Certainly, the eventual success of the Chili Peppers allowed him to develop the kind of cocaine and heroin habits that killed the band's first guitarist, Hillel Slovak, exhaust the patience of an array of long-suffering girlfriends and write some of the worst lyrics ever written, solemnly laid out here like poetry. What pushed Kiedis into his involvement with one of the modern world's most successful rock groups is a little unclear: the importance or otherwise of music to his story remains largely undescribed.

Somewhere within such lines as: 'The whole time we were fucking, she was telling me this was her dream come true', there lurks a Freudian ogre. Most telling is his need to describe every last sexual conquest, surely so as to attain parity with Kiedis Senior.

At school, Kiedis would turn up to class having been kept up all night by his father's partying the claim that he 'started befriending all of the loneliest and most unwanted kids' speaks volumes about the consequences. Scar Tissue, ghosted by the sometime Bob Dylan associate Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, betrays many things - hubris, selfishness, the large-scale absence of any sense of humour - but it unendingly suggests irreparable damage. Partly raised by a father who dealt drugs, Kiedis spent his adolescence immersed in LA's absurd whirl: introduced to alcohol, pharmaceutical downers and nights on the Strip at 13, befriended by Keith Moon soon after, and inducted into manhood by being allowed to have sex with his dad's girlfriend.Īnd, of course, it all screwed him up horrifically. It is this aspect of Los Angeles that spawned Anthony Kiedis, singer and lyricist with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band who have long made much of their lifelong association with the city (witness their 1999 album, Californication).

Led Zeppelin minted the imperious boorishness of the hard- rock lifestyle on Sunset Strip John Lennon saw out his mid-Seventies lost weekend not far away scores of musicians, from Ozzy Osbourne to Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan, have marked the low point of their careers by cloistering themselves in west Hollywood hotels and taking as many drugs as they could get their hands on. If the music's ethos has a hub, however, it lies in Los Angeles, that sun-kissed expanse where rock's emphasis on life in the moment and the equation of glamour with excess are made flesh. America's rock'n'roll Hall of Fame was built in the slightly misplaced surroundings of Cleveland, Ohio, but rock's true birthplace probably lies somewhere near Memphis, Tennessee and some of its most celebrated developments have taken root in Seattle and New York.

Anthony kiedis book review