By Lawrence Grobel

In Anthony Kiedis's just-published memoir Scar Tissue he describes a scene from 1997 in which he and a drug dealer pull into the parking lot of a "cheap hooker motel on Sunset" Boulevard. The dealer went to score some dope. "I was waiting in the truck, when this family got out of their car and headed for their room.... I looked over at their car and saw a Chili Peppers bumper sticker on it. Then I looked at the kids, and they both had on Chili Peppers T-shirts. I felt horribly ashamed and embarrassed. I slouched in my seat and pulled the visor down. Here was a family of fans proud to fly their Red Hot colors, and I was at the same motel but trying to score drugs from some insidious dope dealer."

It got worse. There came a time when he had no money in his pocket and an overwhelming need for some heroin. "What I did have was a beautiful white Stratocaster guitar signed by all of the Rolling Stones.... I was so desperate that I bartered the signed guitar for some drugs that would get me high for about ten minutes."

If it's sex, drugs and rock and roll you want to read about, Kiedis has written the book, one that can share space on the shelf with William Burroughs's Junky and Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight as a detailed blow-by-blow revelation of what it's like to sink into the sordid world of self-destruction and despair. This is a brave, no-holds-barred, 465-page confession. It's not glamorous (though he does describe a hell of a lot of blow jobs by beautiful women), and it's not uplifting (Kiedis never really knew what bandmate Flea thought of his drug use, even though they had been friends since high school).

Scar Tissue is a glimpse into a world most of us don't know. We see the Chili Peppers rocking out on stage, we listen to their records and we think these guys have to be the coolest mofos on the planet. Then you read Kiedis's book and you wonder how he managed to live through all the relapses and screwups to write it. ("My closet was filled with the accoutrements of serious damage-doing. I had jackets that had drugs, jackets that had pipes, jackets that had syringes, jackets that had money, jackets that had Polaroid sex photos, the whole gamut.")

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been around for more than two decades. They've changed drummers and guitarists, but the core of Kiedis and Flea has remained throughout. They lost their friend and guitarist Hillel Slovak to drugs, and then lost guitarist John Frusciante for the period between Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Californication (when they put out One Hot Minute with guitarist Dave Navarro). But the miracle of the band is that they have improved with each new album. Californication was a huge hit, and they followed that with their most soulful record to date, By the Way. But it hasn't been easy. Kiedis has loved and lost more times than even a guy with his looks and talent deserves. He has been in and out of rehab, he has been sober for five years and then relapsed for months, then sobered up, then relapsed. Currently he is going on four years of sobriety and counting. But, as he says at the end of his book, "a week doesn't go by when I'm not visited by the idea of getting loaded."

In a 2002 article in the LA Weekly, John Albert wrote: "More than any current artist, Kiedis appears to have lived the quintessential L.A. experience, having been a child actor, a drug addict, a rock star, a hedonist and a spiritualist."

I went to see the single, clean and sober Kiedis at his new house in one of the canyons of Beverly Hills, which he currently shares with his dog Buster.

Playboy.com: So what motivated you to write Scar Tissue?

Anthony Kiedis: I was prompted by a friend. I was entertaining him with stories from the '80s and he said, "You have to write this in a book." I didn't think I was old enough to write my memoirs, but he coerced me to lose a ton of money in the stock market and as a way of making up for that he found me a great book deal. He introduced me to this crazy book agent, then put all the wheels in motion. In my mind I thought I could do this in a few weeks, but it turned into a year-long labor of love/get me out of this.

PB: What was the most difficult part of the book to write?

AK: Just committing to it for so long. And then dealing with the book publisher, dealing with the lawyers, who called me up and said, "We can't use half this book unless you get permission from all these people." And I said, "Why? It's just my opinion of what happened." But they said I could be sued for slander, libel, blah blah blah. So I was on the phone with lawyers for hours every day, going over stuff that happened 25 years ago. They were telling me what I could say, suggesting ways to rephrase things. It seems like you should be able to say whatever you want in a book.

PB: Did you get permission from your parents? From Flea?

AK: No, oddly enough, they only wanted permission from ex-girlfriends and celebrities. Any public figure that I had an opinion on. I jokingly referred to Posh Spice as a shopaholic from my one encounter with her. The English lawyers called to say I couldn't call Posh a shopaholic, that it was inflammatory. My assistant got a random call from a writer from Rolling Stone who wrote a book with Dave Navarro. He said, "I hear Anthony says some negative things about Dave." It's not true, but that's how rumors get going.

PB: What if Navarro says something nasty about you in his book?

