Acid for the Children

Michael Peter Balzary, known to the world as Flea, the bassist and cofounder of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, traces the first twenty years of his life in this memoir, from his birth in Melbourne, Australia, in 1962 through the band's first performance in February 1983. The narrative moves chronologically through his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, interspersed with reflections from middle age. The memoir ends before the band achieves fame, focusing on the formative experiences and relationships that made it possible.

Flea opens with a prologue set during a 2010 trip to Ethiopia, where elderly women singing in a church reaffirm his sense of musical purpose. He frames his life as a search for spiritual connection and states his intent to write honestly. He introduces his maternal grandmother, Muriel Cheesewright, a resilient woman from London's East End who emigrated alone to Australia, endured an abusive first husband, and reunited with her true love only to lose him to a stroke. Before Muriel's death at ninety-eight, she attended a Red Hot Chili Peppers show and posed onstage for the crowd.

Flea was born in Melbourne and retains few memories from his first four years. In 1967, his father, Mick Balzary, a government customs official, secured a posting at the Australian consulate in New York City, and the family sailed to America. They settled in Rye, a middle-class suburb, where Mick ran a strict household. Flea describes his father as hardworking and connected to nature, but terrifyingly volatile when angry, his explosive rages leaving the boy with a constant knot of fear. Flea's mother, Patricia, was vivacious and smart but emotionally distant.

Around age seven, his parents' marriage collapsed. Patricia introduced the children to Walter Urban Jr., her guitar teacher, a jazz musician who became Flea's stepfather. Mick returned to Australia alone, while Patricia, Flea, and his older sister Karyn moved in with Walter and his parents in Larchmont, New York. Walter's most transformative gift was music. At a Sunday afternoon party, eight-year-old Flea watched Walter and his friends tear through the jazz standard "Cherokee" at breakneck speed, and the experience sent him into an ecstatic trance. That feeling became the thing he reached for the rest of his life. Walter played upright bass with primal ferocity, and through watching him, Flea absorbed the lesson that tortured energy could be transformed into art.

Walter also struggled with alcohol, and his violent tantrums became a recurring pattern. He demolished the house, smashed televisions, and on one Halloween night fired a gun into the street. Flea learned to cope by slipping out to sleep behind the garage and by fragmenting himself, showing different selves at home, school, and on the street. During these years he formed a close friendship with Stephen Paul, a warm-hearted neighbor, bonding over a shared love of reading. He also became a habitual shoplifter and had a troubling encounter with a third-grade teacher who cultivated the boys' trust only to reveal himself as a white supremacist. Years later, while writing the book, Flea discovered the teacher had been a registered sex offender.

In late 1972, the family moved to Los Angeles. With minimal parental supervision, Flea began living as a street kid at eleven, running with neighborhood crews and stealing regularly. At twelve, he was arrested for burglarizing a closed diner. Around the same time, his sister Karyn got him high on marijuana for the first time, and he consciously decided drugs were for him, smoking weed regularly for the next eighteen years. At Bancroft Junior High, he fell in love with basketball and began playing trumpet in the school band after discovering jazz through a book at home. He won a citywide National School Orchestra Award and began private trumpet lessons.

At Fairfax High School in 1976, Flea entered as the smallest kid among 2,500 students, paralyzed by shyness. He met Anthony Kiedis through mutual friend Tony Shur during driver's ed class. On a rainy day, they sat together in the gym bleachers and began a conversation that would continue for decades. Both came from broken homes; both were outsiders. But where Flea retreated inward, Anthony challenged the world head-on. They became inseparable, plotting adventures and egging each other on. Despite recurring friction, Flea recognized Anthony as his truest family.

The third crucial relationship came through Hillel Slovak, a skinny Israeli classmate who played guitar in a rock band called Anthym with drummer Jack Irons. Hillel asked Flea to learn bass and replace the band's departing bassist. From the first moment he picked up the instrument, Flea felt transformed, ready to give his life to it. He learned slap-bass technique by watching the bassist in a rival school band and developed rapidly. Being in a band gave him an instant family and a sense of belonging.

After high school, Flea rejected college and worked a series of jobs while pursuing music. He and Anthony began injecting cocaine, a practice that produced brief euphoric rushes followed by devastating crashes. He acknowledges the drugs hurt him badly but credits literature, basketball, music, and nature as sanctuaries. He moved into the Contemporary Artists Space of Hollywood (CASH), a communal storefront for underground artists, where he felt accepted in a broad creative community. He auditioned for FEAR, a punk band he admired, and won the job, introducing himself as "Flea" for the first time. Quitting What Is This, as Anthym had been renamed, to join FEAR devastated Hillel.

FEAR taught Flea how to channel rage into performance and connect with audiences. Its singer, Lee Ving, became a big-brother figure. But Flea grew disenchanted, troubled by the band's racial and anti-gay humor and the lack of room for musical exploration. Listening alone to punk band the Germs' album GI, he realized that virtuosity was not essential to powerful expression; all that mattered was integrity of motivation. Seeing post-punk band Echo and the Bunnymen while on LSD further transformed his musical thinking.

Reading Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, Flea resolved to quit FEAR. In a synchronous twist, Lee called that same moment to let him go. Anthony, inspired by seeing hip-hop pioneers Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, had written his first lyrics at the kitchen table of the Wilton Hilton, an apartment Flea shared with friends. Flea composed a bass line, and a friend offered them an opening slot at the Grandia Room.

In February 1983, without a single rehearsal, Anthony, Flea, Hillel, and Jack performed their first show as Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, the band that would become the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Flea describes the experience as the first time he touched hearts with music for real, a feeling of being swept away by an unstoppable current. He knew the band was already everything it needed to be.

In a flash-forward to June 1988, Flea recounts learning of Hillel's death from a heroin overdose. He is consumed by guilt for having judged Hillel during his descent into addiction rather than showing unconditional love. The loss teaches him that love is the only thing that counts. In a bonus chapter, Flea describes the band's first demo recording and a road trip to New York City where he and Anthony walked the streets all night, blasting their tape from a boombox.

Flea closes by comparing himself to a rough stone pressured by molten forces into a gem. He acknowledges ongoing struggles with anxiety and a lifelong sense of separateness but affirms his faith in love and creativity. He addresses readers directly, urging them to walk through pain rather than numb it, and recounts founding the Silverlake Conservatory of Music with his friend Keith "Tree" Barry after discovering that arts funding had been cut at Fairfax High, the school whose music room had once been his sanctuary.