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Sure, a little of this goes a long way, but a lot of it goes even further. There's a mesmerizing, hummingbird quality to Scar Tissue that's hard to resist. It's a frank, unsparing, meticulous account of a life lived entirely on impulse, for pleasure and for kicks, and Kiedis (or possibly his co-author, Larry Sloman) has a gift for describing pleasure, especially that of playing music with your pals, something that rarely comes through on the page. The best scene in the book occurs when the Peppers first hook up with drummer Chad Smith, who walks in looking like a metal-head burnout and then stuns the band when he pounds the skins like Art Blakey. "It was a big eruption of sound and energy," Kiedis writes, "and all I could do was laugh hysterically." Now that's something even a square like Dylan could relate to.