How Flea’s “bohemian” childhood shaped his bass style
When you look at Flea now, you see a fun-loving, larger-than-life character who doubles up as one of the greatest bass players in the world, but this modern image is the by-product of a particularly tricky life.
From early doors, he was moving around and trying to adjust to an ever-changing family dynamic. He was originally born in Melbourne, but then moved to New York with his Mum when he was only four. His father was hardly in his life, as he worked for the Australian Consulate and so was constantly travelling. By the time Flea was six, his Dad went back to Australia without the young musician and his mother.
His mother worked as a single parent in New York and eventually wound up meeting a jazz musician with a drug problem. They all packed up and moved across the country to Los Angeles when Flea was only ten and struggling to plant his feet in a world that seemed to continue shifting. He wound up finding solace in drug use and music.
While a lot of people might look at this chaotic start to his life and think that music was a means of escaping it, that wasn’t necessarily the case. Sure, looking now at his grand house in Los Angeles, multiple best-selling albums, adoration worldwide and the general acclaim he receives as one of the best bassists going, you could think that the past is well behind him, but the truth is, Flea carries it to the extent that it’s wrapped up in every note he plays.
He was originally exposed to bass because of his Mum’s boyfriend, the jazz musician known as Walter Urban. Urban was an aggressive man, someone that the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s bassist now describes as “violent and abusive”. He was scared of him to the extent that there were some nights he wouldn’t even sleep in his own house. “I had a rug in the garage,” he said in an interview with MOJO, “and I would roll myself in the rug and go to sleep because I was scared to sleep in the house.”
Whenever Flea saw his stepdad play the bass, he could see that aggression in his style of playing, as his stepdad played the upright bass in a jazz band and would pluck the strings and scream in a chaotic rage when he took to the stage. The violence that Flea witnessed within his home was present in the notes that his stepdad played, and so when Flea started playing bass, he did so in a way to rebel against this man that he was terrified of.
“I thought I was just going completely against my stepfather,” he said. “Because he frowned on me for playing punk rock and rock music, which he thought was ridiculous and had nothing to do with music.”
Flea isn’t the first musician ever to use his art in a bid to rebel against his parents, and he certainly won’t be the last. When he started playing rock music, Flea felt as though he was distancing himself from this troubling family life, but he was actually embracing it. The genre might not have been the same, but the way he used music as a vehicle was identical to how his stepdad played. When you watch Flea play bass, he doesn’t just pluck it, there is emotion in every single note, and it turns out this style was evidently influenced by what he described as a “bohemian” childhood.
“It was bohemian in the way that my stepdad was a jazz musician, very arrogant and born with the feeling that real musicians weren’t getting work,” he said, discussing how this affected his playing.
Concluding, “It has always been all this anger and fear and anxiety. I played so aggressively, and so much of it was what I learned from him subconsciously: that the instrument is a vehicle for getting out your anger and your fear and your feelings of not being understood.”
