AK-ST
Scar Tissue, by Anthony Kiedis – A great little book, written by the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, about his insane life. You can get all of the details on the man’s deeds on the Wikipedia page (Grammys, multi-platinum record sales, Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction, heroin addiction), but this is the first person singular view. Kiedis starts it off with the typical underdog autobiography thing where he recounts in the first pages some messed up incident from his mid-twenties that is supposed to foreshadow/reveal something of his true character/convince the reader to buy the book by putting some action up front (drugs, Mexicans, lost personal items, dangerous situations, poverty, late for a gig), before jumping into his childhood (Keith Richards did the same thing).
You get the strange upbringing with divorced parents – mom in Grand Rapids, Michigan, wayward dad in Hollywood – and the contradictions (thriving on the edge, stoned on drugs, living on his own, yet pulling in straight As in high school). There are the various burnouts – drugs, car crash, diving off a five storey building and missing the pool – and recoveries, and the strange brushes with celebrity (Keith Moon used to sit at his dad’s table when he was a club-goer and Anthony was a pre-teen, Keidis had a brief scene with Sylvester Stallone in F.I.S.T., etc). Kiedis goes over the strange relationship he has with his hard-partying over-compensating dad, with Grand Rapids, Michigan, with Hollywood, with his California high school, with his crazy musician friends, with his dissolution and homelessness and drug use, and with his many girls. Eventually, he’s in a band with these musicians who are also in other bands (Flea played in Fear), and he’s having wild and crazy sex with nutty little California chicks and… Nina Hagen! Wow!!!
He also writes a lot about the crazy dances he invented, and the strange fashions he was into.
I decided to cut all of my hair really short except for the back, which was long, down to my shoulders. I wasn’t mimicking hockey players or people from Canada, it was just my idea of a punk-rock haircut. It was probably inspired by David Bowie in his Pinups era, but it wasn’t flaming red, and I didn’t have the standing-up thing in the front, I had bangs. To people at UCLA, it was abominable. Even my friend were freaked out by it. But Mike (Flea) approved. He always said that one of my greatest accomplishments was that I had invented the mullet.
After a while, Anthony’s band starts to take off, and so he’s suddenly not interested in anonymous sex any more, he’s off drugs; he’s doing other things instead, like fighting with band members, putting out one hit song after another, playing with the Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Peal Jam, headlining Lollapalooza and opening for the Rolling Stones (not fun, apparently). And then there’s the endless cycle of relapse, rehabilitation and recovery, with a fair bit of intervention in between (as well as the heroin addiction of other bandmates, friends and girlfriends).
Kiedis composes long passages are about drugs, some of them really inspired, as he tries to make sense of his massive problem:
Once you’ve seen a solution to the disease that’s tearing you apart, relapsing is never fun. You know there’s an alternative to the way you’re living and that you’re oging against something you’ve been given for free by the universe, this key to the kingdom. Drug addiction is a progressive disease, so every time you go out, it gets a little uglier than it was before; it’s not like you go back to the early days of using, when there was less of a price to pay. It isn’t fun any more, but it’s still desperately exciting. Once you put that first drug or drink in your body, you don’t have to worry about the girlfriend or the career or the family or the bills. All those mundane aspects of life disapper. Now you have one job, and that’s to keep chucking the coal in the engine, because you don’t want this train to stop. If it stops, then you’re going to have to feel all that other shit.
That chase is always exciting. There are cops and bad guys and freaks and hookers. You’re diving into a big insidious video game, but again, you’re being tricked into thinking that you’re doing something cool, since the price is always bigger than the payoff. You immediately give up your love and you light and your beauty, and you become a dark black hole in the universe, sucking up bad energy and not walking around putting a smile on someone’s face or helping someone out or teaching someone something that’s going to help his or her life. You’re not cresting the ripple of love; you’re creating the vacuum of shit. I want to describe both sides of how I felt, but it’s important to know that in the end all the romantic glorification of dope fiendery amounts to nothing but a hole of shit. It has to appear enticing, because that’s why God or the universe, creative intelligence or whatever you want to call it, put that energy here. It’s a learning tool, and you can either kill yourself with it or you can turn yourself into a free person with it. I don’t think drug addiction is inherently useless, but it’s a rough row to hoe.
While the first half of the book is about his parents’ backgrounds and troubled marriage, coming of age, discovering music and living a nutty existence, the second half of the book is much more sober as it gets into his girlfriends, band deaths and other crises, and his many relapses and interventions and therapies and rehabilitations. It also talks about his various adventures traveling around Asia (where he caught “a rare tropical disease called dengue fever” – which is actually not so rare, unfortunately) and Australia and New Zealand. There’s also some stuff about buying houses in New Zealand (?!?!). Finally, it becomes about swapping guitarists and making tea, love and redemption, and occasionally about yet another physical setback (broken hands, feet, spines). Wow – what a nutty, crazy, inspiring life Kiedis has led.
Finally, it’s worth noting the four generous sections of personal photos of him, his parents (including his mom as a cute little five-year-old), and his girlfriends. You get to see a lot of skin, both from a pre- and post-tattoo Kiedis (who is known to perform nude) and his girlfriends Jennifer, Claire, Carmen, Jiame, Ione (Skye), as well. There are also pictures of this beautiful kid that Kiedis was, and pictures of his sick hippy/budding actor father as a young dad with his best pal. Funny comments on the young performer’s early fashion sense too (hats, gloves, kneepads, buttons, skateboards, . There’s also a strip of four pictures of Kiedis smoking his first joint in his kitchen, aged 12 (joint supplied and lit up by dad, of course).