Red Hot Chili Peppers: 'It just keeps getting better'
Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Keidis says he 'couldn't care less' in response to accusations he was using drugs ahead of his cancelled show earlier this month.
Keidis, who has been battling drug addiction since the early 1980s said he received far more kind responses when news broke of his hospitalisation due to stomach pain.
"I felt more care than anything else, you know, I got a lot of messages in the mail and it just seemed that people did care. My friends called, people I hadn't spoken to for years called," Keidis told Sunday Night's Rahni Sadler.
"I was crushed that we had to cancel the show… But what people assume or think about me using, I couldn't care less."
Band members Anthony Keidis, bass player Michael 'Flea' Balzary, guitarist Josh Klinghoffer and drummer Chad Smith sat down with Sunday Night to discuss their upcoming 11th album The Getaway, out June 17, and an incredible 33 years of Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The new album was rumored to be inspired by Anthony's break-up with 23-year-old Australian model Helena Vestergaard.
"I was heart-broken and it turned out to be a beautiful thing because it gave me a starting point when it came to writing," he said.
"Months pass and you start to heal a little bit, and you go to write songs, and you have all of this very imaginative poetry"
Their decades of fame have been marred by tragedy but Australian-born bass player Flea says without it their music wouldn't have been able to reach so many.
"I don't think that it's possible to make good art without profound pain."
"I want to feel everything. I want to feel the joy, I want to feel the pain, I want to feel like the grueling elements of work."
Anthony and Flea, both 53, met in high school and soon added guitarist Hillel Slovak to the Californian band.
Slovak recorded the Red Hot Chili Peppers second and third albums with them but after the international tour for The Uplift Mofo Party in 1988, he died of a heroin overdose.
It was a dark time for the band and Keidis had relapsed after his first attempt at rehab, which he referred to in his book 'Scar Tissue' as the first time he had been drug-free since age 11.
"Heroin I stumbled into one time when I was 14. [It was an] interesting experience. I think my body was kind of built to tolerate that to a certain degree."
Flea and Keidis decided to continue the band to keep alive what their friend had helped build.
"We lost Hillel and that was unbelievably sad," Flea said.
"And there were times when I was really worried about Anthony when he was really strung out and stuff but, you know, he's a survivor."
Some of the bands most successful songs came from Keidis' reflections on his struggle with heroin and cocaine addiction including Under the Bridge.
"Anthony and I, we've been through so much together," Flea said.
"We have to make ourselves vulnerable and hurt each other's feelings and criticize each other in order for us to grow."
For Keidis, being a father to nine-year-old son Everly Bear has changed his perspective on his life.
"It's never boring and it just keeps getting better," he said.
"I guess it's perhaps brought me back to a state of wonder and curiosity and contentment with the simple pleasures of life."
The 11th Red Hot Chili Peppers Album The Getaway is released June 17.
