Anthony Kiedis is an LA rock star in excelsis. As the leader of a band whose best-known image depicts the four of them all but naked, with droopy socks clothing their genitals, he hardly needs labour the point. But long before he formed the Red Hot Chili Peppers with his highschool chum Michael “Flea” Balzary, Kiedis was, by his own account, living a life of fabulous or, if you prefer, appalling unreality.

The child of a broken home, he fled his mother’s sensible, strict household in Michigan at the age of 12 and moved to California to live with his excess-all-areas father. Dad was a drug dealer and womaniser, known locally as Spider, who supplied the 1970s Hollywood rock aristocracy with whatever they needed, which was mainly cocaine. He started Anthony on marijuana within days of his arrival, encouraging his son to take topless photos of his girlfriend while stoned. “So my entry into the world of pot smoking was as smooth as silk,” the author notes, with signature insouciance.

A year or so later Kiedis père supervised Anthony’s first coke injection and around that time arranged for him to lose his virginity with another of his many girlfriends. On their nights out, drinking and drugging until the early hours at trendy bars on Sunset Strip, Spider and son would dress identically in velvet jackets, tight T-shirts and platform-soled shoes. Booze and barbiturate cocktails were their regular tipple; lines of cocaine under the table kept them awake.

This egregious subversion of parental norms struck even Los Angeles’s most notorious party animal, Keith Moon of The Who, as a bit odd. “Moon would take me under his arm and say, ‘How you doing kid . . . Shouldn’t you be in school or something?’” In fact, the teenage Anthony had more important tasks to deal with, such as forming a human shield in front of his wasted father to prevent the biker gangs he had antagonised in the parking lot from beating him up.

“I wouldn’t have traded my lifestyle for anything,” Kiedis enthuses of his early adolescence. This doesn’t sound so peculiar when you learn that he was occasionally placed in the temporary care of Cher, who would let him sleep beside her — but no touching — in her Bel-Air mansion.

Compared with these hair-raising tales of underage debauchery, the story of Kiedis’s ascent to superstardom with the Chili Peppers is a bit tame. Apart from the death from an overdose of their Israeli guitarist in 1987, the band has enjoyed a fairly smooth career path. The cornerstone relationship between Kiedis and Flea has survived (“like Cain and Abel without the bloodshed”) and, despite the periodic stormings-out of replacement guitarist John Frusciante, Kiedis lauds his fellow band members as “individually a bridge to God for me”. Having slogged away on the album-tour-album treadmill for most of the 1980s, they hit the jackpot with their 1991 album, Blood Sugar Sex Magic. Ever since, the Chili Peppers have been feted as one of the most influential groups in the world, brokers of an engaging stylistic compromise between funk, metal and rap.

Kiedis, however, isn’t too interested in exaggerating the Chili Peppers’ claims to greatness. He prefers to dwell on his endless skirmishes with the demons that have stalked him ever since Spider introduced him to them back in the 1970s. By the end of this long book, you have lost count of the number of times Kiedis has been in rehab, and can’t quite believe, as he insists, that he has kicked all the habits, thanks to his dog Buster. Meanwhile, the list of girlfriends (all gorgeous, but none capable of satisfying him for longer, on average, than one album and a world tour) has become a blur.

The most vivid parts of the narrative recount the ghastly details of Kiedis’s junkie life, driving from his Hollywood mansion to the poorest parts of east LA, where the crack is strong, cheap and covered in saliva because the Mexican dealers carry the “rocks” in their mouths. The crazed idiocy of the crack high is well conveyed by an incident in which Kiedis took off all his clothes and called on a neighbour pretending, for no reason, to have mislaid a set of house keys.

Drug antics aside, Kiedis is a showbiz kid at heart. He loves hanging out with successful musicians, no matter which area of the spectrum of “cool” they inhabit. One minute he’s with Kurt and Courtney, the next he’s having interesting conversations with Spice Girl Mel C. Nothing that happens to him in Scar Tissue wounds him more deeply than the abrupt and unexplained withdrawal from his social life of Sinead O’Connor.

No matter how stoned he has been, Kiedis is keen to reassure us that he is a conscientious lyricist and that the Chili Peppers take pride in putting on a good show. Scar Tissue’s very LA message is: this guy may be a screw-up, but he’s a total professional.





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