The Red Hot Chili Peppers are not a band known for their intellectual pursuits and good taste. Now in their fourth decade as California’s preeminent musical amusement park, RHCP have long since ascended to the rarefied air where bands concern themselves with things like trying to better society through clumsy social messaging and passionate pleas for world peace. And to be sure, the Red Hots are no different: They’ve played rallies for Obama and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the Tibetan Freedom Concert, and they were appearing in Rock The Vote ads as far back as 1990. But just as you can never put the toothpaste back in the tube, you can never really put the tube sock back in the drawer, which is unfortunate. RHCP’s longest-standing political commitment is to goofiness at all costs, and that’s obscured the depth of their playing. Go back and listen to “Give It Away” and hear the bass turn itself inside out around the groove, and tell Les Claypool to pack up his mustache and go home.
The man responsible for that bass line, of course, is Michael Balzary, better known as Flea. If Anthony Kiedis is the band’s masculine yang (a word he’s surely rhymed with “wang” at some point), Flea is their yin, the sneakily smart and sensitive one whose dedication to the low end keeps them grounded. And just as Kiedis’ 2004 memoir, Scar Tissue, was a super-horny travelogue of women against whose bodies the singer occasionally docked, Flea’s new memoir, Acid For The Children, is a gentle-hearted look at the relationships that formed and informed his earliest days. Fittingly, it ends the day after his first gig with Kiedis, guitarist Hillel Slovak, and drummer Jack Irons.
Flea is not shy about his ambitions. He told Entertainment Weekly that he hopes the book can “stand on its own as a piece of literature,” and in an appendix lists Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and Arundhati Roy as authors whose books “blew my mind.” Like the Beastie Boys in their recent memoir, he chops his early life up into vignettes, each of them so energetically told that they feel like they’ve been fired out of a cannon. Even at its most incisive and gutting—his examination of the effect his wounded upbringing has had on his behavior from boyhood to the present, his clear-eyed assessment of his mother’s decision to leave his father for a down-and-out jazz musician—the depth of feeling he lends keeps the story moving with the same kind of energy he brings to the stage.
Acid For The Children’s closest analog is, somewhat surprisingly, Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Just as Smith—who is a longtime friend and collaborator of Flea’s, and who provides the book’s foreword—captured the grimy intimacy of life in New York in the late 1970s, Flea’s manic prose recreates the wild L.A. streets of the same era. He and Kiedis roam Hollywood as unsupervised teenagers, riding midnight buses, jumping into pools from apartment roofs, shooting coke and later heroin. They are amoral fraternal chaos unleashed, two poles with a trip-line strung between them that bowls over everyone in their path. Upon bringing Kiedis into the narrative nearly halfway through, Flea tells us that “Anthony lived with the same fear and separateness that kept me totally disengaged from the social process… He went hard and challenged the external world. I went hard the other way, slipping deeper into an interior world.”
While the relationship between the two musicians should form the emotional crux of the story—“I think if I really understood it, the cosmic energy might leak out,” he writes of its complexity—the book’s pithiness keeps it from truly lifting off. This early chapter is the last time Flea writes with any depth about what he considers one of the most profound relationships of his life. Smith recognized that her early years couldn’t be understood apart from her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and her patient remembrance of the complexities of their time together is why Just Kids so affected people who never owned a copy of Horses. By front-loading the way he feels about Kiedis, thoughtfully written though it may be, Flea never allows us to see the complications in their relationship play out over time. It’s a disappointment, especially because Acid For The Children suggests he’s both talented and empathetic enough to give their story its due.
Flea can be maddeningly uneven on a sentence level, too. In the book’s opening chapter, he writes lyrically of how a recent trip to Ethiopia returned him to the root of his motivations as a musician, and about the “burning thing inside me that has kept me always curious, always seeking, yearning for something more.” In the same chapter, he makes reference to “the godzzz,” uses a six-period ellipsis (twice!), and offsets the phrase “boom bap boom ba boom bap” into its own paragraph. The prose frequently mimics his playing: occasionally beautiful, occasionally outrageous, in conversation with a small group of predecessors but unwilling to follow anyone else’s rules.
This is what gives Acid For The Children its considerable charm, and Flea knows it. And it’s worth asking whether 400 pages of sober and reflective storytelling is what we want from the dude who played Woodstock ’99 naked. Taken on its own terms, Acid For The Children feels remarkably close to the bone, its author nuanced in his understanding of himself, his hang-ups, and his surroundings. “I may well be… an uneducated animal who runs on instinct and feeling,” he writes. “But this is my voice.”
37 Comments
“and hear the bass turn itself inside out around the groove, and tell Les Claypool to pack up his mustache and go home.”This is a garbage take. Flea is great (his band…well, let’s say they haven’t aged well) but Claypool is definitely a better bass player. It’s not even close. Also, I hope that Flea goes into his time on the “Suburbia” set cause he’s pretty great as the weird kid in that.
