The troubling story of a child Anthony Kiedis proposing to Blondie’s Debbie Harry
In what could be one of the most fascinating rock stories ever encountered, we delve into its peculiarities. This story involves two icons from opposite coasts of America: the California king, Anthony Kiedis, and New York’s queen, Debbie Harry, in a strange convergence of post-punk and pop music.
In Anthony Kiedis’ memoir Scar Tissue, the sheer lunacy of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ life as a teenager living with his father is quite simply unfathomable. The singer, under his actor-cum-drug-dealer father’s heinous supervision, found himself rubbing shoulders with some of the rock world’s royalty. At one particular party, a teenage Kiedis would propose to Blondie’s lead singer and songwriter, Debbie Harry.
In 1974, when Kiedis was just a very young 12-year-old child, he travelled to live with his father, John Michael Kiedis, AKA Blackie Dammett, in California. The singer’s father had returned from a spell in Europe, making friends with the rock and roll elite in an attempt to try and carve out a career in acting. While he waited for the bigwigs of Hollywood to come a-knocking, he made his way in the world by selling drugs.
Kiedis even recalls his father giving him his first taste of mind-bending drugs: “I had been there only a few days when my dad called me into the kitchen,” he said. “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”
Keidis added: “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 counselled. I realised I was high. I loved the sensation. It felt like medicine to soothe the soul and awaken the senses.”
It meant that Kiedis, often acting as Dammett’s mule or runner, would come into contact with some of the 70s’ most unstoppable talents. He crossed paths with some of rock’s elite acts, everyone from David Bowie to Talking Heads, Led Zeppelin, and beyond. It would help develop Anthony’s talent for music and his snarling attitude—a burning attitude that Kiedis saw in the very early embers of punk.
He and his father were big fans of punk and new wave in the late 70s and were at the forefront of both the homegrown Los Angeles scene and the wave of acts arriving from across the country, namely New York, to play infamous venues like Sunset Strip and The Whisky-A-Go-Go. One such band coming on the West Coast with a big reputation was Blondie.
The new wave monarchy arrived in LA with critical and public acclaim for the band’s latest twist on punk rock and the reams of roses, which fell at the feet of their idyllic lead singer, Debbie Harry. The band opened up a show for the Ramones, and Kiedis and his son attended the after-party. As Kiedis recounted in Scar Tissue, “At that time, my favourite record was Blondie’s first. Every one of those songs was indelibly etched on my soul, and I was totally in love with Deborah Harry.”
It transpires that a young Kiedis, likely buoyed by his ever-growing charm and developing good looks, went on to ask Harry to marry him. Harry remembered the incident as well, although she thought him to be much younger. “I did have one [proposal] from Anthony [Keidis] from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers when he was about eight! I treasure that. I had to let him down gently.”
Just imagine a young Anthony Kiedis, full of confidence and whatever else he could get his hands on, finding it within himself to ask the sexiest woman in the world to marry him at just 15. Now, that is the kind of confidence that makes you one of the leading frontmen of one of the biggest rock bands. That’s the kind of confidence that makes you Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
