Red Hot Chili Peppers "We're assholes willing to admit it"
"I had no idea what the future would be like, but I knew I didn't want to wear shoes."
The lights come on.
The future must be this because he appears barefoot.
Thousands of people roar in any stadium in the world.
And then jump on stage.
Only.
Without shoes.
Naked, actually.
With the same brand of T-shirts as Iggy Pop.
No more warmth than a basketball sock hanging between his legs like a used condom
.
Hitting chimpanzee jumps.
Hugging a '61 Fender Jazz. BOOM.
BAP.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BA.
PUM.
He grimaces like an ape and bangs all four strings with such lust that you don't know if he's playing the bass or fucking him.
One day he thought:
If I played, I would go to another fucking world.
I would move with the music like a wild animal, I would let myself be carried where it wants to drag me »
.
So he didn't stop playing until he became one of the best.
The second best bass player in history for
Rolling Stone
magazine readers
, behind only John Entwistle and ahead of McCartney.
That trip - never better said the trip - is the plot of
Acid for the children
, a book that arrives today in Spain (Dome) and that narrates in first person the journey of a vulnerable child with the face of an angel born in Australia with Named after Michael Peter Balzary to become the wild Flea, the sock guy, icon and co-founder of the mythical funk rock band
Red Hot Chili Peppers
.
Point and end of the book.
Just when the lights come on and the audience roars, in that "other fucking world," the story ends.
If you are looking for the kinky intimacies of a band that has sold almost 90 million records, luxurious hotel rooms on fire and fights between
celebrities
, this is not your book.
"I am far enough from childhood to have an objective view of it.
It is the reason why I write about it in my book.
My childhood is over.
But not the band, the band is happening now.
I still don't have enough distance ”, explained the musician during the promotion of an autobiography so difficult to classify as its protagonist.
Throughout more than 400 pages and a hundred and odd chapters, many of them just a paragraph, Flea draws the self-portrait of a small blond Melbourne boy who at the age of five moved to the suburbs of New York, who grew up threatened by the violence of his father first and his stepfather later, trapped in a more than dysfunctional family, sheltered in books and fascinated by music.
So agile that it seemed to float in the air like a flea
.
So fragile that he peed on the bed until he was a teenager.
Little Mike then traveled to Los Angeles delighted with the idea of running around California half-naked and never dressed again.
He spent 20 years stealing without ever getting caught.
He discovered jazz in the basement of his mother's boyfriend, he
became a virtuoso on the trumpet imitating Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie
.
He fell in love after Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles and hooked on Kareem's hooks on the Lakers before hooking on everything else.
At age 12, he smoked a joint for the first time.
“
I loved that floating sensation
.
There, lying down, traveling, flying, feeling good and sheltered, enjoying the lights and shadows in my room, thinking in a new way, I decided at that moment: 'Yes, this is for me.'
That I got out of my drug days without contracting AIDS is one of the luckiest points in my life.
Then came the angel dust.
"It's like smoking death, you feel your neurons die in real time."
And then cocaine, acid, crack, and even joints with rat poison, MDMA, and heroin
.
Three-headed elephants, dwarf tigers, and dragons.
«I thought incredible, a true artist.
What an idiot ”, he says in the book.
"That I got out of my drug days without contracting AIDS is one of the luckiest points in my life."
That her friendship with
Anthony Kiedis
survives to this day
is another miracle.
They met when they were 14 years old, they stormed every chalet in Beverly Hills to jump from the rooftops to the pool like tourists in Magaluf, they got into everything together and half created one of the best music bands in history.
"I've been a total jerk to him a million times, and I love him more than anyone else in the world
.
"
While learning to move his fingers with a bass between his arms with no other plan than to become "primitive", Flea peeked into the cinema.
He made cameos in
Suburbia, Back to the Future
or
My Private Idaho
.
He tried several youth bands and ended up inventing his with three colleagues.
After almost 40 years on stage, the Red Hot are planning a new album this year, but that's another story. "From the first note, our band was a huge success, as big as it could ever be," says Flea.
“I could see the road in front of me, but like Dorothy and Toto, I had no idea what it entailed to walk it.
He couldn't even see the dedication and sacrifices it would take to stay there.
But there was no doubt that everything was there, I saw it clear as water ».
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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