Physical Graffiti
Flea: I went to see Black Flag at the Starwood and I just thought it was disgusting. I hated it and people were getting the shit kicked out of them for having long hair and people were being carried away in ambulances - a bloody, violent thing. It really made me sick and scared. Punk rock was awful. Then about a year later I took a hit of acid and went to see this band Fear and they were really tight, fast and aggressive and blew my mind. A week later they lost their bass player and I was in Fear. I was like 18.
Anthony: When Hillel and I were kids, and Flea also, we were heavy-duty drug experimenters. We took LSD, we did cocaine, we did heroin, smoked a lot of pot and did a lot of alcohols and different combinations of barbituates. But it was all in good fun: we weren’t slaves to the drugs. As kids, we considered these mind-expanding situations to just view life in a different way. Then, eventually, tile passes and you either become an addict or you don’t.
Flea: This friend of ours named Gary Allen had this weird cabaret lip-synch freaky dance costume thing and he wanted us to get together an opening act for a JOKE and we got it together - Anthony, Hillel, jack and I. We never rehearsed it. I had a funky bass line and Anthony had a poem and he’d never really been in front of a mike before. We had one song, and we did it and people went wild. It was called “Out in LA,” which is still the song we open with to this very day. The next show we did we had two songs and we just started doing shows and literally within a matter or two or three months we were the hottest band in L.A.
Anthony: Flea never really lost it to drugs. He had his experimental phase, realized he couldn’t handle it, and then he put them away. Hillel and I kept taking them - we needed that extra comfort that they were offering us - until we became addicted to a few different substances. The more time passed, the more he and I began to isolate, individually, get away from the band, families and friends.
Flea: I met Anthony in high scholl when I was 15. I didn’t have any friends and he didn’t either and we decided to go o this crazy ski trip. We got in the Greyhound and went skiing at Mammoth Mountain and we would sleep in the laundry room of this condo and put qurters in the dryer to stay warm. We were also little thieves. Tree was making wontons one night and I had this little apartment and we were like starving at the time. I got arrested for stealing wonton skins. I went to jail and I was hassled in jail by these gay guys and I told myself never steal again.
Anthony: My friends and my family were all afraid I was going to die, ’cause I would just take too much too often, for too long period of time. Hillel was much more subtle and much more cunning in his disguise. He had everyone believing that he had it under control, until a certain time came when I became so familiar with the nature of addiction that I knew he was in as deep as me, but he was just more in denial.
Flea: I was a receptionist in my animal hospital until I came in on acid one day…no, I got fired after Anthony and I hitchhiked up to San Fransisco one weekend and gave ourselves mohawks.We tried to sneak on the train but we were getting really wasted on the train and they kicked us off in like San Jose or Santa Barbara - someplace weird - and we got picked up by this transvestite. We had this insane weekend of sleeping on people’s porches, covered in newspapers, being woken by cops prodding us with sticks, doing a lot of unmentionably weird things. On the way back, we hopped a freight train full of beets and buried ourselves in the beets. We thought, “this sure is going smoothly.” We had stopped. We had gone five miles to the beet factory. We got a ride from this Mexican fugitive with a big tatoo on his neck that said “Los Venos Chicos.” When we got to L.A, he said, “Hey, you guys can have the car. I stole it.” I drove it a block, got scared, and abandoned it.
Anthony: I tried to turn Hillel onto going to AA: “Come to these meetings with me, we’ve got to be clean, because we’ve got the Red Hot Chili Peppers in common, we’ve got our friendship in common, we grew up together, we love each other, I want to spend my life with you making music.” I would write him letters, ’cause it was real hard for me to tell him to his face how much I loved him and how much I wanted to make music with him. We would both clean up, and then we’d both start using again - but Hillel thought he had power over the dark side.
I found out he was dead and I went to Mexico for a week, to this little fishing village way, way down, with a population of like a hundred Mexicans. I just lived in this little hut on the beach, basically drying out, ’cause I had already gotten back into it by the time he’d died. I went directly into a hospital for a couple weeks and I’ve been clean ever since.
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