Greatest Hits Red Hot Chili Peppers [portable] -

How do you condense twenty years of chaos into seventy minutes?

The label wanted the obvious ones: Give It Away , Under the Bridge , Suck My Kiss . The MTV bones. But Anthony had a different knot in his stomach. He was forty-one. He had buried Hillel Slovak. He had fired Jack Irons. He had watched John quit, descend into heroin’s abyss, nearly die, and then resurrect himself like a ghost who remembered how to play guitar.

But the band knew the truth. The greatest hit was survival. Every other track was just the soundtrack.

“You think we’ll still be doing this at fifty?” he asked.

They laughed. It was true. It was always true. And they played on.

The compilation came out in November. Silver cover. A red asterisk for a logo. It debuted at number one in the UK, number three in the US. Critics called it “definitive.” Fans argued online about what was missing ( “Where’s ‘My Lovely Man’?” ).