The Untold Truth Of Anthony Kiedis

While in high school, each weekday morning at 6:45, Anthony Kiedis was woken up by pop music blaring from his alarm clock radio. "I really was that anxious to get to school every day," Kiedis wrote in "Scar Tissue." "I loved almost all of my classes."

Despite their hard-partying lifestyle, his father also highlighted the importance of education. "Every day he'd use some crazy-ass esoteric word to get me to increase my vocabulary," Kiedis recalled. "He also expanded my tastes in literature from the Hardy Boys to Ernest Hemingway and other great writers." A major influence was author Charles Bukowski, whom Kiedis namechecked on the "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" track "Mellowship Slinky in B Major."

"At school, the class that I looked forward to most was English," Kiedis wrote in "Scar Tissue." "Every day we'd spend the first fifteen minutes of class writing in a journal. ... Some of the other students would write for five minutes and stop, but I could have written away the whole class time." 

His English teacher, Mrs. Vernon, told him he should continue to write, because he had a "special gift" for it. "When you're in seventh grade and this really wonderful woman whom you look up to takes the time to express an idea like that to you," Kiedis recalled, "that was a bell that wouldn't stop ringing for the rest of my life."

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