AK: I could care less. Anyone can say anything about me. And they have, for years. Maybe there was a time when I found it upsetting, but at this point it's water off a duck's back. It's funny to see how twisted people's concepts are.

PB: What about your bandmates -- will they be surprised or upset by anything you wrote?

AK: Upset, for sure. Surprised, no. The band dynamic creates an inherent egocentric tension because there's this competitive brotherly love thing that's constantly going on. It's not possible to write a book like this without somebody in my band saying, "Why did you say that about me?" Or, "How come you didn't say this about me?" Or, "What about all that other stuff you didn't talk about?" I'm sure that Flea, because we're so close and because our memories vary so wildly on events, will have a word or two with me, if he decides to read it.


PB: You write about having sex with Flea's sister, and are descriptive about her giving you head. Will Flea be cool with that?

AK: I actually asked Flea before I printed it if he was okay with it. At that moment his mood was such that he said, "Yup, I'm fine with everything." When I say stuff like that, it's not to call attention to people; it's to say, Look, we all have our perverted side. We all have our sexual mishaps and misadventures. We all have our weaknesses and strengths, stuff that we're ashamed of and stuff that we're proud of. It's to shine a light on it. It is not to say, Oooh, look, I got a blow job from your sister. Who cares? We all do this stuff, and we don't have to be so taboo about everything. And it's okay to say, Yeah, we're all human beings and we have these natures that we keep in the closet, but I'm not going to hide behind it.

PB: You write about various women you have fallen for -- some of whom you tired of, others tired of you. But one, Sinead O'Connor, seemed incomplete: You got along, then she dumped you without any explanation. Have you ever figured out what happened there?

AK: There is no definitive explanation. I made an ass of myself by being so incredibly infatuated at a certain point. That infatuation works to a degree and inspired me to write all this stuff that I would give to her, but it was an overload of diabolical romantic strangeness. It culminated with this thing of going to the Academy Awards -- I wanted to go with her and she ended up going with Daniel Day-Lewis. Then she just skipped town. It was very abrupt. When I ran into her years later, and I saw her in the back of a limousine with Peter Gabriel, I looked at her and she looked at me: I said hello, she smiled real big and acted like nothing ever happened. Okay, if she wanted to act that way then I'd have to just let it be. She's just prone to being unpredictable. Crazy. I loved all of her antics; everyone should have a voice to say whatever the fuck they want to say.

PB: You also write about dating Sofia Coppola, whom you call the coolest girl you had gone out with. What was so cool about Sofia?

AK: She's got a certain brand of cool that can't be matched. She's super smart and different. Her demeanor was not typical in any way. She lived in an artistic way. Coming from her background, the way she went about working and being a person seemed honorable and beautiful to me. She has a quietness about her that's appealing. We were approaching coupledom status when it fell off the rails. This was years before she became a director.

PB: You were a pretty precocious kid -- writing a note to your dad that you'd like to have sex with his young girlfriend. Were you surprised when he agreed?

AK: His first response was, "I'm okay with it, let me talk to the girl." There was a lot of narcotic social lubricant happening at that moment, so everyone's judgment was very much chemically induced. We were so openly in discussion about women at that time, I wasn't surprised.

PB: But afterward, when you wanted to do it with his next girlfriend, he said no.

AK: That's because he was madly in love with the girl. His heart was involved.


PB: You write about how your dad included you in his pot-smuggling escapades. You describe checking in seven suitcases at the airport, all filled with pot, and collecting them in Wisconsin where your dad would deal them. You considered this a bonding experience for the two of you, but you were like 12 years old. What was your dad thinking?

AK: He was thinking that I was a good beard. Being seen with a kid defused any criminal suspicions that law enforcement might have had. That's a pretty good grift, having a little kid with you while you're doing something illegal. It would be like, Oh, that's a father and son, there certainly can't be a hundred pounds of weed in those suitcases.

PB: Did he ever think he was putting you at risk?

AK: It must have crossed his mind, because he and I were constantly at risk, from age six when I would come to visit and they would be doing giant dope deals out of [his house in] Topanga. I'd be in the house and there would be piles of drugs and piles of money and piles of people. But he must have thought it was okay. He was willing personally to take the chance with his own life. And he must have felt that whatever happened, I would be okay.

PB: You describe scenes where biker gangs would attack him and you'd jump in to save his ass by explaining that he was wasted on drugs. Did you ever feel like the child was the father of the man?

AK: Yeah. That was after seeing Tommy at a movie theater, where four guys tried to attack him and any one of them could have killed him. It was good training for life, being thrown into a crisis and having to be quick on your feet.

