Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
Claire and I had this historical antagonism. When we were apart from each other on the road, we antagonized each other, and when we got together on the road, we antagonized each other. It was because all we wanted was each other’s constant love and attention and for no one else to receive that love and attention, which is a selfish and difficult place to be in a relationship. We were emotionally retarded, and that was the best we could do at the time.
We played in Barcelona, and Chad had made friends with a Barcelonan sweet tart who was cute as a button. She came backstage, and when Chad introduced her, I stood up, gave her a European-kiss greeting, and welcomed her to sit down and grab a bite to eat. This, of course, infuriated Claire.
When the girl left, I looked up and said, “Bye-bye, sweetie.”
“‘Sweetie’? Did you just call her ‘sweetie’?” Claire fumed. “Oh, so now she’s your sweetie?” Although she was making an ass out of herself, I was right there with her, because the next day it would be me saying, “Did you just say ‘good-bye sweetie’ to that guy?”
By the time we got to Madrid, the wheels had fallen off. We got into another unmemorable bickering match, like something off of I Love Lucy but without the happy ending. We were in this beautiful hotel suite in Madrid, madly in love, out there on a fun successful tour in the middle of Spain, and we started fighting about the dumbest thing on earth. And we brought it down the elevator, into the lobby, into the bus that was taking us to our plane.
Unfortunately, that carried on throughout Lisbon. Then we went home and fought there. I loved living in this cool penthouse apartment with her, but it was never smooth sailing. We’d both been such fucking dope fiends for so long that we never had a chance to grow out of our childish behavior. We must have loved the drama and the constant rush of fighting and making up and starting the whole cycle over again. It was just crazy.
I know that I had nothing but love for this girl. I had no interest in chasing any other girls. My only interests were in seeing her get well and in taking care of her, which turned out to be one of the problems. I took care of her so much that she just expected a constant “Oh well, Anthony will do it for me.” I’d pay for everything she needed, I’d try to find her a job, I’d try to find her a friend, I’d try to find her a sponsor, always doing everything for her. Once she started expecting that response, I was like “Fuck that. Don’t go expecting shit. Earn your place in life, earn your respect, just do your thing.” So she was in a terrible place, because she probably felt resentful toward me for giving her stuff and then thinking that she should earn her own place in life. It was a lose-lose situation, and I wasn’t very good at handling it.
Even when I financed her start-up fashion business, that became a troubled area of contention. As soon as I saw her stuff, I thought, “These clothes are so amazing. She’s got mad style.” I got on the phone with my managers in New York saying, “I need the names of all the major department-store buyers.” But Claire was never satisfied, never grateful, and never comfortable with it. She was always on edge and discontented about something. I was equally maladjusted to life at that point. I had been off my gyroscope for so long that I didn’t know how to handle any of life’s basic scenarios with any clarity or intuition.
There were also some fun things happening at the time. Our sex life had started off pretty slowly, but it had developed over time into a spiritual attraction after we finally figured each other’s bodies out. She had a depth to her sexuality that I had never experienced before. There was no question about our love, though we were both combustible personalities.
That year we visited both of our families at Christmas. It was the first time that my parents had met her. It’s funny, my male friends were always terrified of Blackie. When they met him, they’d try to shake his hand, and he’d just look at their hands and walk away. But he was never like that with my girlfriends. He was always incredibly gracious and welcoming to whatever girl I happened to have in my life. He couldn’t wait to hang out with Claire and go through the family photos with her. But Claire was not the warmest of people. Even though she might feel it on the inside, she didn’t communicate any of it to anybody. That was how it was with her and my mom. My mom was very happy that I had this person I was in love with, but she could never tell if Claire had any love or compassion for her or the rest of our family, because Claire wouldn’t wear her emotions on her sleeve.
I had a lot to be thankful for that Christmas. The album was continuing to sell phenomenally. Every so often I’d get a call from Gail at Q-Prime, and she’d tell me, “Californication’s number this in this country, and it’s still in the top ten there.” I’d jump around, skipping and hooting and hollering. It’s a shame that my personal life wasn’t flourishing in the same way my professional life was. Professionally, we were on fire. Besides the record sales, we were playing great. We had figured out how to breathe life into these new songs that had tapped into a deeper and more haunted emotional realm than we’d ever visited before.
Watching the constant evolution of John was also a movie unto itself. When we went out at the beginning of Californication, he was shy and withdrawn onstage, not going in for overt emoting. Over time, he developed into this hambone who just couldn’t get enough. “Let’s start the show with me soloing for ten minutes.” He wasn’t doing it out of narcissism, he was doing it out of his love for playing music and his desire to commune with the spirits, both invisible spirits and also the spirits of the people who were there to experience music and love. Watching him spread his wings was a delight.
