Acid For The Children By Flea
“The compelling new memoir by the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist is a coming-of-age bromance in the vein of Patti Smith’s ‘Just Kids’
Born Michael Peter Balzary, more famously known as Flea, bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers changed the directions of his creative sails to write a coming of age memoir, detailing stories of his youth.
The Blurb:
With “virtuosic vulnerability” (The Atlantic), the iconic bassist and Red Hot Chili peppers co-founder pens a love letter to a youth spent wild in Los Angeles in his raw and riveting coming-of-age memoir.
In Acid for the Children, Flea takes readers on a deeply personal and revealing tour of his formative years, spanning from Australia to the New York City suburbs to, finally, Los Angeles. Through hilarious anecdotes, poetical meditations, and occasional flights of fantasy, Flea deftly chronicles the experiences that forged him as an artist, a musician, and a young man. His dreamy, jazz-inflected prose makes the Los Angeles of the 1970s and 80s come to gritty, glorious life, including the potential for fun, danger, mayhem, or inspiration that lurked around every corner. It is here that young Flea, looking to escape a turbulent home, found family in a community of musicians, artists, and junkies who also lived on the fringe. He spent most of his time partying and committing petty crimes. But it was in music where he found a higher meaning, a place to channel his frustration, loneliness, and love. This left him open to the life-changing moment when he and his best friends, soul brothers, and partners-in-mischief came up with the idea to start their own band, which became the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Acid for the Children is the debut of a stunning new literary voice, whose prose is as witty, entertaining, and wildly unpredictable as the author himself. It’s a tenderly evocative coming-of-age story and a raucous love letter to the power of music and creativity from one of the most renowned musicians of our time.
My Review:
Give me memoirs of all the artists I adore but promise me they won’t disappoint- a “never meet your heroes” type of mentality comes over me when these memoirs pop-up on the shelves of my local Indigo book stores. Regardless, I take a deep breath and dive right in. Well, who ever said never meet your heroes has never met a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
This memoir uses vulnerability and Flea wearing his heart on his sleeve, which really shouldn’t come as a surprise. His stories make you smile, laugh and cry. At the core, Acid For The Children is an artists love story between Flea and front man Anthony Kiedis. Flea writes, “it was next-level shit — the spirit of adventure, the street hustle, the getting high, the art, the philosophy, the burning desire to make something happen. Nothing I did freaked him out, and I’d freaked out every friend I ever had.”
Don’t read this memoir if you are expecting behind the scenes stories of the rock n’ roll war stories of the chili peppers. It’s not that type of autobiography.
thanks, very interesting 🙂