Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis landed himself in some hot water when he was ticketed for running a red light on his motorcycle on a California highway on Sunday, March 31.
Anthony, 61, looked nonplussed to be receiving the citation as he sat on his BMW motorcycle with his chin in his hands and waited for the police officer to finish writing the ticket. He was decked out in all black, which he combined with a white bandana around his neck and a black helmet.
The ticket comes on the heels of news that the rights to Anthony’s memoir, Scar Tissue, have been optioned for a biopic about the singer’s life and the story is in the works with Universal Studios. Anthony published the memoir in 2004 and it quickly rose to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best seller list the same year.
The “Californication” singer touched on a wide range of emotional topics in the book, including the effects felt by the death of Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak. Hillel died of a heroin overdose at the age of 26.
The memoir took a closer look at Anthony’s struggles with drugs and alcohol over the years.
“It’s weird, I was such a survivor and so wanted to be a part of life while I was trying to snuff out the life that was inside of me,” Anthony wrote in the book. “I had this duality of trying to kill myself with drugs, then eating really good food and exercising and going swimming and trying to be a part of life. I was always going back and forth on some level.”
After the book’s release, Anthony and his longtime bandmate and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist, Michael “Flea” Balzary, had a bit of a falling out about some of the details Anthony penned, including the fact that Anthony once slept with Flea’s sister. However, the two friends moved past the issue and were eventually able to joke about it.
“You mean that he had sex with her? I knew all about it,” Flea, 61, told The Red Bulletin in 2016, per Ultimate Guitar. “I was in the next room that night. If my sister’s screwing anyone, then let it be my best friend. I was actually pleased that she liked him as much as I did.”
Anthony later revealed to The Sun in 2016 that he did “regret writing the book for a while as there was some pain caused,” but then he “started seeing the long-term positive reverberating.”
“I realized that the whole point of writing that book wasn’t for me, but to show that somebody can go all the way down and come all the way back and have a productive, successful, happy, interesting life.”
