Jolene's Anthony Kiedis is Behind Your New Favorite High-Test Coffee in a Can

Anthony Kiedis hasn’t heard about the male loneliness epidemic. Which makes sense. For one thing, Kiedis is a guy who seems blissfully offline, so he probably misses a lot of memes. Also, he still plays in a band with one of his best friends from high school. And he’s running a business, Jolene Coffee, with another close pal—Shane Powers, a classic Hollywood guy with a typically eccentric Hollywood resumé (“former Survivor contestant” is one of the entries) and a vibe that tells you he knows where the good parties are.I meet Kiedis and Powers for coffee on the terrace of the Bird Street Club, a members-only lounge on the Sunset Strip. By the time this interview runs the city will have just spent most of July in a steady broil, the sort that makes you pray for an early winter. But when we sit down it’s early June, the kind of day that reminds a table of L.A. transplants why they moved out west to begin with.“My dad brought me here in the ‘70s,” explains Kiedis, who was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and spent the first few years of his life there. “I showed up and took a breath of air and looked at a palm tree and realized that I would never be cold again. And I just fell in love.”Not long after that, Kiedis got kicked out of his first high school—“I lied about my address. I was using Sonny Bono’s,” he says, “and the jig was up—they were like, Yeah, you can’t come here”—and wound up at Fairfax High, a twist of fate he now calls “the greatest thing that ever happened to me.” He and some Fairfax buddies started the Red Hot Chili Peppers; they went on to sell more than 120 million albums worldwide.The band has weathered the death of its founding guitarist, Hillel Slovak, who died by overdose in 1988, as well as Kiedis’ own rocky road to recovery (detailed in his seamy, seminal 2004 memoir Scar Tissue) and the rise and fall of ‘90s alternative rock. Somewhere between that first album sale and the 120 millionth, they also became synonymous with the city. In the last few years alone, they’ve played the kickoff concert for the 2028 Olympic Games with Billie Eilish and closed out a wildfire-relief benefit show at a sold-out Kia Forum; the band's beloved Lakers regularly pump “Can’t Stop” on the P.A. during time-outs. But for all of their mainstream success, they still sound like an extension of the city’s underbelly—sweaty, sleazy, cured in sun and smoke and heat.Kiedis met Powers a few decades ago. They kept showing up to the same parties; Kiedis remembers feeling like his status as the social scene’s de-facto northern-midwest transplant (Powers is originally from Nebraska) was being infringed upon. “We became friends over eye contact long before we became friends over knowing each other and hanging out,” Kiedis jokes, “And then one day I saw him making a ruckus at a daytime fancypants Hollywood pool party, jumping off the roof of the house into the pool, and I was like, Hey, that’s my job! He’s taking my schtick!” The two sized each other up from there and hit it off.These days they meet once a week—for coffee, and to talk about anything and everything. Dating stressors, rough therapy sessions, family issues, or just what they watched on TV the night before. It’s all fair game. “For me, he’s sort of like my big brother in that every single time I hang out with him I learn something.” Powers says of Kiedis. Coffee, Powers suggests, fosters a greater conversational intimacy compared to meeting up for drinks. Alcohol can loosen you up, sure, but it also diminishes your focus and invites distraction. A meeting for coffee implies conversation, and often the ritual only deepens the talk that comes with it.Powers has heard about that aforementioned loneliness epidemic; he’s a hardcore video game guy and knows that, generationally speaking, more young dudes these days are staying in to stream, play Fortnite, and maintain relationships through screens rather than in person. But he can't imagine himself and Kiedis running down their fears, scars and wins anywhere other than face to face. It wouldn't be the same, he says, “if next week we were like Hey, let’s just text for an hour instead of getting coffee.”Kiedis and Powers launched Jolene together last year, with partners John Terzian of the H.wood Group and Live Nation’s Michael Rapino. Generally, celebrities looking to make a quick buck in the beverage business tend to gravitate toward spirits. Coffee’s a different game; the product is harder to perfect and the category is more crowded, which makes it harder to make a mark, especially if you eschew traditional celeb-branding moves (you will not find cardboard cutouts of Anthony Kiedis in a Jolene T-shirt at your local Whole Foods.) But Kiedis and Powers say they wouldn’t have done anything else but coffee, the basis for their twenty-plus-year friendship.The two spent five years developing Jolene, and this coffee snob was surprised to come away from the meeting feeling that the work had paid off. The brand’s canned lattes have a coffee-forward flavor and don’t taste like they’re pumped full of sugar or flavor syrups. The new hazelnut-latte flavor—one of three new Jolene varieties hitting shelves today, along with salted-caramel and Red Velvet flavors—actually tastes like hazelnut, not Nutella, and the black cold brew is so mellow that I sip my way through a full can of Jolene cold brew over the course of our conversation. After the interview I drive home in a great mood—maybe the best mood ever, practically vibrating with joy—only to discover that the cold brew is Jolene's highest-octane offering, with a head-banging 236 milligrams of caffeine per 8-ounce can.Courtesy of JoleneIt’s hard not to notice that, for a guy who’s toured the world and could ostensibly work or hang out with anyone he chooses, Kiedis’s social circle consists of relationships that run deep and are entrenched in history. The Chili Peppers are still going strong; Kiedis and Flea seem emotionally if not physically inseparable. It’s a rare thing—the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in which Kiedis came up is so often defined by legendary feuds between members and lengthy, ugly breakups that lead to tenuous for-the-money reunions. Kiedis, meanwhile, never stopped creating with his friends.“I don’t even know how to put it into words,” he ponders when I ask him what about those bonds he’s the most proud of, “I would say first that I’m most proud of the fact that we’re still alive. Alive as individuals, but also that our music is still alive, and for some reason we didn’t get bored or lazy about what we love…I know in my heart that in two months we’re gonna get together and start playing music, and we’re going to be just as creatively potent as we were in the ‘80s when we first met. They still care that much. They’re still curious and fascinated and want to be better and want to write better songs. I’m proud we didn’t get lame and bored and meaningless.”There are plenty of bands of the Chilis’ generation and the ones before that can–and do–get away with selling out arenas and stadiums and playing the same setlist every night for decades. Kiedis and his pals could dine out on “Scar Tissue” residuals for the rest of their lives. What keeps them writing new music and reconvening in the studio every few years?“It’s chemistry,” he says. “I feel supremely fortunate that I have John, for instance, who is obsessed and consumed and compelled to try new sounds and chords and textures. He lives for it. He couldn’t not do it. Chad, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he never stops playing drums, ever. Flea is the same. He’s obsessed, consumed by it.” It gives him, he says, “that kick in the ass, and a partnership to write to. And honestly, I would hate my life if I didn’t get to write songs and words and dance. It wouldn’t be a life worth living to me without that.”Before we part I ask Powers what the last thing he learned from Kiedis over coffee was. “He was telling me about El Niño yesterday,” Powers recalls. “I didn’t know but apparently it’s a Super El Niño this year, which is going to have all of these crazy effects on the weather.”“For me, it’s a surf thing,” Kiedis explains. “God bless the planet and its weather and fires and rain and storms and hail from other realms. For me, it just equals surf.”