This was an
Amazon.com "Showcase
Review" for a while— until better reviews came along. As
of the day the Red Hot Chili Peppers were inducted into the Rock and
Roll of Fame, 22 of 32 voters found my
review useful:
This thick book is
the memoirs of a relatively young (early 40s) and not particularly
mature man--- who just happens to be Anthony Kiedis, the singer
for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There's lots and lots of sex and
drugs here, along with some rock and roll. He structures it as the
traditional tale of the slow rise to stardom, followed by a few
years of excess with redemption and sobriety at the end of the
road. The joke is, however, that the rise to fame was pretty quick
(though, thanks to drug use and bad recording contracts, fortune
arrived long after fame did)--- and he has lost and found sobriety
many times during a career which is now well into its third
decade.
His writing (in collaboration with a ghostwriter
named Larry Sloman) is engaging, his sense of humor is sharp. He
names names and tells scandalous stories on everyone from Sonny &
Cher to Nirvana to the Spice Girls--- especially on himself and
his bandmates. I am not sure if all these stories actually
happened, but even the lies have the ring of truth. This is not a
masterpiece, but it's worth looking at. To quote one of the band's
album titles, this book is full of blood,
sugar, sex and magic.
I
remember when the Anthony Keidis and Flea of the Red Hot Chili
Peppers were just a couple of kids with a little talent and big
dreams. I first saw them in 1983 (give or take a year) at one of
their first gigs, at a little joint on Sunset Boulevard (or possibly
Hollywood Boulevard), somewhere on the West Side of Los Angeles, by
the name of "Club Lingerie."
Club
Lingerie's name was misleading: it was just a smallish space with a
bar on side of the room and a stage on another: there was no lingerie
on display. I went there that night to see one of my old favorites
from my my misspent youth in New York City: James
Chance, aka James White. He showed up without a band, so the Red
Hots and a few other random musicians had to fill in for the
Contortions or the Whites (as the case may have been.) The show was
sloppy but awesome.
I
was back in New Hampshire as soon when the Red Hot Chili Peppers
eponymous
debut
album appeared at a little record store on Main
Street in Durham, NH called the Listening Post (a predecessor to
the current Durham
Book Exchange.) I didn't find the LP in the racks at the
Listening Post until the spring of 1985, eight months or so
after it was officially released. I think I paid $3.97 for it. I was
massively depressed at the time, and I hated it. I gave their second
album Freakey
Styleya
try only because George
Clinton of P-Funk fame produced it, and I loved that one. The
first album sounds just fine to me now, although Kiedis says in his
book that he was disappointed by it.
Be
that as it may, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have been inducted into an
institution which didn't even exist in 1983: the Rock and Rock Hall
of Fame. Congratulations!
album appeared at a little record store on 
