Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
Greg turned around and walked off like a puppy dog with an ax in his hand. There was a big sliver that had been chopped out of my door, and you could see right into my place, so I got some cardboard and taped it up. Then I went back to sleep.
That wasn’t an atypical day at the Outpost, I’m sad to say. A lot of my days revolved around hanging out with Bob, doing drugs at night, waking up the next day with no money, and scraping together ninety-nine cents to go downstairs and get a slice of pizza.
Flea was no longer a participant in our insanity. While we were still living at La Leyenda, he had read about this D.C. band called Minor Threat, who were promulgating an anti-drug philosophy in a song called “Straight Edge.” Flea was so demoralized and depressed from all these drugs we had been doing that he tore their lyrics out of the magazine and shaved his head and tried to embrace this not-getting-high philosophy. It didn’t stick, but it did stop him from going further down. He leveled off and did a lot less drugs, whereas Bob and I were out of control. One time while I was at the Outpost, I had been shooting coke and speed, and I ran out of everything. There comes a point when you want to keep shooting something, even if you’re high, just to get a new rush. Someone had given me a hit of acid and I had a bottle of vodka, so I took the acid, put it in a spoon, poured some vodka in the spoon, dissolved that blotter acid as best I could, and shot the LSD mixed with vodka. It was the first time I ever peaked on acid in one second. And instead of tasting heroin or cocaine or speed in the back of my mouth, I was tasting vodka.
Somewhere along the line, I ran into some China White heroin again. I can remember spending all my money on coke and lying in bed, not being able to sleep. I’d call Jennifer in the Valley and ask her to come and take care of me, which meant bringing by some money so I could get some heroin to come down. It would usually be about four in the morning, and Hollywood Boulevard was dead quiet, and I was an empty soul lying on the mattress, waiting to hear the sound of her MG. I was such a dope fiend that I could hear that distinctive sound of her car when she got off the freeway, ten minutes before she’d show up. And she’d give me twenty or forty or sixty dollars, whatever she had. She didn’t have a drug problem at this point, so she would be there to rescue me. That was our pattern, me listening for the car to come up, and this sensation of absolute relief when I knew she was parking downstairs.
By now my drug-shooting escapades were starting to impinge on the band. I’d miss a rehearsal, then I’d go AWOL for a while, and I was starting to alienate myself from Flea. We had the record deal and we had work to do, and I would be lying on the floor of my Outpost space, rolled up in some blankets after a wretched night of abuse, trying to get some sleep. One day I was in that situation and there was a knock on the door. It was Flea. He came into the room, which was a squalid mess, and he looked at me. “Anthony, get up.”
I sat up.
“I can’t do this with you anymore. You’re too fucked up. I gotta quit the band.”
I woke up, because that wasn’t what I was expecting him to say. I thought he’d say, “Dude, you’re a mess, we gotta talk about you not getting quite so high anymore,” but when he said he had to quit the band, all of my cells reverberated and I bolted up. That was the first taste of the fact that I could be destroying the dream we had created of this amazing funk band that was all about dancing and energy and sex. I wanted to be in that band with Flea more than anything. But how could I communicate that to him? Then it popped into my mind.
“Flea, you can’t quit,” I pleaded. “I’m going to be the James Brown of the eighties.”
How could he argue with that?
Chapter 6
The Red Hots
After we signed our record deal, Flea and I made the EMI offices our home away from home. A few people there were friendly to us, but we got the distinct feeling that if there was a totem pole of bands on their label, we weren’t on it, let alone at the bottom of it. We even had trouble getting past the security guards at the front door. Every time we’d go there, we’d walk past a giant Rolls-Royce parked by the entrance. We’d ask whose car that was, and they’d say, “Oh, that’s Jim Mazza’s. He runs the company.” But whenever we asked to meet him, we were told that we didn’t need to, he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day decision-making of any band. I can guarantee you that he did not know there was a band on his label called Red Hot Chili Peppers.
One day Flea and I went there in the afternoon, and Jamie Cohen, who had signed us, was out. We demanded to see a higher-up, and his secretary came out. “He’s not available. He’s in a very important board meeting with the entire staff of EMI International. They’ve all flown in for this meeting,” she said.
