Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
“Anthony Kiedis! Wow, we love you guys. We grew up listening to you in Seattle,” Dave said. He told me they had just come off a huge tour, and Kurt Cobain was pretty worn out, but he’d try to talk him into doing the West Coast shows. And he did. Nirvana joined the bill, but then Billy Corgan pulled the Smashing Pumpkins off the bill. Apparently, he used to go out with Courtney Love, who was then Kurt’s girlfriend, so he refused to be on the same bill with Nirvana, let alone open for them. So Pearl Jam was back aboard.
Our first show was at the L.A. Sports Arena, and I was desperately trying to get John excited, telling him what a trip it would be to play with Nirvana, but he was just like “Nirvana, Shirvana, who cares?” Eventually, he would discover Nirvana on his own and became a live concert/obscure B-side devotee, but this time he didn’t care—although his ears pricked up when Nirvana opened their show with a cover of a Who song. This was a big deal for us to be back home playing our biggest show ever. Perry Farrell from Jane’s Addiction came to the show dressed up like a handsome prince, and to me that was a sign of our newfound status.
That night was the first time I met Kurt Cobain. Before the show, I went back to Kurt’s dressing room to say hello, and he was back there with Courtney. He looked torn up, like he had just come off a hard bender. He was wearing a ripped dress, and his skin was bad, and he looked like he hadn’t slept for a few days, but he was just so beautiful in a different way. I was blown away by his presence and his aura. He seemed really kind. We had a nice chat, and I thanked him for playing these shows, even if going back on tour again was the furthest thing from his mind.
I kept looking over at Courtney, convinced I knew her from somewhere. Then she started yelling at me, “Anthony, don’t you remember me? I used to pick you up hitchhiking down Melrose in the middle of the night, when you and Kim Jones were all strung out. I was a dancer back then, and I lent you twenty bucks, and you never paid me back.” It was time for Nirvana to play, and Kurt dragged himself up and out of that dressing room, but this guy who looked like death warmed over got onstage and slayed the entire audience, putting on as good a show as you could ever want to see. Their raw energy, their musicality, their song selection, they were like a chain saw cutting through the night.
We’d saved a couple of tricks for our hometown audience. Our show opened with Flea’s thunderous bass, but he wasn’t onstage, he was attached to a special harness that was propelling him down to the stage from the roof of the arena, upside down, while playing. John was in one of his moods. I don’t know if he was secretly terrified to go out there and have that kind of responsibility, or if there was just so much energy going on that maybe it was too much for him to be comfortable facing, but he was very moody and very distant. He played well, but there wasn’t a lot of interconnectedness happening among us. For the finale, we donned the socks, an event that was becoming rarer and rarer.
The next show was in Del Mar, a town just north of San Diego. We played a giant airplane hangar of a room, and once again Nirvana went out and destroyed with their set, and the kids went insane. It was so packed in there by the time we came onstage that steam had risen off the audience and formed a discernible cloud. We played better that night. There was less pressure, for one, and John felt like rocking a bit more. Maybe Nirvana was pushing him. That night was the beginning of my ongoing battle with tinnitus. Chad and I both came offstage and hugged backstage and realized that our ears were perceptibly ringing. By the end of that tour, I’d have permanent ear damage, which, unfortunately, is one of the hardest things to cure.
Our next gig was in San Francisco at the Cow Palace for a big New Year’s Eve bash. We stayed at the Phoenix Hotel, which was a glorified motel in a scurvy neighborhood. After the show, I rang in the New Year by sitting poolside with Kurt and Courtney. We sat there for about an hour under the stars, just talking, having a bonding session. Kurt was the most relaxed I’d ever see him, and probably the straightest, too.
