Blowing his own trumpet
Michael Peter Balzary isn’t the first rock star to write about his childhood. He’s not even the first rock star to write about his childhood in his own band. But the artist known as Flea – the bassist who has defined the sound of the Red Hot Chili Peppers as well as moonlighting with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Blur’s Damon Albarn, Patti Smith and Tom Waits among many others – has certainly excelled at it in his memoir Acid for the Children.
It’s an intriguing book for what it is – a scattershot blast through the musician’s hazardous formative years – and for what it’s not. It’s not the story of the band. It finishes just as the RHCP are getting a foothold in the early 1980s Los Angeles post-punk music scene. And it’s possibly the better for it. Its author certainly thinks so, as he talks to the Listener from his Californian home.
Flea, who was born in Melbourne in 1962, shifted with his family to New York at age four. There, after a, his father and mother split.
