MixedThe AV Club... [Flea] chops his early life up into vignettes, each of them so energetically told that they feel like they’ve been fired out of a cannon. Even at its most incisive and gutting, the depth of feeling he lends keeps the story moving with the same kind of energy he brings to the stage ... While the relationship between the two musicians should form the emotional crux of the storym, the book’s pithiness keeps it from truly lifting off ... By front-loading the way he feels about Kiedis, thoughtfully written though it may be, Flea never allows us to see the complications in their relationship play out over time. It’s a disappointment, especially because Acid For The Children suggests he’s both talented and empathetic enough to give their story its due ... Flea can be maddeningly uneven on a sentence level ... The prose frequently mimics his playing: occasionally beautiful, occasionally outrageous, in conversation with a small group of predecessors but unwilling to follow anyone else’s rules ... it’s worth asking whether 400 pages of sober and reflective storytelling is what we want from the dude who played Woodstock ’99 naked. Taken on its own terms, Acid For The Children feels remarkably close to the bone, its author nuanced in his understanding of himself, his hang-ups, and his surroundings.
