![]() ![]() They flopped in the grass spine-to-spine, a pair of inside-out parentheses. He envisions literary fame for him akin to that of Patti Smith, who wrote a foreword in verse for Flea’s book (“providence assigned him an instrument/that in his hands formed a spectral voice”).īy this point, it was clear that Flea’s book-promotional duties would cost his Australian shepherds their trail run. ![]() Ritz said the decision to stop in 1983 was Flea’s idea, but also that it was the right call, and he’s convinced that in Flea he’s encountered the next great American writer at the start of a brilliant career. They began a creative conversation anyway. “That really pissed David Ritz off,” Flea said, laughing. He’s suspicious of books that credit a ghostwriter, he said, and didn’t want to write one that did. His favorite autobiographies include Luis Buñuel’s “My Last Sigh,” Harpo Marx’s “Harpo Speaks,” David Niven’s “The Moon’s a Balloon,” Miles Davis’s “Miles” and Charles Mingus’s “Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus” - all books in which the protagonist’s voice feels indelibly theirs, even if it’s mediated by a collaborator. Flea, who ran with other “petty thievin’ street rats,” also lost and found himself in the words of Kurt Vonnegut and the sound of Clifford Brown and Max Roach. But he was also drawn to music, basketball and books - structured forms, offering a sense of security he couldn’t come by in other parts of his life. He was a feral Huckleberry Finn running loose in a “Repo Man” world. It was the ’70s, and let me tell you, the ’70s in Hollywood were wild.” He described nights out until 4 in the morning, running into “every flavor of person, people in all kinds of inebriated states. “I got up to whatever I wanted all night long,” Flea said. In 1972, they moved to Los Angeles, chasing theoretical career opportunities for Walter, and Flea’s newly free-range upbringing became even less rule-bound. Walter became Flea’s stepfather, and life at home took a sharp turn for the bohemian. Patricia took Flea and his sister, Karyn, to live with Walter, a jazz bassist, in his parents’ basement in Larchmont. Flea’s parents split up and Mick Balzary returned to Australia alone. Instead, in New York, Flea writes, his mother Patricia took guitar lessons and fell in love with her teacher, Walter Urban. They’ve reached the point where traditional rock autobiographies tend to close the curtain - on the far side of the hurricane years, after all the Grammys and all the drugs, with their subjects sober and solid and selling out shows on the wonders-of-the-world circuit. In September and October, they played Rock in Rio in Brazil, a Formula 1 racing event in Singapore and a festival on a man-made island in Abu Dhabi. In March, the band performed at the Great Pyramid of Giza, like Frank Sinatra and the Grateful Dead before them. That band became the Red Hot Chili Peppers and persevered for three wild, shirtless decades, weathering the loss of members to addiction and attrition, not to mention the waning of alternative rock as a commercial force. In it he recounts how he took up bass guitar, learned to thumb and finger-pop its strings and formed a band with three high-school buddies: Hillel Slovak, Jack Irons and Anthony Kiedis. ![]() He’s just written his first book, a memoir called “Acid for the Children” that’s out Nov. “Like, your heart, your spirit, who you are - does it come out no matter what context you get put in?” he asked, “Or is it shaped immeasurably and irretrievably by your circumstances? I don’t know.” As the late-morning sun beat down on his graying skull and the tattoo-dotted arms under his Vin Scully T-shirt, he curled his battered bare toes in the grass just centimeters from an ashy fossil that was once a piece of dog waste, and began reckoning with the unanswerable: On a Thursday in mid-October, Flea sat in a patio chair he’d dragged down to the lawn, looking out at the green lake in his backyard. ![]()
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