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.