Flea and I ducked around the corner and conferred and decided to drastically increase our visibility at EMI. So we went into the little bathroom, took off our clothes, went straight for the door, ran in, jumped up on the table, and ran up and down, hooting and hollering. Then we looked down and realized that it wasn’t just men at that meeting. It was the entire multicultural EMI team from around the world, and they all had their briefcases and papers and graphs and charts and pointers and pencils, and we had trashed everyone’s stuff. When this sank in, we jumped off the table, ran out of the room, and struggled to put on our underwear while being chased by the security guards, who had been notified of our intrusion.
We took off like two pieces of mercury and outran the guards through the parking lot and up Hollywood Boulevard until we got to Waddle’s Park. Then we sat down and lit up a big, fat joint of green Hawaiian weed to celebrate the act of letting EMI know who we were. Halfway through the joint, I started getting a little paranoid.
“That was a good idea, wasn’t it?” I asked Flea. “But what if they kick us off the label? They looked pretty upset. Come to think of it, they were screaming at us. Oh, God, what if we don’t have a deal anymore?” When we came down off the pot high, we called Lindy to find out if we’d been dropped yet.
But it all blew over, and we got ready to make our first album. Jamie and Lindy wanted to know who we wanted to produce the album, and Flea and I both, without hesitation, recommended Andy Gill, the guitar player from Gang of Four. Their first album, Entertainment, was what had inspired me to get into dancing back when I was living with Donde. The music was so angular and hard and edgy, the epitome of that English art school funk, and Gill’s lyrics were great and sociopolitical, but in a way that didn’t seem like they were taking themselves too seriously.
Lindy got in touch with Gill’s manager, and he agreed to produce us, which we thought was a great victory. When we met with him and he made disparaging comments about his earlier work, we should have seen the writing on the wall. But we started doing preproduction on the album at the SIR Studios, which were on Santa Monica, right near Vine, just a few blocks from my new house with Jennifer. I had a little money from the record deal, and Jennifer sold her MG, and we scraped together enough to rent a small house on Lexington Avenue, in a pretty gnarly area of Hollywood that was home to all varieties of prostitutes, from transsexuals to young boys.
Andy Gill started to go about this business of preproduction with Cliff and Jack and Flea and me, but it made no sense to me. I didn’t really know what the hell a producer even did. It was a weird, uncomfortable situation for me, and the pressure started affecting me. I went on horrible drug binges, disappearing for days on end. It usually involved shooting coke, because I had gotten a few good coke connections. Bob Forest had turned me on to a guy who was a band member in a prominent L.A. rock group. He lived in a huge high-rise in Hollywood. I was such a scammer and a weasel that he ultimately refused to even let me up to his apartment. Whenever I showed up, he’d drop a can that was attached to a string from his balcony, and I’d have to put my money in, and only then would he throw the coke down. But my most reliable source of coke was the valet parking operation at a nearby shopping plaza. Someone told me that when you pulled up to park your car, all you had to say was “I need a ticket”
Heroin began entering the picture more, too. Jennifer hated me when I’d shoot cocaine, because I would disappear and act weird and not be the most warm and reachable person. She wasn’t afraid to get in my face and scream and throw punches at me. But one night we had been at the Power Tools Club downtown, and I ran into Fab, who had recently moved into a huge loft that was a block away from the club. We went over to his house and he sold me a little itty-bitty miniature micro-bindle of the strongest China White heroin that you’d ever want to find, so strong that you didn’t even have to inject it.
We snorted some, and it was like sinking into heaven. Jennifer loved it, and we went home and had sex for twelve straight hours, the beginning of the never-ending heroin sex merry-go-round that she and I would partake in. But that initial high is the feeling that you’re doomed to be chasing for the rest of your life, because the next time you do it, it’s good but not quite like that. Even still, China White was so cheap, and seemed so harmless. It wasn’t like I was on the streets doing weird shit or sticking needles in my arm and ending up with a hundred bruises and blood dripping all over the place. It seemed so much more elegant to hang out at this loft with the paintings and the French people and sniff a little stuff and feel euphoric, and it lasted and lasted, and when you woke up in the morning, you still had some money in your pocket. China White was such a deceiving organism. At first it showed you the heaven, it didn’t show you the hell.
