Even if you’re not a fan of his band’s music, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, along with Larry Sloman of Howard Stern fame, collaborated back in 2004 to churn out Scar Tissue, a funk-based drug-slinging, barking, clawing, brake-screeching semi-apocalyptic, star-studded documentary of the life of the L.A. vocal monk, Anthony a.k.a. Tony Flow. Anthony provided the stories of love, anger, and death, while Mr. Sloman traveled to interview and validate the stories of these lovers, haters, and grim reapers.
The story really is a more concentrated copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Imagine Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty had stayed in their lives of hitchhiking for, let’s say 42 years, sinking and emerging from multiple heroin-needle wounds, five-story diving acts, and a funk band that has a bad habit of switching its lineup every other day.
The formerly mysterious Kiedis reveals sides of him never before known, such as romantic celebrity connections, while on the opposite side of the spectrum he covers deep lessons in life.
By the time you reach Tony’s twentieth year, you are amazed that the author isn’t an animated corpse, using an infected needle to pound the keyboard because his fingers gave way years ago.
But the work is truly inspirational and shows the great potential of other sides of anyone’s life that easily can be missed. These are sides that Anthony Kiedis plays off of well, as he clearly states early in the book that he has a natural talent of taking advantage of a situation.
While Mr. Flow may have dabbled with the Cobain-killer since the year this book hit shelves, it is not known, and his spark of creation transcends as much as his story does the same.