We brought in the millennium at a concert at the Forum in our hometown. The Forum always had these great memories for us. Flea and I had sneaked into the Forum to see Queen back in the day, and more recently, when we came to Warners Bros., we hit the jackpot as Laker fans because Mo had four tickets at center court on the floor. After Blood Sugar, we were the number one perk-getters at Warner’s. Flea and I and two of our friends were always sitting pretty at center court.
We’d played the Forum once with Dave Navarro, and it was one of our best American dates with him. It’s always hard to do well when you’re playing in your hometown. There are such high expectations, and then you have the added stress of arranging tickets for family and friends. So it can go two ways. Instead of doing what you do best, which is going out there and rocking, you might get too hung up on all these outside issues, and wanting the show to be the best ever, and end up sucking. Or you might hit the jackpot and rock your hometown like it’s never been rocked before.
This show was somewhere in between. We were good, but we weren’t unbelievable. The nice thing was that my sister Julie and her husband, Steve, flew out to spend New Year’s Eve with me. That was also the memorable show when John Frusciante would get shot by Cupid’s arrow and fall for Milla Jovovich, who had been rehearsing her band next door to us at Swing House. That night she came to the show wearing a wedding dress, and she put the whammy on John’s flim-flammy.
We had a few days off after the New Year’s show, and then we went from beautiful, sunny California to dismal, cold, gray Tokyo, Japan. It was the first time we’d played Japan since John was back in the band, and we wanted to leave a new taste in their psychic palates, since it was where John had played his last show before quitting the band. But the Japanese shows weren’t much fun, and we weren’t at our best. One of the problems was that by then, I had developed a chronic case of shin splints, and anytime I was out onstage, moving around would be “Ooh, ooh, ah, ah.”
After Japan we had a week off before going to Australia and New Zealand. Everyone headed off for different holidays. I was going to meet Claire in Bali. I couldn’t wait to see her, especially after being so bummed out in Japan. I’ll never forget how happy I was when I walked through that airport door and she greeted me. She had a big flower in her hair and had put on a few pounds, which I appreciated, because she looked good when her flesh was full and pushing out, rather than being sucked up.
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Then it was time to play Big Day Out, Australia’s answer to Lollapalooza. January is the nicest time by far in Australia, because it’s their summer and the whole country goes on joy time. We started our tour in Auckland, New Zealand, and we were especially excited because Nine Inch Nails were going to be on the bill with us, and we all just loved them. We were also playing with the Foo Fighters, and we would become incredibly close to them down the line.
The only downside to all of this was my shin splints. Even with the week off, the pain would not subside. My shinbones were getting hairline fractures because my muscles and tendons were so swollen, they were pulling off the bone mass. Walking was painful, jumping was even more painful, and I was going to have to go out there and give my best performances ever with these getaway sticks that were in maddening pain. Two days before the show, I saw a doctor.
“Doc, I got shin splints. Could you please give me a muscle relaxant, or something that’s not going to affect me from the neck up, so I can go perform?” I asked.
He suggested Advil, but I told him I’d tried that and it hadn’t worked.
“There’s a new non-narcotic painkiller called Ultram,” he said. “It really works on athletes who have to perform under similar conditions to you. Take one in the afternoon and one right before the show.”
The day before the first show, I took the Ultram, and lo and behold, I started to feel pretty good. Not good enough to know for sure that I felt good, but I could swear I felt good in the subtlest possible way. It couldn’t be the Ultram, because it was non-narcotic, so I decided that I just felt good. I took the other one before the show, and man, I felt no pain in my legs at all.
We played our show, and it was mad fun, fifty thousand Kiwis bouncing in unison. The kids knew every word to every song, even the new ones, and it was an unbelievable rush. John was blazing on his guitar, Chad was an orchestra of cannons blasting off, Flea was a ball of primal aborigine energy, and I felt totally in control of myself as a singer and performer. And there was no pain! I was ready to kiss the earth.
It was all good, and when we got back to the hotel, I had sex with Claire and something unusual happened. We were fucking and fucking, and I just was not coming. That had never been a problem. Later, it crossed my mind that it might have been due to the Ultram, but how could it make me not come? It was supposed to be a glorified Advil, a non-narcotic. It made no sense.
I thought it was amazing that I could be getting pain relief from a non-narcotic pill that was also making me feel pretty nice. There had to be part of me that recognized the voice in my head saying, “Okay, you’re supposed to take your Ultram at three, and it’s noon now, so maybe you should take it a little early.” Halfway through the tour, I had to have my prescription refilled. But the doctor had told me it was not a narcotic, and I wasn’t getting goofy high, just a foundation of artificial well-being, which I was loving.
