Acid for the Children
Acid for the Children is the 2019 memoir of Michael Peter Balzary, the bassist known to the world as Flea, founding member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The book opens not in Los Angeles but in suburban Melbourne, Australia, where Flea was born in 1962 and where his early childhood was warm, ordinary, and musical. His parents' divorce brought him at six to Westchester, New York, and at eleven to Los Angeles, where his mother had married the moody, charismatic, occasionally violent jazz bassist Walter Urban Jr. Flea writes about that household, about wandering the canyons of the San Fernando Valley as a feral teenager, and about the loose pack of friends he found at Fairfax High School, including the singer Anthony Kiedis and the guitarist Hillel Slovak, with whom he would form the band that became the Chili Peppers. The book stops, deliberately, before the band makes its first record, and is the work of a self-taught writer in love with sentence rhythm.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Acid for the Children
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The bassist from Red Hot Chili Peppers writes the years before the band: an Australian boy in Hollywood, jazz lessons, broken homes, weed and acid, and the friendships that became Flea.
Acid for the Children is the 2019 memoir of Michael Peter Balzary, better known as Flea, the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It covers his life up to roughly age 17, before the band formed.
Not really. Acid for the Children ends before the Red Hot Chili Peppers came together. The book focuses on Flea's chaotic childhood between Australia and Los Angeles, his relationship with Anthony Kiedis as teens, and his discovery of music.
Acid for the Children is 436 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Acid for the Children takes most readers 7 to 9 hours to finish.
Acid for the Children is a standalone novel by Flea, not part of a series.
Acid for the Children is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.