Scar Tissue
by Anthony Kiedis with Larry Sloman
Time Warner Books £18.99, pp466
Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie
by Ed Cray
Norton £18.99, 488pp
America's rock'n'roll Hall of Fame was built in the slightly misplaced surroundings of Cleveland, Ohio, but rock's true birthplace probably lies somewhere near Memphis, Tennessee and some of its most celebrated developments have taken root in Seattle and New York.
If the music's ethos has a hub, however, it lies in Los Angeles, that sun-kissed expanse where rock's emphasis on life in the moment and the equation of glamour with excess are made flesh. Led Zeppelin minted the imperious boorishness of the hard- rock lifestyle on Sunset Strip; John Lennon saw out his mid-Seventies lost weekend not far away; scores of musicians, from Ozzy Osbourne to Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan, have marked the low point of their careers by cloistering themselves in west Hollywood hotels and taking as many drugs as they could get their hands on.
It is this aspect of Los Angeles that spawned Anthony Kiedis, singer and lyricist with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band who have long made much of their lifelong association with the city (witness their 1999 album, Californication). Partly raised by a father who dealt drugs, Kiedis spent his adolescence immersed in LA's absurd whirl: introduced to alcohol, pharmaceutical downers and nights on the Strip at 13, befriended by Keith Moon soon after, and inducted into manhood by being allowed to have sex with his dad's girlfriend.
And, of course, it all screwed him up horrifically. Scar Tissue, ghosted by the sometime Bob Dylan associate Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, betrays many things - hubris, selfishness, the large-scale absence of any sense of humour - but it unendingly suggests irreparable damage. At school, Kiedis would turn up to class having been kept up all night by his father's partying; the claim that he 'started befriending all of the loneliest and most unwanted kids' speaks volumes about the consequences. Most telling is his need to describe every last sexual conquest, surely so as to attain parity with Kiedis Senior. Somewhere within such lines as: 'The whole time we were fucking, she was telling me this was her dream come true', there lurks a Freudian ogre.
What pushed Kiedis into his involvement with one of the modern world's most successful rock groups is a little unclear: the importance or otherwise of music to his story remains largely undescribed. Certainly, the eventual success of the Chili Peppers allowed him to develop the kind of cocaine and heroin habits that killed the band's first guitarist, Hillel Slovak, exhaust the patience of an array of long-suffering girlfriends and write some of the worst lyrics ever written, solemnly laid out here like poetry. Take 'Love Trilogy', supposedly about 'the things that aren't necessarily perfect or always loveable': 'My love is death to apartheid rule / My love is the Zulu groove / My love is the pussy juice.'
And so we come back to Los Angeles. The city's crystallisation of the rock dream can seem thrilling beyond words, but it also embodies the same profound naffness that seems etched into Kiedis and his bandmates' DNA. Their one truly iconic bit of stagecraft found them naked except for sports socks rolled over their genitals. Their most celebrated musical aspect is the pioneering of rap rock, one of the most ill-advised genres ever.
And when, as rock stars must, they have attempted gravitas, they have usually come off looking little short of hilarious. I have two favourite passages from Scar Tissue : in one, Kiedis explains an alleged depth to his lyrics by claiming: 'I had been reading a lot of books about whales and dolphins and had always been acutely aware of social injustice.' In the other, he turns up at the Dalai Lama's mountain retreat. 'Could you please inform the Dalai Lama that Anthony Kiedis is here?' he asks the gateman. Disappointingly, Buddhist grace wins the day and he is eventually granted an audience.
If Kiedis embodies our image of modern LA, then Woody Guthrie is a byword for a side of the city that is long gone. As Ed Cray's admirably solid biography attests, the bard of America's dust-bowl refugees ('A tough, skinny, curly-headed Huck Finn,' in the words of Studs Terkel's foreword) affected to be a guitar-carrying Tom Joad, journeying from his native Oklahoma, via Texas, to southern California, earning a paltry living on folksy radio stations set up to warm the hearts of those economic migrants who had desperately come West.
Whereas modern LA can easily seem adrift from the currents of the real world, Guthrie's city - 'an ill-sorted patchwork of insular neighbourhoods, orchards and truck farms' - pulsed with them.
Guthrie arrived in the world too early for rock'n'roll, yet the portrait offered here suggests he had all the requisite personality traits. His wives and children were less important than the imperative to remain pretty nomadic; his proletarian image camouflaged a middle-class pedigree; he seemed, said one associate, 'to feel it was perfectly all right for other people to support him, to see that he had whatever he wanted and, furthermore, he did not see why he in return should assume any responsibility towards others'.
This description would neatly fit the character at the centre of Scar Tissue and, indeed, any number of the musical hopefuls still drawn to LA's cold sparkle.
