On June 25, 1988, Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak died at home in Los Angeles as the result of an accidental heroin overdose. Slovak, who was a founding member of the Californian punk-funk band, was 26.
At the time, Slovak's best friend, Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis, was dating Hollywood actress Ione Skye, perhaps best known for her starring role in the film Say Anything, as well as her acclaimed performances in films such as Rivers Edge, The Rachel Papers, and Gas Food Lodging. Skye recently published her revealing best-selling memoir, Say Everything, and in it she recalls the fateful night that she and Kiedis learned of Slovak's death.
Skye knew that Kiedis was a heroin addict when she began dating him as a 17-year-old. So when the singer's friend Bob Forrest, frontman of cult LA band Thelonious Monster, phoned the couple's home on the evening of June 27, 1988, "crying so hard that he couldn't get words out", Skye originally feared that the call had been made to share bad news about her boyfriend, who had gone out that evening to see his drug dealer.
Recalling the horror of the night in her memoir Skye writes:
“What is it?” I said. “Is it Anthony?”
It was Anthony, I knew it. He’d gone to meet his dealer and hadn’t returned.
“It’s Hillel,” Bob sobbed. “They found him at his place…”
"Bob hung up," Skye recalls, "and I stood in the dark, holding the empty phone till I heard Anthony rev into the driveway."
When Kiedis didn't immediately come into the house, Skye went out to his car, and found her boyfriend "hunched over in the front seat, a plastic THANK YOU shopping bag crumpled next to him." The sight initially made Skye think that Kiedis was shooting up heroin, but the singer was actually just writing in his notebook, working on potential lyrics. Skye urged him to come in immediately to phone Bob Forrest back.
"I couldn’t be the one to say it," she writes.
"Anthony dialed the phone, his warriorlike shoulders slowly curling around the blow of Bob’s news," Skye continues. "Then he straightened, hung up, grabbed the THANK YOU bag, and strode to the bathroom.
"You’re doing that now?" I said, following him.
"Anthony whipped his head toward me with a look so anguished that I understood.
"Of course he was shooting up. He’d just lost his best friend. Who wouldn’t numb that blow if they could?"
Red Hot Chili Peppers later paid tribute to their friend's tragic passing with the song Knock Me Down, on their 1989 album Mother's Milk. This was the first album that the band recorded with their new guitarist John Frusciante.
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