By the time we hit Salem, Oregon, my vocal cords were shot. They were like two fat sausages smooshed into each other, and I couldn’t make a sound, so we had to reschedule the last few dates of the West Coast tour. After a short break, it was time to tour Europe. John was not only continuing to distance himself from the joy of being in the band, he had started losing the battle of psychic wellness. He went through a period when he was convinced that someone—our driver, the hotel bellman, whoever—was trying to kill him every day. I’m pretty sure he believed it, so we had this constant struggle of having to convince him that no one was trying to kill him. “Well, I don’t know,” he’d say. “I saw our driver talking to someone on the street, and I think that someone is connected with the people who want me dead.” I think John was experiencing good old-fashioned weed paranoia taken to an extreme. He was smoking shitloads of weed and drinking gallons of wine, not wanting to be on tour but finding himself there.
Traveling was no longer jovial. We wouldn’t get on the bus and sing and listen to music together and talk about the day’s events and have little competitions. The bus became a dark and unwelcoming place, because we had divided into camps. John had broken our unwritten rule of no spouses or girlfriends on the road. It wasn’t a great thing for us that Toni was on tour, because it allowed John to further insulate himself. A lot of people compared their relationship to John and Yoko, but that wasn’t accurate. Toni would never think of speaking for John; she was there to coddle him and support his decisions. Even in the face of tension, she would smile placidly. So I never thought she was coming between John and the band. It was clearly John’s doing, and she was tagging along.
Things deteriorated to the point where John and I didn’t talk on the bus, and if we ran into each other in passing, we wouldn’t even acknowledge each other. That was a pretty unbearable place to be, and I didn’t have a palette of spiritual principles to choose from to help me deal with all the madness. I became sad and angry and resentful and poisoned by the whole experience. I was being an asshole, John was being an asshole, and poor Flea was hiding under the covers, unable to deal with it at all. Even Lindy, who had always been the mediator, was at a total loss. He had been getting frantic calls from John’s mom and dad, begging him to help John, because he seemed to be in so much trouble. But Lindy was as stupefied and paralyzed by the situation as anyone else. No one was being proactive. We didn’t stop to assess the whole situation, we just tried to get through it from week to week, which didn’t create a healing environment. Considering the severity of the dysfunction being displayed, it’s strange for me to look back and think that we didn’t realize things couldn’t go on like this.
It got worse before it got better. We interrupted our European tour to fly into New York City near the end of February to do Saturday Night Live, which was a disaster from beginning to end. We weren’t there for five minutes before John started fighting with the staff. The music supervisor, a guy who’d been up there for years, came over and made an innocuous remark to John, and John turned his back on him and told Louie, “This guy says another word to me, I’m not doing the fucking show.” I was already apprehensive, because we were planning to do “Under the Bridge” as our second number, and that song always was a challenge for me to sing. I was entirely dependent on John for the musical cue into the song, and when we did the dress rehearsal, he was playing something in a different key, out of tune, in a different timing, basically reinventing the song for himself and nobody else. I was flummoxed. We retreated into our dressing room and tried to hash it out, but there was no talking to him. He’d find Toni and go into another room.
But he was in the dressing room long enough to feel dissed when Madonna came by to visit. She was going to be in one of the skits that night, so she came by to say hello. I had known her for years and years, going back to her “Holiday” video, when she wanted to cast me if I would agree to change my hairstyle (which I didn’t). The whole time she was back there, she inadvertently ignored John, and he stormed out, irate that she had given hi
The show began, and we did our first number, “Stone Cold Bush,” an uptempo rocker. It went well. Then we came back to do “Under the Bridge.” I’ve since heard that John was on heroin during this show, but he might as well have been on another planet, because he started playing some shit I’d never heard before. I had no idea what song he was playing or what key he was in. He looked like he was in a different world. To this day, John denies that he was playing off-key. According to him, he was experimenting the way he would have if we’d been rehearsing the tune. Well, we weren’t, we were on live TV in front of millions of people, and it was torture. I started to sing in what I thought was the key, even if it wasn’t the key he was playing in. I felt like I was getting stabbed in the back and hung out to dry in front of all of America while this guy was off in a corner in the shadow, playing some dissonant out-of-tune experiment. I thought he was doing that on purpose, just to fuck with me.
