Acid for the Children

by Flea, Patti Smith (Foreword by)

Overview

With "virtuosic vulnerability" (The Atlantic), the iconic bassist and Red Hot Chili peppers co-founder pens a love letter to a youth spent wild in Los Angeles in his raw and riveting coming-of-age memoir.

In Acid for the Children, Flea takes readers on a deeply personal and revealing tour of his formative years, spanning from Australia to the New York City suburbs to, finally, Los Angeles. Through hilarious anecdotes, poetical meditations, and occasional flights of fantasy, Flea deftly chronicles the experiences that forged him as an artist, a musician, and a young man. His dreamy, jazz-inflected prose makes the Los Angeles of the 1970s and 80s come to gritty, glorious life, including the potential for fun, danger, mayhem, or inspiration that lurked around every corner. It is here that young Flea, looking to escape a turbulent home, found family in a community of musicians, artists, and junkies who also lived on the fringe. He spent most of his time partying and committing petty crimes. But it was in music where he found a higher meaning, a place to channel his frustration, loneliness, and love. This left him open to the life-changing moment when he and his best friends, soul brothers, and partners-in-mischief came up with the idea to start their own band, which became the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Acid for the Children is the debut of a stunning new literary voice, whose prose is as witty, entertaining, and wildly unpredictable as the author himself. It's a tenderly evocative coming-of-age story and a raucous love letter to the power of music and creativity from one of the most renowned musicians of our time.




New York Times Bestseller
A #1 LA Times Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
One of NPR's "Favorite Books of 2019"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455530533
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	11/05/2019
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	23,064
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Flea is an Australian-born American musician and occasional actor. He is best known as the bassist and co-founding member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and co-founder of The Silverlake Conservatory of Music.

Editorial Reviews

…reads like a stoner's reflections on a beloved childhood…Flea's book feels as if it includes every idea and reflection that has ever crossed his brilliant mind, and reading it is not unlike the experience of paging through someone's journal.

The New York Times Book Review - Touré

10/01/2019

Rock bassist Flea, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, recalls his adolescence in this sensitive, well-written coming-of-age memoir. Flea was born Michael Peter Balzary in 1962 in Australia to a customs official father and a mother who never relished the traditional role of wife and mother. The family moved to New York for a job opportunity, but by the time Flea was seven, his conventional family fell apart. He and his older sister were shuttled off to Los Angeles to live with his mom's new hippie jazz musician boyfriend. Perhaps as a result of this family fissure, Flea admits that he has often felt out of sync with others. But this is also a memoir about friendships as Flea lovingly remembers those with whom he did connect, such as his first best friend, Stephen, with whom he spent hours reading. In high school, Flea found a kindred spirit in Anthony Kiedis, and the two embarked on drug-fueled adventures before forming the Red Hot Chili Peppers. VERDICT Readers will find much to relate to in Flea's life story and will hope that this isn't the only entry in his writing career. [See Prepub Alert, 5/5/19.]—Amanda Westfall, Emmet O'Neal P.L., Mountain Brook, AL

Library Journal

2019-08-19
A wild ride through the coming-of-age wilderness of the famed rock bassist.

Though this volume barely touches on the career of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the band whose fans will likely constitute its most ardent readership, Flea's spirit permeates the narrative, which is scattered, reflective, hedonistic, funny, scary, and occasionally redemptive. By the time it finishes, the author has just turned 20, and the band has just begun its launch. Even early on, he writes, "I knew it was all there [with the band]. I could see its path stretched out before me, but like Dorothy and Toto, I had no idea of what walking it could mean." Flea was born Michael Peter Balzary in Melbourne, Australia, on Oct. 16, 1962, preceded by an older sister, to a mother and father who would split during his early childhood. His father continued to live in Australia, where his sister would return, while his mother moved with her son to the United States. In New York City, they lived with Walter, a tempestuous jazz musician who became Flea's stepfather. Despite his erratic behavior, Walter showed the author how to "utilize the pathos of his life to create thrilling art. The anger and loneliness, the pain from feeling hurt and neglected could be fuel for the greatest gifts." For years, Flea was an outsider, and his weirdness only intensified once the family moved from New York to Los Angeles in order to further what never quite became a musical career for Walter. As a "street kid" ("not a homeless kid, not an uneducated kid, but a street kid") in LA, the author discovered a host of colorful characters and drugs, played trumpet and loved jazz, and read Vonnegut. Few of the chapters, which unfold in bursts of jazzy, sometimes irregular prose (and little attention to grammar), extend for more than a page or two, and some of them are just a paragraph. Flea was still a street kid when he bonded with future band mates Anthony Kiedis, Hillel Slovek, and Jack Irons.

Relentlessly honest, untamed, and often revelatory. Perhaps a second volume is in the works?

Kirkus Reviews

"Acid for the Children is not an as-told-to, nor is it written "with" someone. These are Flea's words-excitable, jazzy, regretful, disarming, popping and writhing away in his biological bass zone. Insecurities to the fore: He worries that he may be producing "a thorny jumble of trash." But he's actually a lovely writer, with a particular gift for the free-floating and reverberant. He writes in Beat Generation bursts and epiphanies, lifting toward the kind of virtuosic vulnerability and self-exposure associated with the great jazz players....Flea-elegant nutcase, funk-at-high-pressure bassist, wildly cultured and culturedly wild man-has written a fine memoir. You'll put down Acid for the Children with your human sympathies expanded; you'll feel less alone."—The Atlantic

"Acid For the Children's closest analog is, somewhat surprisingly, Patti Smith's Just Kids...The prose frequently mimics [Flea's] playing: occasionally beautiful, occasionally outrageous, in conversation with a small group of predecessors but unwilling to follow anyone else's rules. This is what gives Acid for the Children its considerable charm..."—AV Club

"[An] electric, surprisingly moving memoir...Flea is an enlightened narrator, and this passionate, smart memoir will resonate with readers whether they're fans of the band or not."
—Publisher's Weekly, starred review

"A wild ride through the coming-of-age wilderness of the famed rock bassist...Relentlessly honest, untamed, and often revelatory."—Kirkus

"Flea is a surprisingly good writer...RHCP fans or not, readers will find a unique coming-of-age memoir that's also an ode to books, music, and performing."—Booklist

"[A] sensitive, well-written coming-of-age memoir. Readers will find much to relate to in Flea's life story and will hope that this isn't the only entry in his writing career."—Library Journal

". . . a vital, only-in-L.A. account of a wide-open time filtered through an engaging, humbled voice reshaped by his recovery and reconnecting to his spirit through art and music."—LA Times

". . . a coming-of-age bromance in the vein of Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.'"—Rolling Stone

"[Acid For The Children is] written with the same lyrical, holy goof-ball energy its author brings to all his public activities, and its earnest, eccentric prose reflects Flea's evolution from Hollywood-scene knucklehead to reflective, spiritually clued-in adult."—The New York Times

From the Publisher

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