Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
Chapter 8
The Organic Anti–Beat Box Band
Rejoining the band wasn’t the only thing that I talked to Flea about when he called me in Michigan. While I was away, Flea had a part in a science-fiction movie called Stranded, and he’d met a beautiful young actress named Ione Skye who he was certain was my type. We made plans for an introduction when I came home.
When I got back to L.A., I moved in with Lindy, who was nice enough to let me stay in the spare room of his two-bedroom apartment in Studio City. Of course, that meant he had to fend off all the calls from Jennifer. I had no desire to talk to her, especially after I met Ione. From the moment I laid eyes on Ione, I knew that goddess was going to be my girlfriend. It was a few days before her sixteenth birthday, and she looked like she’d come out of a fairy-tale book. Whereas Jennifer was this exquisitely manicured, modern, self-created sculpture of a punk-rock superstar, Ione was more of an au naturel, soft, soulful forest nymph. She had long, flowing curly brunette hair, a beautiful large flirtatious rack, and an overbite. I was always a sucker for an overbite.
Ione came from an alternative-lifestyle Hollywood family. Her dad was the folksinger Donovan, but he wasn’t really in the picture. Her mother, Enid, was a beautiful hippie with blond ringlet hair. Ione had a brother named after her dad. They all lived in this great old Craftsman house on North Wilton, which was suffused with a warm, rustic, loving family vibe. Ione dressed like a hippie child and had an ethereal sixth sense about her, an extra gift. She was also way too sexually curious about everything. It was an energy that she didn’t verbalize, but it worked for me at that age. She was probably the most beautiful, smart, sexy, caring, and nurturing young girl in all of Hollywood, and our attraction was mutual, thank God. A few days after we met, she was introducing me at her birthday party as her boyfriend. It was mind-blowing, how quickly I fell completely and deeply in love.
Now I was ready to go back to work. I sat down with our producer, Michael Beinhorn, and we went over the status of the songs. We were supposed to go into the studio and cut basic tracks in ten days, so I planned to write throughout the recording process. It wasn’t an overwhelming amount of work; back then you needed only twelve songs for a record. We worked on “Fight Like a Brave,” and Beinhorn put a football-rally chanting chorus on it. “Me and My Friends,” a song that I’d written while driving home from San Francisco with my old friend Joe Walters, came together nicely. “Funky Crime” was basically a lyrical description of a conversation that we’d had with George Clinton, in which he maintained that music itself was color-blind but the media and the radio stations segregate it based on their perceptions of the artists. “Backwoods” was a song about the roots of rock and roll, and “Skinny Sweaty Man” was my ode to Hillel. I wrote another song, “No Chump Love Sucker,” that was also in Hillel’s honor. He had just been left high and dry and shattered by a girlfriend who dumped him for a guy who had more money and more drugs. So it was a revenge song against that type of evil, materialistic woman.
“Behind the Sun” was a definite branching out for us. Hillel had this unusual, melodic riff, and Beinhorn felt it was a song that could be a hit. He worked a lot with me on the melody, knowing that it wasn’t my forte to get wrapped up in a pretty song. I guess my reputation at that time was for songs like “Party on Your Pussy,” which EMI refused to put on the record until we changed the title to “Special Secret Song Inside.” But it wasn’t entirely accurate to think that all of our songs were raunchy. “Love Trilogy” became one of our all-time favorite songs. The music started off like a reggae thing, then it went into hard-core funk and ended up in speed metal. For years, whenever someone would question our lyrics, Flea would say, “Read ‘Love Trilogy’ and you’ll know what real lyrics are all about.” It’s about loving the things that aren’t necessarily perfect or always lovable.
From “Love Trilogy”
My love is death to apartheid rule
My love is deepest death, the ocean blues
My love is the Zulu groove
My love is coop-a-loop move
My love is lightning’s blues
My love is the pussy juice
My love can’t be refused
After fifty days of being sober, I thought, “That’s a nice number. I think I should honor that number.” I decided it was a good time to do drugs. My plan was to get high for a day or two and then go back to work. What I found was that once I started, I couldn’t stop, and it really made a mess of the beginning of the recording process. The songs were amazing; Hillel was on fire; we were all in love with recording in the basement of Capitol Studios, another incredibly historical monument of Hollywood recording; Beinhorn was working his ass off; and I went and got high and couldn’t stop. Finally, I decided to do a bunch of heroin, get some sleep, and face yet another mess I’d made.
