DENVER — For 20 or 30 minutes before Red Hot Chili Peppers started the sold-out opening show of their U.S. tour, Empower Field at Mile High felt a bit scary. The sun went down, a storm set in and many of the 50,000 drenched fans took refuge in covered concourses, trying to stay dry yet still see the stage, causing claustrophobic bottlenecks. Vendors hawking tallboys were everywhere, but in many parts of the stadium, security was eerily absent.
Then the lights went down and bassist Flea appeared on a video screen, wearing a purple muscle shirt, plus tall, purple socks and a long skirt, plucking a white bass, huddling at center stage with drummer Chad Smith and recently returned guitarist John Frusciante for an opening jam. Fans (some of whom apparently paid as much as $3,778.65 for two tickets) returned to their seats and the walkways cleared. After the Los Angeles funk-rock band opened with classics “Can’t Stop,” “Dani California” and “Scar Tissue” and three or four songs from their latest, Billboard 200 albums-chart-topping LP Unlimited Love, the rain stopped and the Peppers’ enthusiasm for being together spread to the crowd.
Befitting a stadium concert, the band draped the stage with psychedelic videos and special effects, at one point resembling a Day-Glo lava lamp, but the energy was with Flea, Smith and Frusciante. They formed a tight triangle, frontman Anthony Kiedis bopping in and out, and the power of new tracks (“Black Summer” was most effective) and old came from this core. The band is in a prolific phase: Before playing “Whatchu Thinkin’,” Kiedis and Flea announced its second double-album of new material this year, Return of the Dream Canteen, due Oct. 14.
Frusciante — who first joined the Chili Peppers in 1988, and has been in and out before returning to play on Unlimited Love and his first shows with the band in 15 years — was especially sharp, and seemed to energize Flea, Smith and Kiedis. His high and screechy-yet-melodic curly riffs are built into the band’s sound, whether briefly punctuating “Scar Tissue” or closing “Charlie” with a long jam. Unlike Flea and Kiedis, who were in constant motion, stalking, running, leaping and making aerobic gestures, Frusciante frequently jammed in place.
The band played its biggest hits, of course: “Give It Away,” as explosive as always, closed the set; the smash 1991 ballad “Under the Bridge” (which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992, their biggest hit on the chart) and 2002’s “By the Way” were the encores. But the best moments were the warmest: Under his backwards baseball cap, Smith was caught beaming onscreen when Kiedis told him, after “Scar Tissue,” “Very, very nicely done” and praised him as a “beautiful man.” He flashed that smile again, towards the end, after Flea and Frusciante plucked their guitars, facing each other in a slow dance, with Smith in the rear.
On their first all-stadium tour ever (called the 2022 Global Stadium Tour), the Chili Peppers are an unlikely survivor of the pop-and-grunge ’90s, having started the prior decade as a chaotic punk party band, known for slap-bass thrashers like 1989’s “Nobody Weird Like Me.” Flea, 59, introduced a hardcore version of that one on Saturday by misdirecting the band to “take it down real slow”; he added, before executing numerous Pete Townshend-style leaps, “I’m f–king old. I’ve got gray hair under this dyed shit.”
Flea was so energetic that Kiedis, the band’s ripped, bare-chested frontman, wearing shorts with a bright-red lightning bolt on the crotch, had to exert himself to keep pace. He sang well, especially on softer hits like 1993’s “Soul to Squeeze” and signature love song “Under the Bridge,” the band’s heartbroken tribute to their Los Angeles hometown. But Flea’s L.A. love was even more blatant, as he walked back onstage for the encore on his hands, skirt dropping over his head, displaying his briefs, then flipping upright to rock a purple-and-gold Lakers bass.
Denver was still bright and sunny when Thundercat (the L.A. funk-and-jazz bassist who brought a crack band for underrated streaming hits like “Funny Thing”) and Haim (the heralded San Fernando, Calif., sister trio who wore black leather pants and bikini tops while playing delightfully heavy rock ‘n’ roll versions of “The Wire,” “The Steps” and “Want You Back”) opened the show. Then it stormed for the first time in weeks.
