Interview with Anthony Kiedis from 2006

Kiedis lives alone in an elegant Spanish-styled 1930s villa in Benedict Canyon. It is, unmistakably, a bachelor’s pad. Along with his two Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs, Katie and Sammi, Kiedis shares the place with a lot of art, books and music- and not much else. The car in the garage is a Porsche Carrera.

For a 43-year-old man who started shooting hard drugs at 14, and once complained that in New Zealand “there wasn’t enough cocaine in a small country like that to keep me satisfied for any length of time”, he is looking good. The muscly torso beneath the tight white T-shirt and black jeans suggest that Kiedis has swapped the crack pipe fort the gym- a very LA transition for an LA enthusiast such as himself.

“I will never leave this place,” he announces firmly. “This state and the city are so full of mysticism and creative juice. Because people like to label things it has become the capital of what is considered a more artificial reality, but that’s not how I see it.” He says the first single from Stadium Arcadium, Dani California “is about the misconceptions surrounding West Coast culture.”

Kiedis came to LA in 1963, aged 11, to live with his natural father, a drug dealer, womaniser and part-time actor whose lifestyle the young Anthony took to like a fish to water. Dad, another surprise survivor, is now the band’s biggest fan. Kiedis Jr talked at length of his past indulgences in an autobiography, Scar Tissue, published in 2004. “The book started out as a desire to tell a story about a father and a son growing up in Southern California in the 1970s, because it was so colourful and crazy. But then I didn’t know where to stop so I told the whole thing.”

The full transcript of Anthony’s interview and scan of the article is HERE

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2 Responses to Interview with Anthony Kiedis from 2006

  1. Rachel Cairns says:

    i think he might be a little disappointed with the age this article puts him at… if he was 11 in ’63, he’s looking pretty good for 60 🙂

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