Anthony Kiedis Celebrity

NAME: Anthony Kiedis

OCCUPATION: Singer

BIRTH DATE: November 01, 1962 (Age: 49)

EDUCATION: Fairfax High School, University of California Los Angeles

PLACE OF BIRTH: Grand Rapids, Michigan

Singer, actor, writer. Born on November 1, 1962, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Anthony Kiedis has become one of best-known figures in alternative rock. His parents split up when he was very young. He lived with his mother, Peggy, in Michigan and visited his father, John, in California. While with his father, Kiedis was exposed to the Los Angeles club scene where he got a chance to see such rock acts as the Eagles, Neil Young, Deep Purple, and Rod Stewart.

While Kiedis was attending Fairfax High School, he was in numerous bands, but none of them were up for consideration for a real band. It was not until early 1982 when he got together with high school friends Hillel Slovak, Michael Balzary and Jack Irons to play in a club as Tony Flow & The Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, which would eventually change its name to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The band's original line up consisted of the four friends, until Slovak and Irons left the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play with Anthym. Since then, the band has experienced at least twelve different line ups, releasing nine studio albums in the span of 22 years.

Having co-founded the band with Michael Balzary (Flea), he was the band frontman with his good looks and his charisma. Along with Flea, Kiedis has never left the band, although in his 2004 memoir Scar Tissue, he said he was kicked out of the band for a month due to rehabilitation problems. Kiedis is the main songwriter of the group, pounding down nearly all of the lyrics of the band's repitore. All of their songs are credited to Flea-Kiedis-.. with the other band members at the time. Kiedis has said that each band member writes his own part for each song. His songwriting style has varied over the years. From their early roots as a band, Kiedis wrote many lyrics involving sex, drugs, and life in L.A. As his musical tastes expanded and his outlook on life changed, he started to write songs about spirituality, struggles in life and loss of friends, incorporating a larger sense of social realism and thoughtfulness in his lyrics.

Kiedis' singing style has drastically changed over the years. While one cannot simply "learn" to sing, Kiedis has learned to control his vocals more and more with each album. He started being the vocalist of the band by rapping, of which he could do at extreme speeds, keeping a consistent rhythm. Starting from as early as Mother's Milk in 1989, Kiedis would write songs for the band with more melody rather than the basic rythym and beat style of funk and hip-hop, their first song doing this being "Knock Me Down". 1991's Blood Sugar Sex Magik still saw Kiedis rapping, but he started singing his first melodic ballads in songs like "Under the Bridge", "Breaking the Girl" and "I Could Have Lied". Over the years, Kiedis would favour singing rather than rapping. Kiedis said in his memoirs that he got many vocal coaches, but none of them would help him sing "better". In fact, it was not until 1999's Californication when he could take full control of his voice to sing. Many critics and reviewers agree that his voice has greatly improved and might have even reached its height in the Chili Peppers' most recent album Stadium Arcadium. In 2009 the band will be eligible to enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.