I went downtown and found an El Salvadoran who hooked me up, and I was in that opiate haze one more time. But all I could think about was the fact that I was supposed to be in the studio. I started hearing Jackie Irons’s beat in my head for a song we were working on called “The Organic Anti–Beat Box Band.” I sat in a downtown park, surrounded by an odd mixture of park people, and wrote the lyrics. I felt excruciating pain and guilt and shame behind not being there for the beginning of the record, but I thought if I showed up with something good to offer, the heat would diminish. And it did. I crashed at Lindy’s, then got up and apologized and pulled it together for the rest of the session.
Part of the reason I relapsed was because I didn’t have a support system. I didn’t know anybody who was sober. I had ventured out to a couple of meetings on my own, but I had a lifetime of the mind-set “I can take care of whatever is wrong all by myself, and I don’t need any of you yokels to guide me, because I don’t, at this moment in time, want what you have.” I went back into a self-imposed abstinence, which equaled what they call a “dry drunk.” It’s an accident waiting to happen. You’re not putting the stuff into you that makes you bonkers, but you’re not dealing with any of the shit that’s been in there your whole life and makes you want to get high in the first place.
We had a great time making the record. It was inspiring to see Jack Irons back in the mix. He added such an important and different element to our chemistry. Hillel, Flea, and I were all pretty self-obsessed maniacs. Jack was the one wholesome fellow. He turned out to be messed up but in a different way. He was a nice element, really hardworking and joyful and supportive.
When it came time to record the vocals, I used Hillel as my bandmate/vocal producer. Every time I did a vocal, we both felt like I was going to a new place and that these were the best vocal expressions I’d ever put down on tape. Hillel was ecstatic, running in between takes, going, “I’m telling you, this is the most beautiful thing we’ve ever done. I can’t wait to release this record.”
Of course, on the last day, when the last note was done and in the can and our jobs were finished, Hillel and I found a French dealer and got loaded on some China White, reveling in our accomplishment. That opened up the floodgates. While I was still staying at Lindy’s house, I orchestrated an absolutely gory scenario of speedballing. I didn’t have a lot of money and I didn’t have an automobile, so I’d wake up in the middle of the night, grab some spoons from the kitchen, and clean out Lindy’s bucket of change. Then I’d take a fishing pole out of his closet, crack his bedroom door open, and fish his car keys off his dresser, feeling miserable that I was such a freak that I could be doing this to the poor bastard who was trying to help me out.
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 going 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
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 your 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 creating 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.
In my deluded mind, I thought that if I chipped away at a little bit of dope every now and again, I wouldn’t go on these insane speedball binges and my life wouldn’t spiral out of control. I moved into Ione’s house, and a couple of times a week, I’d go out and buy forty dollars’ worth of China White, smoke it, get high all night long, and then go to sleep and feel all right. About a month into living with Ione, she convinced me that I shouldn’t go off and do that, so the compromise was I’d get the dope and bring it back and smoke it in bed with her. We used to have these all-night sessions when I’d smoke the dope and then we’d cuddle up in bed and read books like Interview with the Vampire and Catcher in the Rye to each other, all night long, until the sun came up.
Despite the occasional heroin smoking, I was keeping it relatively together while I was at Ione’s house. We had lots of glorious days together. I’d wake up next to her in bed and think, “Jesus Christ, she is such an angel, and I’m so in love with her.” Then we’d lie in bed and sing along to Bob Marley’s record Kaya every morning, holding each other tight. We’d drive around in her little Toyota and have lunch and smoke pot together and make love all over the city. I was still carrying around that “one foot on a banana peel, one foot in the grave” energy, but I was trying to be respectful of this new place in my life. On one of those days, we had just smoked some pot, and I was thanking my lucky stars that this was where my life was at that moment, when the Stevie Wonder song “I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)” came on the radio. We pulled over and cranked up the radio and started weeping profusely because we were so in love and this song was describing our feelings.
A week later, I’d disappear into the downtown maze of ghetto dope hell. I’d borrow her car in the middle of the night and always mean to get it right back, but sometimes I’d be gone for days. That was when I started partnering up with this Mexican mafia drug dealer named Mario. I knew Mario from my downtown runs with Kim Jones. Mario always gave me a great deal, charging me the least amount of money for the most amount of drugs. I could have stayed in Hollywood, it was full of hookers who would deliver heroin to your house. But I didn’t want to have a lot of dealers in my life and I’d convinced myself that if I went downtown it would only be for that one time, I wasn’t really going back to that forlorn life.
When we weren’t shooting up in his drug-infested apartment, Mario knew this safety zone beneath a freeway bridge, some weird hideaway that the LAPD never patrolled. He explained to me that no non-Mexican gang members were allowed there, so in order for me to get in, we had to lie and tell them that I was engaged to his sister. We walked up to the big guys guarding the gate, told them Mario was my future brother-in-law, and they let us in. Sheltered beneath that overpass right in the middle of the city, I spent countless days lying on a bunch of dirty mattresses and shooting up with a bunch of killers.
