Ouch!: Flea details “bizarre peeing accident” that caused head injury
Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on March 23rd, showing off a head injury that was caused by a “bizarre peeing accident”.
The untimely injury occurred just days before Flea is set to release his debut solo album, Honora, on March 27th, which meant that he was sporting a plaster on his forehead while on promotional duties speaking to Fallon.
Before getting into the nitty gritty in regards to his new jazz record, the elephant in the room, the big plaster on his face, needed to be addressed.
Initially, Flea gave a false story, saying, “It’s very serious, Jimmy. A few days ago, I was walking down the street and see this gang of thugs walking toward me, there was like five guys. They were all wearing leather jackets. I saw them mug like four old ladies.”
The bassist then said that the thugs were carrying “bats, knives, chains” and likened them to the “bad guys from Robocop“. Flea, as his story goes, then used his martial arts experience, and they were all “whimpering, moaning, crying” on the ground, which is when he realised he “had suffered a little nick”.
While that would have been a hell of a story, he then confessed to it being a work of fiction, and revealed the less heroic cause of his head injury.
“Actually, what happened was it was a bizarre peeing accident,” he confessed. “I was doing a radio show for Apple Music the other day. I was playing a Lee Morgan song, a great song called ‘Stopstart’ with Billy Higgins on drums. There were three minutes left in the song and I said ‘I got to go pee’, so I have three minutes before I introduce the next tune,” he explained.
Within the three-minute interval, the injury occurred with Flea recalling, “I jump up, I run down the hallway, I pee, I’m coming back. I’m wearing my reading glasses, I yell something to someone, running full sprint down the hallway, and bam… smack into a glass door, flat on my back, blood spurting out of my head.”
He then joked, “I’m lying there going ‘Oh man, I’ve got to do the Fallon Show in a few days… I’ll tell him I got into a fight.”
After amusing the audience with the anecdote about the “bizarre peeing accident”, Flea later took to the stage on The Tonight Show to perform a cover of Frank Ocean’s ‘Thinkin Bout You’, which appears on Honora.
In a recent interview, Flea revealed the genesis of the album was born after he forced himself to learn the trumpet while on tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, sharing, “So I decided I’m gonna play trumpet every day for two years, and at the end of the two years, I’m gonna make a record.”
He added, “I don’t know how good I’m gonna be at the end of two years, but I know I’m going on a two-year-long stadium tour with the Chili Peppers and I can play in my hotel room, and that’s what I’m gonna do, and that’s what I did. I practised every day for two years, and went and made my record.”
To celebrate the release of Honora, Flea is set to embark upon a theatre tour across North America, Europe and the United Kingdom later this year, including a performance at the Koko in Camden on May 26th.
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