When Ben Feldman was growing up in Bala Cynwyd in the 1990s, he made a fateful trade. The preteen music fan — “I would have been 12 or 13,” he said — gave up his copy of Led Zeppelin II to a friend of his older sister’s. The scratched CD case he got in return contained Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the 1991 album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. That album turned the Chili Peppers into one of the biggest bands of the 1990s and made Feldman a lifelong fan. It also sent him on an indirect path that, three...