“Love and forgiveness”: The moment Flea wanted to leave the Red Hot Chili Peppers
While the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ revolving door of guitarists continues to circle, the remainder of the band has stayed a critical constant: Anthony Kiedis, Chad Smith, and Flea have been the holy trinity of one of modern music’s most genre-bending bands.
A band whose love for the ‘City of Angels’ has been defined by their respectively turbulent upbringings where exposure to substance abuse at an early age was a commonality. Frontman Kiedis was exposed to hard substances very early on in life, with him and his father regularly snorting cocaine together or smoking weed. At just 14 years old, Kiedis used heroin for the first time after mistaking the unidentified powder for cocaine in the house, leading to decades worth of opiate abuse.
Meanwhile, the band’s enigmatic bass player, Flea, was experiencing adolescence through the lens of a hyper-creative child, placed in a home filled with alcoholic volatility and, at times, gun-toting violence. Speaking of his step-father in his memoir Acid For The Children, Flea said: “Walter would get drunk, and something would trigger him, and he would freak out and smash everything in the house,” He continued. “At times, a gun would come out.”
Life in the shadows of normality eventually forged the brotherhood of Red Hot Chili Peppers, which began at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, with Kiedis and Flea as original members alongside guitarist Hillel Slovak – who passed away in 1988 – and drummer Jack Irons. Following the death of Slovak and the hiring and firing of several drummers, guitarist John Frusciante and drummer Chad Smith joined. As a four, they would go on to record seminal albums that, to this day, cause fans to credit this lineup as the original band.
While Smith’s energetic and precise drumming style anchored the Chili Peppers’ future exploration of complex and unique sounds, the introduction of Frusciante proved to be genuinely altering the band’s path to success. Frusciante, an accomplished guitarist and lauded as a modern-day Hendrix, elevated the Chili Peppers’ melodic capabilities that allowed the band to seamlessly drift from soul, funk and hard rock.
The release of their first album as the newly established four-piece, Blood Sugar Sex Magik showcased Frusciante’s stylistic influence on the band and his guitar performances on the album’s title tracks as well as on iconic tracks ‘Under The Bridge’ and ‘Suck My Kiss’ showed his influence on taking the band to new and innovative heights.
But the very heights that record took the band to was ultimately what led him to quit for the first time. After Blood Sugar Sex Magik made the Chili Peppers mega stars, the instant exposure to success led to him turning to heroin to cope with his emotional problems.
After recording following album One Hot Minute without Frusciante, he eventually returned for the recording of Californication and stayed for three more albums before leaving in 2009. What has remained clear to this day, is that every record Frusciante was involved in has gone on to be the band’s most successful records, both commercially and artistically.
So, in 2009, when Frusciante once again left the band, the rest of the members scrambled to figure out what future they wondered they had left.
In a 2011 interview with Q magazine, Flea spoke about times when he thought about leaving the band, saying, “I’d thought that if John did go that I would definitely not want to continue the band without him. But after he left, something kind of shifted in me, and I found myself a really profound love for the Chili Peppers and particularly Anthony.”
Flea’s loyalty to Kiedis has seen him stick by the frontman and the Chili Peppers’ mission more than just one time, even before the introduction of Frusciante. Given his difficult upbringing, Kiedis was tackling drug addiction from the very beginning of the band’s career, and it threatened their existence before any commercial success.
Speaking at their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame Induction in 2012, Kiedis shared a story of Flea’s loyalty to him and the band: “One day, I stayed up a little too late, and I was hungover and passed out, and I think Flea had kind of come to the end of his rope”.
He continued the story, saying: “He said, ‘Anthony man, you’re just fucked up; I don’t know that I can do this anymore’. And I came out of my stupor, and I kind of cleared my eyes and said, ‘But Flea, I was going to be the James Brown of the ’80s’, and the look on his face was like shit, you were weren’t you? Let’s keep going, and he forgave me”.
The anecdote was told with humour but remains a bright cover-up of the dark reality that existed within the band. Suffering truly for their art, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ music was a sonic representation of life’s multicoloured experience. Both dark and colourful, it portrayed the realities in which they suffered but the realities that also forged them together and sent them down the path of becoming one of music’s most iconic bands.