Jennifer and I started doing more heroin, but I would still go on these maniacal coke binges. When I could, I’d steal Jennifer’s new car, an old taxicab that she called the Circus Peanut because it was the color of those marshmallow candies. When I couldn’t, I’d be forced to walk to my new dealer, a writer who lived a few miles from me. He dealt both heroin and coke, which was pretty convenient for me. But I’d never get good deals, since he was using himself. Of course, I was my typical pain-in-the-ass client self, always waking him up or generally harassing him until he’d let me in.
One day I was shooting coke at his place, but I got all crazy and he kicked me out. I had been fastidious about using sterile rigs and sterile cotton when I first started shooting up, but by now I didn’t care much. If I had to, I’d use a syringe that I found in the street. Instead of sterilized cotton, I’d use a section of my sock or, more commonly, the filter tip of a cigarette. At first I’d use only sterilized spring water to dissolve the stuff in, but now I’d just pull the back off a toilet or look for a lawn sprinkler or even a puddle.
This crazy behavior began to encroach on my professional life. I started missing rehearsals and writing sessions. Then I even began to miss some live shows, including a big punk-rock show at the Olympic Auditorium downtown, where we were playing with our friends the Circle Jerks and Suicidal Tendencies.
I had started a binge a couple of days before, and when the day of the show came, I just could not stop using. I kept telling myself, “Okay, this is the last gram of stuff I’m going to do, and then I’m going to make it to the show.” Letting the band down like that was the most gut-wrenching feeling I ever had. But Keith Morris, my friend from the Circle Jerks, filled in for me. He just sang the same line, “What you see is what you get,” over and over again for every song. It wasn’t the only time I’d miss a gig because I was on a run. We played Long Beach early on, and I was a no-show, so kids from the audience were invited up to sing the lyrics. Another time Lindy’s brother sang.
We decided to record the album at El Dorado Studios, which is right on Hollywood and Vine. El Dorado was a classic old Hollywood studio with nice vintage equipment. For our engineer, we hired Dave Jerden, a soft-spoken, experienced, and competent man behind the board. Andy Gill was much different than we had expected. He was approachable, but he was also very English, semi-aloof, clearly intelligent, but with no edge. We were these aggressive, volatile individuals, and then there was this soft, smarty-pants English guy. Even though we all liked him and he was interested in us, he wasn’t becoming the fifth finger on our hand. He certainly didn’t embrace our musical aesthetic or ideology. It was almost like it was beneath him. He had been there, done that, and that was fine, but let’s move on, go somewhere else. And we were like “Somewhere else? This is who we are!” So there was a little tension.
One day I got a glimpse of Gill’s notebook, and next to the song “Police Helicopter,” he’d written “Shit.” I was demolished that he had dismissed that as shit. “Police Helicopter” was a jewel in our crown. It embodied the spirit of who we were, which was this kinetic, stabbing, angular, shocking assault force of sound and energy. Reading his notes probably sealed the deal in our minds that “Okay, now we’re working with the enemy.” It became very much him against us, especially Flea and me. It became a real battle to make the record.
Andy’s thing was having a hit at all costs, but it was such a mistake to have an agenda. He should have just made us the best band that we were. We would come up with these really beautiful, rough, interesting sounds, and he’d go, “Oh, no, no, you could never get that sound on the radio.” We’d say, “And your point is what? We’re not making this to get on the radio.” He’d say, “Well, I am, I’m shooting to get something on the radio here.” Jack Sherman also wasn’t coming from the same place that Flea and I were. He was new in the band, and he was being far more cooperative with Andy, going for these clean, supposedly “radio-viable” sounds.
If the two bonded, it was because Andy saw Jack as a patsy he could control in the studio. We would argue all the time about the tone of Jack’s guitar. Andy was trying to soften it up, and we’d be outraged. “That’s weak and soft and lame and this song is punk rock and it’s got to be thrashing and hard,” we’d scream.