We got through the song, and it sounded like four different people playing four different songs. At the time I was dating Sofia Coppola, another one of my unfulfilled attempts at a relationship during this period of my life. She was by far the coolest girl I had gone out with, especially in that period after Carmen, and I told her to make sure to watch the show, and now I was just fucking dying. When something happens like that, it’s like the kicker who misses a field goal as the clock is running out: The only thing that’s going to take away that pain is playing another game and getting another chance to kick the field goal.
That pain was there for a long time, because we went back to Europe, and John’s behavior got even more erratic. When it came time for him to solo, he would pull the cord out of his guitar and create a jarring noise and then plug it back in and, if he felt like it, play the chorus. The ironic part about Saturday Night Live was, the week after our performance, our record went through the roof. Maybe it was a coincidence, but maybe people heard something in that chaotic performance that touched them.
After we finished the European leg of the tour, we went back home and had a couple of weeks off before going to Hawaii, Japan, and Australia. When we came home between legs of tours, I saw less of Flea, and I never saw much of Chad. John disappeared and started pursuing his drug use. So I’d hang out with whatever girl I was seeing at the time, although I was mainly doing the random dating thing, and nothing was sticking. Since my split with John, I had room in my life for a new running partner, and I found one in Jimmy Boyle. He was a friend of Rick Rubin who looked exactly like Rasputin, with a full beard and mustache and long Jesus hair and crazy-psycho blue eyes, and he dressed like an elegant ragman. The more we saw each other, the more we realized the many things we had in common. He was a recovering drug addict who had just gotten divorced from a tragic young beautiful dope fiend whom I’d dated as well. He was also a vegetarian (a practice I had picked up from Ione), he loved music, and he loved chasing girls. Every day I was in town, we’d meet for a ritualistic breakfast of blueberry pancakes at A Votre Sante on La Brea.
I invited Jimmy to come to Hawaii with us. He loved it because he loved to be around the excitement of music, not to mention the girls. Plus, we were going to Hawaii, for Christ’s sake. John was still being distant while we were in Hawaii. Our record had been doing okay, better than any of our previous ones, though still only okay, barely in the Top 40. Once we were in Hawaii, we got a call from Lindy. “Guys, I don’t know what to tell you, but this record is going through the roof. It’s charting next week at number eight,” he told us. For me, that was cause for celebration. Flea was feeling the same way, but John was staying removed from the whole thing.
That whole trip was teeming with hot young Hawaiian girls, and it was a fun time for all, because everyone was feeling full of life in the sunshine and the ocean. Boyle and I were sharing a room, and at four in the morning, we were asleep when there was a knock on the door. I went to answer, and it was this young Hawaiian maiden.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
“Well, my friend’s sleeping. It’s not really a good idea, it’s four in the morning,” I reminded her.
“Really, I can’t come in?” she pressed.
“Uh, it’s kind of an uncomfortable situation.” Right there, in the hallway of this hotel, she dropped to her knees and gave me a blow job. Jimmy was so jealous. “I can’t believe this. You fucking hear a knock in the middle of the night, you go to the doorway, and the most beautiful girl on the island gets down on her knees and gives you a blow job. What is that? What have I done wrong in my lifetime not to deserve this kind of treatment?”
I wasn’t overjoyed about all this new adulation I was getting. I wasn’t having the same reaction John was, but on a personal level, I wasn’t letting it all go to my head. I think I didn’t feel entitled now that I was becoming famous, and I stayed relatively humble. That was my perception, and I’m sure somebody else had a different take. I recognize when I feel a sense of entitlement—you get used to having things your way—but I also recognize the absurdity of that, and I’m willing to laugh at myself and to acknowledge when I’m being a spoiled brat and when I’m not. I found it fascinating and peculiar, more than suddenly thinking I was better than or holier than.
