How did the Red Hot Chili Peppers get together?
Old Trafford Cricket Ground is usually the home to, you guessed it, cricket. But one fateful night in Manchester, it was the domain of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Tens of thousands of people rocked up to the cricket ground in a bid to see the California rockers in action, and while that may sound like a lot, a crowd this large watching Flea and Co isn’t a strange thing these days. The band are constantly playing sold-out stadium shows, given that their infectious blend of funk and rock is the kind of music that appeals to crowds of people en masse.
It’s hard to imagine, then, that they almost never got together, as when Flea and Anthony Kiedis first met, they almost wound up having a fight. They were at school together, and Flea was playing around with one of the other kids, and Kiedis thought that he was bullying.
“We had just turned 15,” said Flea in an interview with Mojo when discussing how he and Kiedis met, “It was the beginning of the school year and we had just gotten to high school, so we were all new. Anthony had been in LA for a few years, just like me. He was an intimidating presence. He had his hair cut real short.”
Flea continued, talking about how the two of them almost had a fight the first time that they properly met one another. “The first time he met me he did threaten me,” said the bassist, “There was this other kid who was my friend and I was kind of being an asshole. I had the kid in a headlock and doing what we call in Los Angeles a noogie […] I was doing it playfully but I don’t think he appreciated it.”
Despite a frosty beginning, once Flea and Kiedis wound up taking classes together, they started to grow closer. They became friends in high school, along with Hilel Slovak and Jack Irons. Given they all had an interest in music, it wasn’t long before the idea of starting a band together came about.
So, how did Red Hot Chili Peppers get together?
At first, they were interested in being a one-off opening act called “Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem,” but once you’ve gotten a taste for the rockstar life, it’s hard to stop at just one gig. Once they had played their first gig as an opening act, the band realised that they were keen on starting a group and sticking to it. Having met at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles and becoming friends first, the group already knew about the kind of music they were keen on making, and so they used that as a starting point and went from there.
Flea originally joined the group out of rebellion. He didn’t get along with his stepdad, who was a jazz musician, and so when the opportunity to start a band came about, he took it, purely to annoy his step father. Flea had a history of playing the trumpet, but ditched it for a bass guitar when the opportunity arose.
“I wanted to be a trumpet player, but I started playing bass in a rock band,” he said, “Which he (his stepdad) really looked down on […] Two weeks later I’m on Sunset Strip posing and being a rock star and all of a sudden girls are talking to me. I thought I was just going completely against my stepfather, because he frowned on me for playing punk rock and rock music, which he thought was ridiculous and had nothing to do with music.”
