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
(Capitol)

Before Anthony Kiedis got the notion he could sing, and the public actually bought it, before the band ever sniffed a ballad, RHCP was a band of rowdy California free spirits who deftly merged black and white music into a tightly wound whirl of funk, punk, metal and hip-hop. Mofo Party Plan finds the band maturing while not straying from its chaotic, balls-out approach. The band's success during this phase was built on tight, genuinely funky rhythm work and loads and loads of 'tude (something Kiedis used to obscure his limited skills as an MC). The songs range from the medium-tempo thump of "Funky Crime" to the these-mofos-is-crazy mayhem of "Skinny Sweaty Man."

This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...