"Are you more of a rock band now than funk?” I asked Anthony Kiedis as we sat having lunch by the pool at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Los Angeles. He looked at me askance. “We see ourselves as this ...

There's a famous Nick Cave quote that gets passed around whenever anyone wants to dismiss the music of a certain long-running Los Angeles funk-metal act: "I'm forever near a stereo saying, 'What the ...