"The world is cruel enough as it is. Everything that is not love is cowardice."
Flea's autobiography is comprised of short, (mostly) chronological vignettes, allowing him to depict his surreal formative years (the last line is "Thanks for reading my childhood.") in manageable, bite-sized chunks.
"Acid for the Children" is a whirlwind, peppered with emotional moments and indelible experiences. He refers a lot to his guardian angels, and when you get a sense of the sheer amount of emotional obstacles and physical damage he overcame, you come away with no other explanation for how he is still alive and reasonably intact.
"He was not steady enough to be there for himself or anyone else in a consistent way, and he was violently unpredictable. But he showed me what it was to turn pain into beauty ...
"Pain was something to be grateful for, not to be pursued, but inordinately valuable."
"I keep jumping into a pile of shit, and my patient guardian angel keeps picking me up, cleaning me off, and putting me in a place where I can let an infinite love rhythm blast through me. Each time, I get a little bit better; less shit, more light."
Flea's account is chock full of amazing music recommendations, as well as a truly moving and incredible story of meeting Dizzy Gillespie as a boy. Turning to music as a bulwark, he recognize something embracing and salvational in it.
"I realized that music was a force that brought people together and gave them power. People living outside society need a sound to believe in. A sound that cannot be owned or emulated by squares. It inspires the marginalized and the rebels. It gives a soundtrack to their walk that only they understand. It speaks for people who might not otherwise have a voice."
"In most every other area of my life, I was full of self-doubt, but not when it came to rocking. I planned on going primal."
"I learned to just get down to it, no pussyfooting around, no posing, get deep and lose your fucking mind. The immediacy of the music, tasting the moment, physical risk and danger; art and action coming together."
Predictably, no account of the 1980s Red Hat Chili Peppers is complete without some truly punk rock anecdotes -- obviously featuring Flea's longtime partner in crime, Anthony Kaedis.
"By the way, the Circle Jerks once did an impromptu gig in there and one of their fans took a shit on the floor."
" ... [I] returned to the parking lot to find Anthony working his magic on a three-nippled girl he liked ..."
"I liked Anthony right away. I could tell he was a misfit like me.
"The universe gives us the ones we need. And the ones we deserve."
The book ends a bit suddenly, and it's hard to shake the sense that "Acid for the Children" kind of poured out of Flea, and he has a lot more to say. But the result is a turbo-charged depiction of growing up without guardrails in 1970s Los Angeles -- and the journey from neglected child to era-defining musician.
"No rehearsals, no planning, no conceptual discussions. All that self-destruction, all that hopeful love whirling in and around us, something had to give. Death or Life. We could have imploded, but to live, all that intensity needed to find a place to process itself in a healthy way, and finally, organically, orgasmically, it did."
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