22 Bizarre And Frequently Horrifying Stories About Red Hot Chili Peppers Frontman Anthony Kiedis

Not long after Kiedis moved to Los Angeles in 1974, his dad took him on a business trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin. As Blackie Dammett spent three days selling blow, he sent his son to see the same James Bond movie every day.

When Dammett and Kiedis returned to Los Angeles, they had $30,000 in cash. As Kiedis recounted in Scar Tissue, "My dad told me I'd be carrying the money, because if they caught someone who looked like him with all that money, he'd be busted for sure... so we rigged a belt piece, stuffed it with cash, and taped it to my abdomen."

Kiedis allegedly lost his virginity at 12 to his dad's 18-year-old girlfriend. As Larry Slowman, ghostwriter of Scar Tissue, recounted:

One night, when Anthony was 12, he went with his father to the Rainbow Room and Blackie's girlfriend is there dancing for him.

And Anthony asks, "Dad, can I have my first sexual experience with your girlfriend?" And Blackie says, "Sure, son."

So they go back to the house, and his dad builds a big bed out of four mattresses in his room and puts the girl in next to him.

And that's how he [loses his virginity].

"Sometimes I combined my passion for drugs and girls," Kiedis wrote in Scar Tissue. After a show in South Carolina, the singer scored a half-gram of coke from a bartender, finished it quickly, and was on the hunt for more blow when a woman approached him.

[S]he had our album, and told me I was her favorite poet of all time, and she gave me this letter that, among other things, suggested my d*ck was a dolphin and her p*ssy was the ocean and I had to go for a swim in that ocean...

"Can you get me some coke?" I started.

The two soon found themselves in a backwoods trailer park, where they scored more drugs.

Kiedis's dad was friends with Sonny and Cher, whose son Chaz is a few years younger than Anthony. When he first moved to Los Angeles, Kiedis spent a fair amount of time with the family, going to parties and even once accompanying them on a skiing trip. 

When Kiedis was in eighth grade, Cher, who was separated from Sonny by then, offered to babysit, according to his autobiography. He and Cher enjoyed a pleasant evening, then Kiedis went to bed, and Cher got ready to do the same. 

Believing Kiedis to be asleep, Cher took off all her clothes. Kiedis watched from nearby.

Blackie Dammett, born John Michael Kiedis, was an aspiring filmmaker in the mid-1960s when he got way into pot and started hanging around clubs on the Sunset Strip, partying hard and ignoring his young family, according to Scar Tissue. This freewheeling lifestyle soon led to divorce: Margaret Noble, Blackie's wife, left him and moved with Anthony and her new husband, Scott, to her home state of Michigan. 

Meanwhile, Dammett went to London, where he partied with Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and wrote Anthony letters about spending time among rock gods. Eventually, Dammett returned to Los Angeles, where, as a struggling actor, he sold drugs to and hung out with rock stars like Sonny and Cher. In 1974, when Anthony was 12 years old, he went to live with his father. As an impressionable adolescent, he met Bowie, Blondie, the Talking Heads, and more.

Dammett, whom you might recognize from his small roles in Lethal Weapon or Nine Deaths of the Ninja, also introduced his son to drugs at a young age. Not long after Anthony's arrival in Los Angeles, he and his father smoked a joint. As Kiedis recounted in Scar Tissue:

I had been there only a few days when my dad called me into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table with a pretty eighteen-year-old girl he'd been hanging out with that week. "Do you want to smoke a joint?" he asked me...

Then he lit up the joint and passed it to me. "Be careful, don't take too much. You don't want to cough your lungs out," he counseled...

I realized I was high. I loved the sensation. It felt like medicine to soothe the soul and awaken the senses.

Years later, Blackie said, in an interview for a BBC documentary, “It wasn't so unusual that I let him take a little bit of acid, or a little bit of marijuana.”

After smoking his son up for the first time, Blackie Dammett suggested that young Kiedis take a few nude photos of an 18-year-old woman he was hanging out with at the time.

As Kiedis recalled, after he, his dad, and the young woman in question passed a joint around a few times, his dad broke out a camera.

Then my dad handed me an Instamatic camera and said, "I think she wants you to take some pictures of her." I instinctively knew that some form of skin was about to be exposed, so I said to her, "What if we pull up your shirt and I'll take a picture of you?"

"That's a good idea, but I think it might be more artistic if you just had her expose one of her breasts," my dad said. We all concurred. I took some pictures, and no one felt uncomfortable about it.