“My lyrics take care of me, like therapy, get sh*t off my chest.” That’s Dilated Peoples, from “Worst Comes to Worst”, and it’s a line I quote a lot. It’s the first thing I think of when someone mentions Scar Tissue.
In many ways that’s exactly what Anthony Kiedis has done with his life. He’s used his music to process it. And in this book he tells the story behind the songs.
If you don’t know him, Kiedis is the singer in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They’re a band with crazy longevity. They started out in Los Angeles in the early ’80s and they’re still going. Funk, punk, rock, then the big melodic records that came later. Along the way they lost friends and bandmates to addiction. Kiedis had his own long struggle with it too, and he doesn’t dress any of it up.
It starts with a wild Hollywood childhood, living with his dad in Los Angeles, and things get wilder from there. By the time the band takes off, Kiedis is already deep into the habits that will nearly finish him. The success and the addiction grow up side by side, and the book doesn’t pretend you can separate them.
It’s a raw book. He gets clean, relapses, gets clean again, and tells you about each time. Some of it is hard to read. All of it feels honest, and I think the honesty is the point.
I’ve been sober since 2014, so I’m drawn to people who tell the truth about this stuff. Recovery isn’t a straight line for most people, and books that pretend otherwise don’t help anyone. When someone is open about the messy bits, it makes it safer for the next person to be open about theirs.
A notebook and a pen
The line from the book I keep coming back to is about writing.
“When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn’t otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.”
Kiedis wrote constantly. Lyrics, poems, notes to himself. One of those notebook poems became “Under the Bridge”, after the producer Rick Rubin came across it and told him it should be a song. It’s about loneliness and the worst of his addiction, and it ended up being one of their biggest hits. Something he’d written just to get it out of his head ended up meaning a lot to millions of people.
There’s something about writing that slows your head down. In a conversation you can skip the awkward bits, change the subject, make a joke. In your own head you can go round in circles for years. The page just sits there and waits for you to finish the sentence.
Writing it down doesn’t fix anything on its own. What it does is get the thing out of your head and in front of you, where you can actually look at it. Kiedis says it shows you a side of your truth you don’t otherwise see, and I think he’s right. Half the time you don’t know what you think until you’ve written it.
I’ve been a DJ since 1987, so I’m biased. But I think music is one of the best tools we have for making sense of our lives. Scar Tissue is about the music, it’s about recovery, and it’s about finding peace through music. For Kiedis, the writing and the music are the same thing. One feeds the other.
This book and Flea’s book are both brilliant, and both really grabbed me. In some ways Flea’s might be even better. Read them together and you get the same band from two very different people. One is the frontman, the other is the bass player who’d been his friend since they were teenagers at school. Between them they tell the story of a band that had every reason to fall apart and somehow didn’t.
If you like a music book with some real weight to it, there are plenty more in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me.
You don’t have to be a rock star to get something out of a notebook. Nobody else ever has to read it. Maybe it’s time you got a bit of what’s going round in your head out onto a page, and saw what it had to say.