PB: Your dad gave you some weed, Thai sticks and hash when you went back to Michigan for the summer of 1975: You were 12 at the time. Is that something you would ever do if you had a kid?

AK: No way. Hell, no. I'm willing to ride out the mistakes my kids are going to make, and I'll try not to be a domineering freak, but kids are going to do whatever they're going to do. You have to give them your best experience, strength and hope, and then let go.

PB: You and a friend took two acid trips in the eighth grade. Did that get scary?

AK: Not even close. We were so welcoming to that experience. I read about LSD and I never looked forward to trying a drug as much as I did with LSD. I was consumed with the idea of experiencing that type of altered consciousness -- whether it was heroin, peyote or LSD. The acid we got was very pure. We took one trip in BelAir and got the suburban L.A. thing. We took another down in Mexico where we stayed in the ocean for eight hours. It was fantastic. No fear, no trepidation.

PB: You added heroin to your intake of cocaine when you were 14. What's the difference between the two drugs?

AK: They're polar opposites, which makes them go perfectly together. I've never understood why most people don't get that. Cocaine is a bummer without heroin. I've met hundreds of addicts who only take cocaine, and I wondered how they lived through all the miserable come-downs. One releases all the serotonin in your brain, and the other releases all the dopamine. These are two very euphoric chemicals. One [cocaine] flashes in a pan and then leaves you deleted and one [heroin] keeps releasing until you become completely strung out. So you really need both. It was described to me by a doctor that cocaine releases the chemical in your brain that is associated with listening to rhythmic music, where you want to get up and dance, like with James Brown; and heroin releases the same chemical that is released when you hear beautiful melody, which makes tears come from your eyes. Sometimes you want to dance, sometimes you want that emotional connection. It was just a fluke that I stumbled into the fact that they go well together.

PB: Before you turned 24 you felt you were "withering away, mentally, spiritually, physically, creatively -- everything was fading out." How did you manage to turn that around?

AK: For me it was knowing people who were sober and who had been junkies like me before. I reached a point where I could not do it anymore. It wasn't working. I wasn't able to escape, no matter how much I put in my body. I could not get away. I called someone and said, "I don't know what to do. I can't get high. I can't stay sober." That's when I got shipped off to a rehab.

PB: At 24 you proudly claimed that you were clean for the first time since you were 11. But it didn't last, did it?

AK: No.

PB: You said you relapsed because you didn't know anybody who was sober. That's a pretty sobering comment.

AK: I also didn't realize how much work it took to create a psychic change sufficient to maintain sobriety. I fooled myself into thinking, If I can stay sober for a month, I'm good. It's an experience of daily maintenance. It's principles to live by. You can't do it for a little while and then go back to not maintaining your condition and think that you're going to stay sober.

PB: You also said that you had no idea how Flea felt about your drug use, that he was afraid you were going to die on him. You've been friends since high school, so how come you never talked about it?

AK: It was denial on my part. That's me being a crazy-assed drug user, feeling impervious to death myself, thinking I'm never going to die. Even though people around me are dying and what I'm doing could kill me any minute, I never felt like I was going to die. So why should anyone else feel like I'm about to die?

PB: You write that what grounds you today is your obsession with drugs, and that not a week goes by when you don't think about getting loaded. Do you think that will ever change?

AK: It's true. It's going to sound worse to the normie than to the person who's in recovery. It's not a problem. It's a pretty healthy fear to have. I don't become obsessed with the thought. It doesn't have a physical power over me. When you're strung out and you don't use for a while, you get obsessed with the idea of using and you have a physical reaction: a stomach ache, your bowels churn, you get nervous, your hair stands on end, your skin crawls. You have to have it, your body demands it. That does not happen to me. When I get a thought it's intentional, letting me know it's still who I am. It's not tormenting, it's very comfortable.

PB: What do you think about prescribed drugs, like antidepressants?

AK: I'm not a fan of antidepressants. Depression is a part of life. It's not the worst thing in the world. Find a way to accept that emotion and do something other than take a fucking pill to deal with it, like changing your lifestyle or going to any length to get well, without taking a psychotropic drug. That makes more sense than taking a pill to alter your chemistry. That's a Band-Aid. You're just fucking with your head's chemistry even worse. It's a real cop-out by the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry.

PB: What do you do today to release the dopamine and serotonin in your brain?

AK: My chemistry is in great shape these days, so it happens naturally. When I listen to music, when I look at the sky, when I'm with my friends, when I sleep with my dog, when I swim, run, or ride my Vespa down the hill. I don't have to release them all at once anymore; I can take them as they're doled out by nature.