So we rocked Auckland and went on to the Gold Coast of Australia. We were the inaugural event at the Olympic Stadium in Sydney. Physically, I was in perfect health. My legs weren’t bothering me, I was exercising every day, running and swimming and stretching. Claire and I were having fantastic sex. I was loving the whole experience. But then I started to become aware of the fact that Flea was not experiencing the same euphoric joy of life and touring and music and people and skies. He was not on the same heavenly ambient wavelength.
Flea had been going through a lot of personal shit with his girlfriend for this whole Californication time. I knew he was down and sick and depressed and anguished about everything, but I also knew the situation was of his own making. We create a horribly painful bouillabaisse to sit in for years on end, until we can’t fucking sit there anymore; but it wasn’t like some evil fate flew into his ass, he created it. He sat there and masterminded his own misery. So he was troubled, but he had to appreciate that the love he was experiencing from both John and me was immense. We were backing him, we weren’t dissing him. It wasn’t like during the Mother’s Milk era, when John and I bonded up and left him unattached. And Flea can, at times, be a prima donna, especially earlier in the Dave era, when he was ready to quit the band at the drop of a hat.
Just for the record, anything negative that I ever say about Flea is only because he’s my brother and I love him. The fact is, it’s funny to take the piss out of ourselves. Each one of these guys, Flea, John, Chad, is individually a bridge to God for me, and there’s nothing I would do to change any of these people or the experiences I’ve had with them. Every one of them has given me love and music and the best life I could ever hope to have. But at the same time, I feel compelled to laugh at all of our foibles. I’m not poking fun at the relationship to feel better about myself; it’s just because we really are all such kooks.
Flea was suffering then, both emotionally and physically. He was feeling zapped and sapped and run-down and not centered. When we got to Melbourne, he called a band sit-down. Peter Mensch was there to tell us about our upcoming U.S. tour. And if we thought hitting Europe and the rest of the world was hard, Peter was about to tell us how many dates they were hoping to give us in the U.S.A. I was feeling gung-ho, let’s go. But Flea basically broke down and explained that he wasn’t able to enjoy this experience. You could tell by the look in his eyes that he was at his wits’ end.
That was when he proposed the idea of touring in three-week segments, then taking ten-day breaks between segments. It was a fairly revolutionary idea, and it made it nearly impossible to generate any money, because you have to keep your crew on salary for those ten days. You have to keep your buses and your trucks, and it’s the same amount of expenses, except for hotels, as being on tour, only you’re not making a penny.
We realized that doing this tour was not about making the maximum amount of money; it was about having the maximum amount of fun and enjoyment and staying healthy. We implemented that schedule and, to Flea’s credit, we stick to it religiously to this day.
Flea came up with another important idea. For a long time, we had both been charity-oriented and earlier, while we were on holiday at his house in Australia, he and I had talked about the idea of taking some of our profits and creating some sort of charitable organization. We decided to take 5 percent of our income from touring and give it away. Just give it to the best charities we could find, whether it was cancer research or children’s hospitals or music programs, whatever. That’s a pretty big percentage of income, because half always goes toward the expenses of touring, and then another 20 percent goes to the managers, and 5 percent to a lawyer, and another 5 percent to the accountants.
We went to John and Chad, and they both thought it was a great idea. It turned out to be an incredibly fun and positive change, because now we get the joy of helping all these people. It was shocking to the core how good it felt to be of service. Kids send us pictures of themselves and letters of gratitude and tell us how much it means to them to get some medical care or a playground or musical instruments. It was one of the best decisions we ever made as a team.
But that euphoria faded back to some fairly mundane realities. In Australia, Claire and I starting fighting again. There we were, walking down the great old section of Melbourne, and we got into a tiff. It wasn’t a poisonous fight; we were yelling at each other and she was socking me and I was grabbing her and it was a good, he
It was a testament to the potential of our volatility. There was no physical harm, but there was an intensity about us that would have made anyone stop and say, “Is everything all right here?” I remember thinking it was fun and playful, because I secretly liked it when she beat me up. She’s a big strong girl, and heaven forbid she gets her legs in the party, because then you’re going down.
After Big Day Out, Claire and I went back to L.A. and settled into our new digs together. We had been back for a week when I was invited to the NBA All-Star game, which was in San Francisco that year. The NBA was offering to provide us with a hotel, a car, tickets to the game, the works. Figuring we could spend a nice romantic weekend, we flew up. The hotel they put us in was not that nice a place, but it was free and in an interesting neighborhood. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t exciting, so afterward we drove back to the city and found a restaurant. We were getting along fine, sitting at an upstairs table, holding hands, and enjoying each other’s company. And then we made a huge mistake.