I realised that the whole point of writing that book wasn’t for me, but to show that somebody can go all the way down and come all the way back and have a productive, successful happy interesting life. People were reading it in hospitals, in prisons and schools and it was having a positive effect. In a June 2016 interview, Kiedis stated he had regrets of writing Scar Tissue saying “I did regret the book for a while as there was some pain caused then, I started seeing the long term positive reverberating. The book reports very specific dates, such as when Kiedis was conceived.

He claims his new clean date is December 24, 2000. Later on, he reveals that he was not actually clean, as he claimed at the time, during the late-nineties Californication era of the band's existence. He attempted to get clean afterwards but relapsed in 1994 after being given medications while getting a tooth pulled. His death only made matters worse, and caused him to do more and more hardcore drugs. Kiedis had no idea what to do without his friend. On Slovak's death from overdose in 1988, Kiedis writes that he was so shaken that he skipped town, missing the funeral. By the time his band formed and became more popular in the 1980s, he and former bandmate Hillel Slovak had severe drug addictions. The title name was taken from the single 'Scar Tissue' released five years earlier on the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Californication.Īccording to the book, Kiedis' first drug experience was with his father Blackie Dammett, a former drug dealer, at age eleven. It follows Kiedis into the depth of his experiences with drug addiction.

The book follows Kiedis' life from his birth in 1962 to early 2004.

Scar tissue autobiography book review