The Best Part of a Big Book! Scar Tissue

To produce the album, Flea and I both recommended Andy Gill, the guitar player from Gang of Four…[Gill] was much different than we expected. He was approachable, but he was also very English, semi-aloof, clearly intelligent but with no edge. We were these very aggressive, volatile individuals and then there’s this soft, smarty-pants English guy…So there was a little tension.

For the first couple of days, everything seemed fine. But I soon realized Gill was going for a sound that wasn’t us. By the end of the sessions, Flea and I would literally stomp out of the studio into the control room, crawl over the console VU meters and scream, “Fuck you! We hate you! This is shit!” at Andy. Andy was completely calm the whole time — very English.

We did some lighthearted stuff, too. We were in the middle of a heated argument with Andy one night when Flea said, “Let’s put this on hold. I’m going to take a big shiny shit."

“Oh yeah, be sure and bring that back for me then, won’t you?” Andy said drolly.

“OK,” Flea said.

“I wouldn’t put it past you,” Andy said.

I followed Flea out of the room. And all the way to the bathroom, we were saying, “Let’s really bring him the shit.”

So Flea defecated and we put it into an empty pizza box that was in the studio and we went running back down the hallway and delivered the shit pizza to Andy.

He just rolled his eyes and said, “How predictable.”

To this day, Flea always points to that incident to demonstrate why we’re such a good band.

Excerpted from Scar Tissue: My Life with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, by Anthony Kiedis with Larry Sloman, © 2004. Reprinted with permission from Hyperion.