About the only thing that could tear me away from this endless cycle of abuse was to go out on tour. When it was time to start the touring for Uplift, a damn limousine came to pick me up for the trip to the airport. I figured if we were going out on tour in a limo, something must be working, and it was. We played some of the greatest shows of our lives on that tour, mainly because Hillel and I weren’t obsessed with getting high. We drank a lot and did coke whenever we could, smoked a lot of pot, and maybe had one shipment of dope sent out. But we crisscrossed the country, charging these small stages for hundreds of willing and beautiful customers. Kids would come out of the woodwork to rock out with this different outfit from Hollywood. We weren’t part of the punk-rock movement, or the post-punk movement, we were a different animal. I had no idea how these kids even knew about us, but they were the best audiences you could ever ask for—so much heart, so much spirit, so much enthusiasm, they’d just show up and give everything they had.
We did a lot of crazy things to while away the time while we were on tour. When we got to Texas, I decided to shave off all my pubic hair. I collected it and put it in a Ziploc bag and gave it to our roadie Nickie Beat as the “merch” for that night. He went out to the concession booth and tacked it up on the wall, next to the T-shirts, and started hawking “Anthony’s pubic hair, only twenty-five dollars.” At the end of the night, he reported that he couldn’t get the money, but he did get panties from three different girls, with the promise that they’d bring their entire families to the next show.
On that tour, we came up with a new touring pastime called Tongue in the Dirt. In the past, a lot of our games and challenges revolved around food. On the Freaky Styley tour, we had something called the Truck Stop Vomiting Club. We’d typically eat horrible, greasy, disgusting food, and we knew it was no good for us, so we’d go on to the truck stop and upchuck it by whatever means necessary. Whether it was fingers down the throat, or thinking about something disgusting, your manhood was defined by your ability to make yourself vomit. Flea was always the hair trigger of these events. All he had to do was look at an egg and he was vomiting all over the place.
Then Hillel came up with something called the Grizzlers. Every day, when we’d hit a greasy spoon, to perk up the atmosphere of our experience, we’d turn our order into a rhyme. So we’d be in Utah, and the waitress would be hovering over us, waiting for the order, and we’d say something like “I don’t know any Chinese, but I’ve worked with blacks, so give me scrambled eggs with a side of flapjacks.” Then we’d end it with “Because we’re the Grizzlers.” We’d go around the table, and everyone would have a minute or two to compose a Grizzler verse.
Tongue in the Dirt evolved out of challenges Flea and I gave each other back in high school. I remember one time I was on a city bus with Flea when we were about fifteen, and I was a little under the weather and coughed up a hideous cookie of congealed phlegm into my hand. We were both looking at this fucked-up loogie with awe when I challenged Flea: “If you’ve got any balls at all, you’ll eat this right out of my hand, because you’re the only motherfucker crazy enough to do that.” And he did! Tongue in the Dirt was born without our even knowing it.
In our newest refinement of the challenge, we’d get a few roadies and some of the girls who were traveling or visiting with us and form an irregular circle. If we were throwing a football around, we’d line up forty feet apart. If it was some awkward chunk of metal we’d found on the side of the road, we’d be closer together. The object of the game was to catch the object without dropping it. It was a group decision whether a particular throw was catchable or not. If a throw was not catchable, the person who threw would lose. But if some
As the game developed, the more dirt you took in, the greater your honor. The losers began eating bugs off the grilles of cars or licking the entire circumference of a trash can, anything that would entertain their brethren with an audacious display of absurd bravado. It was a terrific game, because you could play it with a hockey puck or a football, and it was all about psyching out your opponents and making the unexpected throw and putting a spin on it. It was a great way to spend time with friends and destress. Tongue in the Dirt maintained its presence in the camp for a very long time.
It was during the Uplift tour that I had the first inklings that we were becoming a tiny bit famous. Girls would show up backstage and offer themselves to us. Suddenly, I became disinterested. Even under the influence, I couldn’t be persuaded to sleep with these girls, because they would come up to me and go, “You’re Anthony Kiedis. I want to fuck you. Let’s go.” I’d be like “Hmm. No. I’m going somewhere, and I think your friends are waiting for you.” It was like when Groucho said he’d never join a club that would have him as a member. That was me. I wanted something that I couldn’t have. I’d rather have a challenge or even failure than something that was too freely given. Most of the time.
The longer we were on that tour, the more our popularity increased. In the South, we had been booked into theaters instead of clubs. By the time we hit Denver, Lindy was ecstatic, because we had to move our show to a huge theater thanks to the ticket demand. That night, after the show, Hillel and I were sitting backstage, congratulating each other on our newfound success, when a girl came storming backstage.