Give it away

An excerpt from Anthony Kiedis’ Scar Tissue

One of those jams would lead to the breakout song on the album. I was off on one side of the rehearsal studio, working on lyrics, while the band was jamming as a trio. Sometimes they’d be serious intellectual craftsmen, trying to intertwine their minds and come up with specific parts, but other times they’d rock out in a very joyful manner. 

On one of those latter days, Flea started playing this insane bass line, and Chad cracked up and played along. I was so struck by Flea’s bass part, which covered the whole length of the instrument’s neck, that I jumped up and marched over to the mike, my notebook in tow. I always had fragments of song ideas or even specific isolated phrases in mind. I took the mike and belted out, “Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now.” 

That line had come from a series of conversations I’d had years earlier with Nina Hagen. Nina was a wise soul, and she realized how young and inexperienced I was then, so she was always passing on gems to me, not in a preachy way, just by seizing on opportunities. I was going through her closet one day, looking at all her crazy clothes, when I came upon a valuable exotic jacket. “This is really cool,” I said. 

“Take it. You can have it,” she said. 

“Whoa, I can’t take this. This is the nicest jacket you have in there,” I said. 

“That’s why I gave it to you,” she explained. “It’s always important to give things away; it creates good energy. If you have a closet full of clothes, and you try to keep them all, your life will get very small. But if you have a full closet and someone sees something they like, if you give it to them, the world is a better place.”

I had come from such a school of hard knocks that my philosophy was you don’t give thing away, you take whatever you want. It was such an epiphany that someone would want to give me her favorite thing. That stuck with me forever. Every time I’d be thinking, “I have to keep,” I’d remember, “No, you gotta give it away instead.” 

When I started going regularly to meetings, one of the principles I learned was that the way to maintain your won sobriety is to give it to another suffering alcoholic. Every time you empty your vessel of that energy, fresh new energy comes flooding in.”