PB: When you were younger, did you dream about being a rock singer?

AK: I never planned on being a singer when I was growing up. It was a toss-up between crime and some sort of poetic art form, whether it was acting or writing.

PB: When did you realize that you didn't have to have a great voice to have a place in the world of music?

AK: It wasn't so much the voice, but hearing Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and their song "The Message" I realized that rhyming and developing a character were another way to do it. That rap song permeated the pop consciousness of America. And I thought it was cool. You could write poetry and create stories with colors and ambience with music, and you didn't have to be a master of melody. That's when I thought I could do something of a musical nature without the training. It became a matter of whether the voice was interesting.

PB: Why do you think the Chili Peppers have been able to continue recording for so many years when many alternative rock bands, like Nirvana and Jane's Addiction, couldn't make it, especially since your band has had many of the same drug problems and personal issues that broke up other groups?

AK: There's no good explanation. With Nirvana, the death of their leader had a lot to do with it. Had Cobain survived his drug addiction he probably would have continued to evolve. He had that kind of mind and enthusiasm for music other than his own that would keep him interested in changing. That's a big part of it: being willing to change. Not to force a change or keep up with something, but just to keep yourself stimulated so you want to try something new. It doesn't matter in which direction -- you might get turned on by music that came out in the '20s.

PB: When Flea was asked what each of you do on a night off while on tour he said he would stay in his room and meditate, Chad would go to a strip club and get drunk, John would do yoga and play guitar, and he wouldn't know what you would do.

AK: It really depends on where we are. Instead of getting stuck in the dismal routine of hotel rooms I feel best when I'm out there making the most of the night air. I used to get fucked up in all kinds of different clubs in the earlier years of our existence. I've spent a lot of time listening to music, talking late-night on the phone.

PB: John Frusciante has released some solo material this year. Do you have any plans to do the same?

AK: I hope not. I would if I had to, but I hope I don't have to. There is no one that I'd rather play with than the guys I'm playing with. There is nothing that I have to say that I can't say in this band. John, because he doesn't write the lyrics or sing the lead vocals in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, has that voice in him to write lyrics and sing lead vocals, so he has to go make solo records, because it's in him. He would be insane not to. If, God forbid, this dissolved, then I would have to find a solo avenue. But I'm not going to find better people to play with.

PB: How does being on the road today compare with what it was like in the late '80s and early '90s?

AK: Very different. It's all great. I feel fortunate to have experienced the entire gamut of touring possibilities. A lot of bands stay at one level, the club level, and never get to experience all these other levels, of playing festivals, arenas, stadiums. Other bands become so popular immediately that they never get the pleasure of paying their dues. We've experienced every single level. When we were playing the shit-hole clubs of America we were having so much fun, it was so thrilling to go out there and play for 40 people in Ohio who didn't know what they were in for, and just grabbed them by the throat with jokes and energy. Now we get to go to Hyde Park and play for 80,000 people three nights in a row. It's a whole different mindset. Now we get on a plane and fly at 3 a.m. from Brussels to Edinburgh and stay in these exotic hotels. It wouldn't be nearly as interesting, though, if we hadn't experienced all of the stepping stones along the way.

PB: Do you still have as many girls knocking on your hotel door offering blow jobs as you did years ago?

AK: It was wilder then. The groupies are still there, it's just that now we're very insulated and isolated from a lot of the people we play for. I kind of miss the randomness of the way it was.

PB: When you were working on By The Way, you wrote a lot more than you put out. What happened to all those songs?

AK: A lot of them wound up being used as B-sides for singles in weird foreign releases. So about eight songs that were left over came out, but you'll never see them unless you're an avid collector who has to get the Japanese single or the import single. So those songs come in handy because they go to the nitty gritty of the fans. They'll know songs like "Out of Range," which isn't a best-selling song on a CD. Then we wrote a dozen new songs for the greatest hits record, and used only two on that. So we have all these other songs. The messed-up thing for us is that the excitement comes from writing more new songs, so instead of taking those earlier songs, which are good, and working them onto a new record, we want to write new ones. We've already written a bunch of new songs for our new record.

PB: Will it be different from the last one?

AK: It's always different.

PB: When will the next record come out?

AK: When it's ready. Less than a year. We'll get into the studio in late November.

PB: You played for the Creative Coalition at the Democratic convention in New York. Will you be doing anything more to get out the vote?

AK: We've considered playing in some of the swing states, going to New Mexico and Ohio with Bruce Springsteen. But then we got busy writing music and stopped thinking about it. Our ambition is to create beauty rather than to fight ugliness. We would rather try to make people happy than to try and stop them from being sad.