Les may be a better bass player but Primus can’t touch RHCP…. I would love an entire book on Suburbia.
And they aged fine, their last album produced by Danger Mouse was dope.
post 90’s RHCP is so tame and boring compared to their early efforts. I will say that Flea’s movie cameos have been hilarious…“The Big Lebowski” ‘98
“Son in Law” ‘93
“The Chase” ‘94“Back to the Future II” ‘90
Fully agree. I think Flea is awesome in every way. I’m not a big Kiedis fan I guess…
I miss their funkiness, but they also hit their 40’s (and now late fifties, yikes) and I appreciate how they don’t try to do the exact same thing every album. I absolutely love By the Way and their last album.
lol
RHCP suck after Mother’s Milk to me. I do like their early stuff (and saw them on said Milk tour) but I never liked them when they lost that punk vibe they had.
I love both their old and newer stuff and consider them more or less different bands entirely, I just can’t see them really doing the same stuff post-MM as they got older and sobered up. Punk is also at its best when it’s from relatively unknown musicians, not megastars.
Plus it’s ridiculous when super-comfortable, mega-wealthy middle agers try to recreate music that was based on rebelliousness and angst. At least Perry Farrell learned that after Strays with JA (although I think it’s a fine album, just kind of silly under the circumstances).
Radio ruined RHCP for me. I can still listen to Primus but not Kiedis
As much as I love Les Claypool, I still can’t tell if he’s ever had any formal training. Anybody know?
I feel like the answer is probably yes, cause the guy can play a lot of complicated stuff theory wise.
Honestly, they have evolved with the times and I’d argue they HAVE aged well(as in them as musicians, not their older music). Their last few albums are vastly different from Blood Sugar Sex Magick, which is when the AV Club seems to have stopped listening to them. I wouldn’t argue that they’re super deep or profound, and their songs still mention California and dating now much younger women. But there’s a maturity to it. Their metaphors for wang would be much more subtle. Also Flea has gone a long way to study music theory and learn more beyond the rock lifestyle, and now is a huge sponsor of music education.
I’d argue that all of their albums up to and including Californication were interesting in their own way and quite different from one another but then they just kind of stopped progressing. Nobody needs a 150 min album.
By the Way would’ve been a good stopping point I’d argue. It was largely a John Frusciante work but it was more psychedelic and melodic than their original ther albums, stadium Arcadium I liked but they could’ve cut it to one disc and it didn’t really break new ground for them
Their material up through Blood Sugar Sex Magic still sounds still pretty great today.
Oh god no. Every fucking song they release these days sounds like Californication which is terrible enough.
That’s why I said up through BSSM.
I’m including BSSM in that litany of shit
It was lesser than the two immediately preceding it, but it was still good.
Having seen Claypool/Lennon Delirium earlier this year I have to concur: Flea is a damn fine bass player but he doesn’t stack up against the likes of Claypool.
I agree, that statement is strangely seething with unneeded vitriol. Les and Flea both deserve recognition for their considerable musical contributions.
Agreed. Les > FleaPrimus > RHCPFlea is a great bassist for his genre, but Claypool takes that instrument into ridiculous territory. Also, the fake RHCP song Abracadabralifornia proved how ridiculous this band is. Like the live human version of Chlamydia.
There’s really no point in saying one is “better” than the other; Claypool especially is kind of a thing unto himself, at times incredibly sloppy but sounds only like him.
Mingus couldn’t sound like Les, Flea couldn’t sound like Mingus, and comparing them to figure out who was “better” is pointless.
There’s plenty of point in debating this: it’s what the internet was made for.And I like Flea: I took umbrage at the column’s snide remark about said mustache. I dislike the Peppers in general and their later work specifically.
I mean, point taken, but: their respective styles are different enough as to make comparison pointless.
Claypool plays crazy shit that Ray Brown never thought of, but the suggestion that Les is better than Ray is…a dumb suggestion. Apples to oranges is my point.
I like RCHP up to BSSM (although I haven’t listened to them in at least 15 years), and while I respect Primus (learned every song off of every album up to “Sailing the Seas of Cheese”), their later catalog is really, really not great. “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver?” Yikes.
If you can, get the audio book. It’s just bass.
?
How low can you go?
I’ve done a side-by-side comparison and half of Flea’s Acid for the Children is plagiarized from this book. Pretty disappointing.
So you’re new to rock and roll. I’m not sure how you got set up writing a review on a book by a rock star already; but welcome.
“It was at that exact moment that I discovered a tube sock could be used for for more than just putting on your feet”
There’s a Faith No More book out now too which I still haven’t read. I’ll take FNM over RHCP any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.
I hope the book delves into his collaboration with Ozzie and Slash.
sick Chrono Trigger reference