Chili Peppers' Kiedis Says Talking Heads Made Him Want Sex With Librarians

03/19/2002 6:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Mark Armstrong

(3/19/02, 6 p.m. ET) -- Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis recalls the first time he ever heard the Talking Heads, likening the moment to how some might remember where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated or when man first walked on the moon. It was in a friend's living room in 1977, when Kiedis was 15 years old. The song was "Psycho Killer."

Kiedis shared his thoughts as part of the Talking Heads' induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in New York Monday (March 18). He says that listening to the landmark band made him feel in ways he never had before. "Some very strange things happened to me when I heard the Talking Heads. For one thing, I felt smart. I'm serious. I listened to Talking Heads and it made me feel smart, and that was a pretty good feeling," he said. "You know, I'd felt a lot of things for music before, but I'd never felt, you know, particularly smart, and I liked that. The Talking Heads also made me want to dance like a maniac, which I love because that also changed my life, you know? There is nothing more meaningful to me than, like, music and dancing. It's as important to me as my mother and my best friends."

Kiedis added that the Heads' music also had this impact on him. "Another thing that happened to me when I started listening to the Talking Heads is I wanted to have sex with a lot of librarians, and other music hadn't made me feel that way either," he continued. "So, I'm definitely making a bond with the Talking Heads at this point."

The Chili Peppers' singer's praise for the group was nearly unbounded. "As a band, they did things as beautiful and meaningful as any Nobel scientist or a saint or any form of God that we believe in," Kiedis said.

Members of Talking Heads puts aside years of legal battles to reunite for the Hall Of Fame occasion, performing three of their best-known songs: "Psycho Killer," "Burning Down The House," and "Life During Wartime."

-- Neal Weiss, Los Angeles and Bruce Simon, New York

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