Scar Tissue

Anthony Kiedis is helped through the physical and grammatical nuts and bolts of this story by Larry Sloman, and the writing is gentle when you compare it to the contents. We are dropped right in at the deep end, in the present and beginning day of Kiedis’ biographical journey, when he is being treated for Hep C, by a beautiful nurse with a syringe. This links seamlessly into his struggle (and previous embrace) with more drugs than humans have digits, all taken intravenously. His journeys inward are reproduced in the most outward fashion, as we take the same knockbacks and avoid the same near fatal punches as Kiedis did on his path to stardom and, now, enlightenment of the kind only one who has almost died can recapture. It’s a story people will be unable to avoid being drawn in by, no matter what their salt or vice. A legendary life given a more than satisfactory outlet.