fIREHOSE

In high school a bunch of my skater friends were really into Red Hot Chili Peppers.  This was about when Mothers Milk came out, but a lot of the guys had Uplift Mofo Party Plan in heavy rotation in their stereos, too.  I became particularly attached to Mothers Milk for a while.  It had a kind of punk/rap/funk thing going.  The first song on the album, "Good Time Boys" has a line in it that goes "...tell you 'bout the band called fIREHOSE!"

I figured that any band that RHCP sang about was probably good, and probably a lot like them.  While it's true that fIREHOSE is indeed good, they are not actually much like Red Hot Chili Peppers.  Since this was in the dark ages before the internet could tell me what a band sounded like before I bought the album, I just saved up my money and bought the fIREHOSE album fROMOHIO.
On cassette.

At first I was really disappointed.  But, I'd spent money on it, and I was always looking for something that could be my kind of music, differentiated from my brother and my cousin, who had some solid musical circles they were exploring.  My brother was particularly into Sonic Youth at this time, and my cousin was deeply into the Doors.  So I kept giving fIREHOSE a shot, and they started to grow on me.  My favorite song on the album ended up being two songs in a row - "What Get's Heard," a kind of funky spoken-word thing followed by "'Nuf that shit, George," a 2+ minute drum solo.

Going back, I think fIREHOSE has more appeal to me now than RHCP does.