Red Hot Chili Peppers Singer Anthony Kiedis Finally Explains Why He Skipped Bandmate Hillel Slovak’s Funeral in New Netflix Doc

By Anna Menta

If you’ve been a Red Hot Chili Peppers band from the early days, then perhaps you remember that front man Anthony Kiedis skipped the funeral of his band-mate Hillel Slovak, who died of a drug overdose in 1988. Now, in the new Netflix documentary The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel—which began streaming today—Kiedis offers an explanation for his notable absence.

“I remember hearing that his mother, she was holding me responsible to some degree,” Kiedis said in a talking head interview for the documentary. “I had such a reputation at that time as a druggie. So I decided this is a person who I’m just gonna give space to, for forever, and not put her through… me. I tried to just disappear.”

Directed by Ben Feldman, and produced by Hillel Slovak’s brother, James Slovak, this Netflix documentary is a good primer for RHCP fans who didn’t hop on board until the ’90s, when the release of their fifth album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik shot them to true rock-stardom. The film walks viewers through Kiedis and bass player Flea’s childhood friendship with Slovak, whom they both admired and looked up to. While Slovak was the cool high school kid with a band, neither Flea nor Kiedis were musicians.

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

After years of friendship and a rocky start, they eventually formed the Peppers and got a record deal. But though they were making music in the ’80s, their work was plagued by both Kiedis and Slovak’s heroin addictions. In June 1988, Slovak was found dead—overdosed—in his apartment in Hollywood.

“We had the funeral. All of Hillel’s friends came,” James Slovak, Hillel’s brother, said in the documentary. “A few hundred people outside, you know. Flea was a pallbearer. But Anthony, he was no where to be found. He didn’t show up.”

From Slovak’s tone of voice, one can guess that he still hasn’t forgiven Kiedis for skipping his brother’s funeral.

Photo: Netflix

For his part, Kiedis does admit he wasn’t thinking Slovak’s family in the way he should have been. “The way I dealt with it was to not face the truth,” Kiedis said. “Not face the sobering reality of his family lost their son. His girlfriend lost her soulmate. We lost our best friend. It was too much.”

Later, Kiedis said, he went to visit Hillel’s mother on her deathbed, at the behest of James, who claimed that despite Kiedis’s fears, his mother never hated him. “I had a nice goodbye moment with her.”

Kiedis went on to say that Slovak’s death was a wake-up call for his own drug use, though not one that he heard right away.

“I continued to try to get high for a while, and that truly stopped working,” Kiedis said. “Nothing could shut my mind off, at that point. I knew that the gig was up. The days of just consuming, was up. And then the reality just set in: I’m not going to wake up from the bad dream. That kind of began my real journey of becoming sober, and my real journey of dealing with the loss of Hillel.”

Ahead of the The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers film release on Netflix, the band put out out a statement on Instagram distancing themselves from the film, writing that they participated in the film thinking it was a Hillel Slovak documentary, but that they felt the film was “being advertised as a Red Hot Chili Peppers documentary, which it is not. We have nothing to do with it creatively.”