How long do Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts last?

The Red Hot Chili Peppers were a little-known L.A. band in spring 1985 when they encamped in Detroit for a couple of months, striving to plug into the spirit of George Clinton. "Freaky Styley,” rehearsed in Ferndale and recorded with the iconic funk maestro at Detroit’s United Sound, became the group’s second album, largely overlooked at the time.

Sunday night, nearly four decades later, the group played the biggest Motor City date of its career, taking over Comerica Park for the band's first-ever stadium concert in the city. 

About 34,000 piled into the Tigers’ ballpark for the nearly two-hour show, which brought vocalist Anthony Kiedis, bassist Flea, drummer Chad Smith and guitarist John Frusciante to town for the band’s first stop here in five years.

RHCP isn’t the only rock act with Funkadelic coursing through its veins, but it’s certainly the only one to have achieved this level of commercial success. Several years after those dense funk jams of ’85, the group found a sweet spot that mingled its punk irreverence and testosterone-pumped energy with radio-friendly charms. An alt-rock powerhouse was crowned.

Sunday brought the spiky but polished Chili Peppers machine that’s been humming along since the '90s, though the band seems reinvigorated in its role as an elder rock statesman, even reinvested in the cause.

This summer’s stadium tour, coming on the heels of the Rick Rubin-produced “Unlimited Love,” is the first of the band’s career. But as veterans of the festival circuit, the Chili Peppers are no strangers to supersize concert settings, and at Comerica Park, the band comfortably worked the stage with an appropriate sense of scale.

Flea, bare-chested and sporting multicolored hair, was all energy all night — an ageless, bass-slapping whirling dervish, up to the encore that had him walking the length of the stage on his hands. The mustachioed Kiedis was animated up front, with Smith reliably muscular at his drumkit. Frusciante, back in the fold for his third stint with the band, was deft and fluid on guitar, his chunky riffs giving way to molten leads.

The four guys in RHCP may be headed into their sexagenarian years (Smith hit the big 60 last fall), but Sunday’s audience was impressively multigenerational, a solid mix of aging Gen Xers and hyped-up twentysomethings.

The Chili Peppers were part of a busy concert night in metro Detroit that included Kendrick Lamar at nearby Little Caesars Arena, Jason Aldean at Pine Knob, the Beach Boys at Meadow Brook and O.A.R. at Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre. It was also the summer show's fifth show at Comerica Park. 

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For the Grand Rapids-born Kiedis and Bloomfield Hills-raised Smith, a show like this is a homecoming event of sorts, if not always at this level — such as an ancient gig at Detroit’s Latin Quarter club, recounted Sunday by Kiedis. 

Flea had chimed in early: “Thank you, Michigan! Thank you for Chad and Anthony.”

The Comerica Park set danced around the group’s catalog: requisite hits (“Under the Bridge,” “Dani California”), melodic material from the band's turn-of-the-2000s period (“Universally Speaking,” “Californication”), and frenetic numbers from the early years (“Nobody Weird Like Me” and “Give it Away,” which closed the regular set). Improvised jams and extended instrumental breakdowns got liberally tossed in.

“Don’t Forget Me” was a show highlight, and “Tell Me Baby” got a random dedication from Flea to late Tigers manager Sparky Anderson.

As for the new songs, some worked well (the jagged funk of “Aquatic Mouth Dance,” a textured “Black Summer”), others less so (“These Are the Ways,” the Frusciante-sung “The Heavy Wing,” a shame given it’s a high point of the recent album).

The Strokes preceded the Chili Peppers with a galloping, career-spanning set, while L.A.’s Thundercat, a six-string bass virtuoso, dazzled with his delightfully weird and adventurous take on R&B, jazz and funk.

Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or .

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