On the other hand, he believes he got a lot out of his experiments with hallucinogens. Flea began shooting speed regularly, which didn’t help his attention deficit disorder tendencies or his emotional advancement. Most of the kids he found were fellow scamps who enabled his knack for getting into scrapes, which ranged from petty theft to crashing cars. This belief, along with his unstructured home life, led him to yearn for a brotherhood of friends to serve as a surrogate family. From early childhood, Flea writes that he had “an undying sense that something was wrong with me, that everyone else is clued into a group consciousness from which I am excluded”.

The latter contributed to an already serious inferiority complex. By that time, Flea had acquired his nickname, based on his fidgety nature and diminutive stature. The cover of the book boasts a picture of him at 12 smoking a joint. It was a chance for her to go into New York City and liberate herself.”Īfter a few wild years on the east coast, the family relocated to the gnarlier parts of Hollywood and, by 11, a barely supervised Flea began to smoke pot every day. By contrast, “Walter did drugs and played jazz and had all kinds of ethnicities hanging out. “She had grown up in this really straight Australia, where things went by the rules of the 1950s,” he said. Though Flea paints his stepfather as an unkempt, odd and violent man, he believes his mother was drawn to his bohemian sensibility. Immediately, Walter moved the family (including Flea’s older sister, Karyn) to his parents’ house where they lived together in the basement. Things became even more unstable when his mother remarried to a troubled jazz musician, Walter Urban Jr (now deceased). By the time he was seven, Flea’s parents divorced and his father moved back to Australia, causing the boy to feel abandoned and unmoored.

When he was five, his father’s work necessitated the family move to Rye, a northern suburb of New York City. The first part of the story centers on impressionistic perceptions from his first four years of life in Melbourne, Australia, where he was born Michael Peter Balzary. To capture the fractured nature of it, Flea divided his book into brief, blunt chapters, in the process creating a rhythm for his prose as curt and distinct as his bass playing. “Eventually, I became entranced with the idea of getting under the narrative, to find out the ‘why’ of my early life,” he said. “I thought I would just write about the band because who would be arrogant enough to think anyone would care about my childhood?” he said.īut, given the amount of violence, drug use and sometimes useful adventure in his past, this clearly wasn’t just any childhood. Not that this was Flea’s original game plan.

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