It’s ironic, because on most days, Flea is the biggest spoiled brat in the band, but he and I had this talk in Santa Monica, and he said, “You know, Anthony, this record is doing so good, I think you’re becoming a bit of an egomaniac.”
“Me? Me? You’re the egomaniac. Take a look at your own ego,” I proposed.
I’m sure there was some bloated-ego thing happening that I wasn’t able to recognize, but I didn’t feel like it would last for long. The weird thing is that long before we ever had success on a commercial level, I had already developed a sense of entitlement. I had an unnecessary, unwarranted, unfounded, self-centered sense of entitlement from childhood. In elementary school, I always felt like I should be the president of the school and that I was somehow above the law of the school and I could break the rules. When I moved in with my father, he was arrogant and full of himself, and that carried on to me, so I always had this sense of entitlement and a semi-false sense of self. I would steal because I had that sense, whether it was houses or cars or furniture or cactuses, whatever. I understand how people can be cold and ruthless criminals, because I remember at that point in my life, I did not think of the consequences for anybody else involved except me. And the consequences for me were that I got what I wanted.
The richer and more famous I got, the less I’d behave in that manner. Sure, the ego does get inflated and retarded and grotesque in some ways, but that’s a chance to learn, a chance to go, “Okay, what do I have to do to deal with this weirdness, and how do I diminish the ego to a point where it’s not interfering with my relating to the rest of the universe?” If anything, everything was making me less selfish and less self-centered, and more interested in getting out of myself and being in a place where I could share. A lot of times people will judge you on their perceived idea of how you’re acting. If you’re in a room and you’re feeling shy and you don’t want a certain amount of attention, you’re not going out of your way to make friends with everybody. Then someone’s going to walk away going, “That arrogant motherfucker, he didn’t even try to talk to me.” You’re trying to lay low and not make a big deal about yourself, but they’re seeing you as this guy who’s all that and a bag of fucking chips.
I don’t feel like I started thinking of myself any differently while this was happening; if anything, I was thinking of myself in a worse light, because I’d lost an important connection in my life with John. I began realizing that I’d been carrying on as a control freak, wanting to have everything go according to my plans, which turned out to be the biggest pain in the ass ever. I used to think that everything would be great if Flea just behaved this way and John did what I wanted him to do, and that was probably the biggest mistake I made during that time, thinking that I knew better or had a plan, an
We hit Japan in early May 1992. It’s strange, because John thought that we had worked out our differences by then, but I still felt that we weren’t close. He was still in his cocoon with Toni. And he was again exhibiting some strange behavior. The night before our Tokyo gig, John was in the lobby of our hotel with Louie, and he became convinced that he had exposed himself to some female autograph seekers and that he was in imminent danger of getting arrested and deported.
There was a distinctly erratic, unpredictable vibe happening around John. He was smoked out of his mind, and also hitting the wine in such a way that he didn’t strike me as being typically drunk. I don’t know if it was a combination of the wine and the pot, but it seemed like he was drinking psycho juice rather than just wine. There was the typical dopey, daffy, wobbly, slurry normal drunk behavior, but there was also this weird PCP-like drunk going on, like he was in a different space.
The next morning John traveled to the venue with the crew. Lindy and Flea and Chad and I came on a later train, and when we got to the arena, Mark Johnson told us that John had quit the band and he wanted to go home immediately. Mind you, we were slated to go to Australia after Japan, and it would be our first Australian tour ever. This was incredibly important to us, because it was a land that we loved, it was the birthplace of Flea, it was the new land of milk and honey and sunshine and girls, just a magical place. So there was panic in Lindy’s eyes and in Flea’s and my hearts. We had to talk to John right away, even though the final die had been cast.
We went back into the room where John was holed up.
“I have to leave the band, I have to quit. I have to go home right away, I can’t do this anymore,” he told me. “I will die if I don’t get out of this band right away.”