Inside Anthony Kiedis' wild life – heroin addiction, drug dealer dad, celeb exes

Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis has turned 52, but he has enough wild stories to fill two lifetimes.

Born in 1962 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Kiedis had a far from normal childhood thanks to his parents and his godfather was Sonny Bono, who was married to the one and only Cher.

It’s no surprise then that he ended up becoming one of the biggest rock stars around after he formed the Red Hot Chili Peppers back in 1983, and realised it was his life’s calling.

Music soon took over, and his increasing levels of fame saw Kiedis dating some of the most desirable women in music and Hollywood.

He’s showing no signs of slowing down either, as the band has just finished recording their 12th studio album and announced a huge stadium tour for next year.

To celebrate the rockstar’s 52nd birthday, Daily Star have taken a look back at the singer’s wild life.

Early life and drug dealer dad

Right from his earliest days, Anthony’s life ran like a Hollywood movie.

His parents sadly divorced when he was just three years old, which meant he lived with his mother Magaret Noble.

He would visit his father, John, in Hollywood during the summer for fortnightly stints.

Kiedis loved bonding with his dad, who went by the stage name Blackie Dammett, and he once described those as the happiest days of his life.

He once said: “Those trips to California were the happiest, most carefree, the-world-is-a-beautiful-oyster times I’d ever experienced.”

When he was 12, Anthony eventually moved in with his struggling actor dad, and it led to the youngster playing Sylvester Stallone’s character’s son in a film called F.I.S.T (1978).

However, Anthony’s father was a part-time drug dealer, which meant Anthony was exposed to lots of drugs growing up.

Anthony’s first foray into drug use came from his father’s supplies, such as marijuana, which he smoked when he was just 12 years of age.

The music maestro accidentally tried heroin for the first time at 14 after mistaking it for cocaine.

It turns out Anthony mingled with some famous faces in his early days, because his godfather was singer and actor Sonny Bono, who was married to iconic pop star, Cher.

Sonny and Cher were a famous singing duo in the 1960s and 70s, and Cher used to babysit little Kiedis from time to time.

Kiedis even confessed that as a youngster, he used to spy on his legendary babysitter when she was undressing.

Speaking to James Corden about his time with Cher, he said: “I was 12 years old. She was fit and fine, I knew that and I’d just hit that hormonal plateau.

“We hung out, I slept in her bed. I actually watched her through the crack of the bathroom door, getting ready for bed.

“I was in my jammies, getting ready to get some zzz’s. She, like, dropped her negligee and I was like, ‘Ok, this is happening.'”

Red Hot Chili Peppers

The origins of Anthony’s epic band lie at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles.

Although the star initially struggled to find friends at high school, he met Flea, his future bandmate, and the two became best pals.

Kiedis once said of Flea: “We were drawn to each other by the forces of mischief, love, and the Grateful Dead. We became virtually inseparable. We were both social outcasts. We found each other and it turned out to be the longest-lasting friendship of my life.”

Kiedis introduced his future bass player, Flea, to punk rock music, which ended up having a significant impact on their future band.

When the pair were 15, the two young rockers were getting up to some mischief as they were jumping from a building into a swimming pool.

However, Kiedis missed the pool on his way down and brutally broke his back, but luckily he made a full recovery.

After meeting the band’s next two original members, guitarist Hillel Slovak and drummer Jack Irons, they began writing their own music.

Kiedis began as a hype man for the band rather than a singer, which saw him try to hype up the audience by making jokes.

The band only had one song at first and gained notoriety for stripping down to play naked in clubs, with only a sock to cover their private parts.

Club owners even began booking the nude band on the condition that they perform nude with their socks.

Tragically, one of the founding members, Slovak, died of a drug overdose on June 25, 1988, and drummer Jack Irons left the band due to his grief and heart-break.

The Red Hot Chili lads recruited new members John Frusciante and Chad Smith and went through a string of temporary guitarists after Frusciante left the band and later rejoined.

However, before long, the band shot to global success after their first commercial hit record in 1991, Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

The band have since sold a whopping 100million records worldwide, making them one of the best-selling bands of all time.

Recalling his first ever performance with the band as a frontman, Anthony described it as a moment of destiny.

He said: “All the anticipation of the moment hit me, and I instinctively knew that the miracle of manipulating energy and tapping into an infinite source of power and harnessing it in a small space with your friends was what I had been put on this earth to do”

Drug use

Singer Kiedis has openly admitted to having been addicted to drugs like heroin and cocaine over the years.

Having lived with a drug-dealing dad, Anthony grew up among an array of drugs, and he ended up using substances for years.

He was even fired from Red Hot Chili Peppers when his drug use got too much for the band, and he sometimes missed out on shows due to his habits.

After the tragic death of his former guitarist Slovak from a heroin overdose, Anthony tried to get clean and went into rehab.

He managed to stay clean for five years, but he relapsed in 1994, which held up the release of his band’s album, One Hot Minute.

Kiedis continued to have an on-and-off relationship with drugs over the next six years.

However, Kiedis has reportedly managed to avoid a relapse since Christmas Eve in 2000.

Celebrity exes

Anthony has had a number of high-profile lovers during his years of rocking out on stage.

The rockstar revealed all in a June 2016 interview, where he explained that there were some years where had sex with over 100 people.

He confessed: “If I saw a pretty girl, I wanted to have her.”

Lucky Anthony reportedly had a short but “very intense” romance with stunning German supermodel, Heidi Klum.

He told Presseportal.de that the relationship with Klum was “one of the most beautiful memories in my life”.

The musician said of Heidi: “The hottest woman in the world was my girlfriend, that made me really proud. I saw her and immediately fell in love with her.”

He admitted that he was “selfish” at that time, and that Heidi had just came out of a failed marriage.

Anthony added: “A man can be happy, with a woman like her at his side. She is not only beautiful, but also intelligent, a successful business woman, and great mother.”

Another one of Anthony’s significant relationships was with Heather Christie for four years between 2004 and 2008, and the pair share their son, Everly Bear.

In March 2018, the former couple got into a custody battle over Everly.

In 1990, Anthony also dated famous Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor for a brief time, and she inspired him to write the song, I Could Have Lied on the band’s first big album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

He even had a brief romance with Spice Girls star Melanie C in the 1990s, and she inspired the track Emit Remmus from the band’s 1991 record, Californication.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers even covered the hit Spice Girls track Wannabe at a 1997 concert in Japan.

Kiedis had a relationship with fashion designer Yohanna Logan between 1998 and 2003, but it was an on-and-off affair.

He even had a two year relationship with Australian model Helena Vestergaard.

When asked about marriage in his 2016 interview, he candidly replied: “Maybe it is because I never learned to live in a relationship and as silly as it sounds, I do not understand women yet. They remain a mystery.”

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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk