Overview
What Is This? is the name adopted by a Los Angeles rock group that emerged from the city's late 1970s punk and alternative scene. The group began as a friendship-based project among high school classmates and became notable less for mainstream commercial success than for its personnel: several members were also founders or early players in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The band is often discussed today for its role in the web of relationships that shaped parts of the L.A. underground rock community.
Formation and early years
The band traces its roots to a pair of friends who met at Fairfax High School and played together in an early incarnation called Anthym. Guitarist Hillel Slovak and drummer Jack Irons were the nucleus of the group. Bassist Flea joined the ensemble briefly before stepping away for college. In the vibrant, cross-pollinating environment of late-1970s Los Angeles, local players often sat in with one another and formed short-lived projects; it was during one such informal performance that Flea and schoolmate Anthony Kiedis invited Slovak and Irons to play in a side project that evolved into the Red Hot Chili Peppers (RHCP).
Overlap with the Red Hot Chili Peppers
For a time the same core musicians played in both bands. Slovak and Irons split their efforts between What Is This? and RHCP, and the two groups influenced one another in style and personnel choices. After RHCP recorded and released their first album, Slovak and Irons chose to concentrate on What Is This? for a period rather than remain full-time members of the newer, more experimental ensemble. This period of shifting commitments illustrates how fluid band boundaries were in the scene where friendships and creative exploration often mattered more than fixed lineups.
Later evolution and related projects
Lineup changes continued, and at one stage songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Natasha Shneider became associated with the group. Members from this orbit later joined or formed other projects: Natasha Shneider and collaborator Alain Johannes created the band Eleven, which included contributions from musicians who had been part of the What Is This?/RHCP milieu. Drummer Jack Irons subsequently went on to play with several prominent acts, and Hillel Slovak is remembered as an influential guitarist in the early RHCP story.
Musical style and significance
What Is This? drew on a mixture of punk energy, rock guitar work, and R&B-tinged rhythms that were characteristic of parts of the L.A. scene at the time. While the band did not become a household name, its importance is amplified by its members' later achievements and by the band's role as a creative meeting point for several musicians who shaped alternative rock in the 1980s and beyond.
Members and notable facts
- Founding members: Hillel Slovak (guitar) and Jack Irons (drums).
- Early bassist: Flea, who later co-founded the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
- Associations: the group was active in the California underground scene and intersected with multiple projects and musicians.
Because the band exists primarily in histories of the L.A. scene and in connection with better-known acts, accounts tend to emphasize its personnel and network rather than a large recorded output. For further context about the scene and the musicians who passed through it, see sources that document late-1970s Los Angeles music and the early careers of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eleven. Formation details and personal recollections are available in interviews and retrospective pieces that explore how friendships at Fairfax High and the downtown club circuit led to multiple influential collaborations.
Related reading and archival references: Anthony Kiedis interviews and profiles, historical overviews of the band and its contemporaries, and specific artist pages for Jack Irons and Flea provide more detail on how these musicians moved between projects during the formative years of L.A.'s alternative rock scene.