Part of the frustration we had with Jack was that he was a polished guitar player who really didn’t have a punk-rock pedigree. Plus he was so anal, so unlike Flea and me. One day Jack was getting ready to play in the studio, and I got there early. He had a little guitar cloth in his hand, gently cleaning the neck of his guitar. Then he went into his pristine doctor’s bag of stuff and pulled out what looked like air freshener, and he started deftly spraying this along the neck of the guitar.
“What the hell is that? What are you doing to your guitar?” I said.
“Oh, this is Fingerease. It helps your fingers glide up and down the neck easier,” he said. I was used to Hillel, who played so hard that his fingers would start to come apart. He knew he had a good night if his guitar was covered with blood. And here was this guy doing this gay spray job of mist onto his fretboard so his fingers could glide easily. I would razz him about that. “Do you have your Fingerease? Don’t leave home without the Fingerease.” He’d come back with “Oh, you probably don’t even know what a diminished seventh chord is.”
For the first couple of days in the studio, everything seemed fine. But I soon realized that Andy was going for a sound that wasn’t us. By the end of the sessions, Flea and I would literally stomp out of the studio into the control room, crawl over the console VU meters, and scream, “Fuck you! We hate you! This is shit!” Andy was completely calm the whole time. And Dave Jerden was like one of those dolls in the back of cars with the bouncing head, going, “We gotta listen to Andy. We gotta listen to Andy.”
We did some lighthearted stuff, too. We were in the middle of a heated argument with Andy one night in the studio when Flea said, “Let’s put this on hold. I’m going to take a big shiny shit.”
“Oh yeah, be sure and bring that back for me, then, won’t you,” Andy said drolly.
“Okay,” Flea said.
“I wouldn’t put it past you,” Andy said.
I followed Flea out of the room. All the way to the bathroom, we were saying, “Let’s really bring him the shit.”
So Flea defecated, and we put it in an empty pizza box that was in the studio, and we went running back down the
He just rolled his eyes and said, “How predictable.”
To this day, Flea points to that incident to demonstrate why we’re such a good band: because we brought shit to Andy Gill.
I do remember bursts of happiness during that period. The new songs like “Buckle Down,” “True Men,” “Mommy, Where’s Daddy,” and “Grand Pappy DuPlenty” all sounded exciting and great. But I was terribly disappointed when I heard the mixes of “Get Up and Jump,” “Out in L.A.,” “Green Heaven,” and “Police Helicopter.” All those songs sounded like they had gone through a sterilizing Goody Two-shoes machine. When we used to play them, they were so vicious-sounding, and now they sounded like bubblegum pop.
The tension affected Dave Jerden, and he was treated for a stomach ulcer and missed a week of work. Then Andy had to go to the hospital and have a cancerous testicle removed. While he was in the hospital, Flea and I tried to get Dave Jerden to remake the album, but he wasn’t having it.
The album was released, and it wasn’t something to celebrate. I felt like we had landed between two peaks, in the valley of compromise. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but it was nothing like our demo tape. Still, our take was “Okay, this is our record, and let’s keep marching on,” especially after I read the first review. I picked up BAM, a little Bay Area music magazine, and they simply assassinated the album. I was very hurt, but I realized that sometimes people got it, sometimes they didn’t. I couldn’t put too much stock in what writers had to say about our music. Then we got a rave review in one of the first issues of Spin magazine, so we had the yin and yang of record reviews. At any rate, we were being acknowledged by someplace other than the “L.A. Dee Dah” column.
Right before the record came, we posed for our first poster. We had done a photo session in our socks previously, and that went on to become infamous, but this was our first official promotional poster. Right before the session, I grabbed a Magic Marker and started drawing all over Flea’s chest and stomach and shoulders. It was just lines and squiggles and dots, but it looked great. We were into wearing unflattering hats then, but Cliff showed up, and he was the most outside dresser of all of us. He was wearing a huge mask with a hat over it and some kind of gloves so that you couldn’t see one inch of his skin. He looked like a cloth-covered robot. Then Flea put me in a headlock, and we shot the poster.