The one bassline Flea needed to fix: “Another stupid white boy trying to be funky”
Don’t let the naked performances and wide-eyed gap tooth grin fool you, Flea is one of the greatest bass players of all time. He stepped out of the backstage shadows to change the perception of the humble instrument. He wasn’t there to keep time or support the embellishments of John Frusciante or lead Anthony Kiedis down a storytelling path. No he was there to steal the show.
His career rose through the cracks of shifting music plates in the late 1980s. Traditional rock and roll was in somewhat of disarray, having spent nearly two decades dominating the airwaves, to many it had reached maximum velocity, with no clear avenue of innovation to follow.
Meanwhile, the foundations of a burgeoning hip-hop scene were beginning to reveal themselves. California, in particular, was in a state of flux, with one hand waving goodbye to the bohemian troubadours and another shaking hands with the pioneers of West Coast hip-hop. But the emergence of the former gave understanding to misfits like Flea, who saw the bass as more than just a humble guardsman.
Rhythm was becoming the centre point of popular music, and in Flea, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers realised they had someone who could build rock’s bridge into the future. And with Ruck Rubin at the production helm, whose back catalogue boasted the very best of rap-come-rock with the Beastie Boys, Flea’s bass lines became the hypnotic bedrock upon which the band could explore chaos.
So perplexing were many of his riffs that to the untrained ear they weren’t just flawless, but completely incomprehensible. It was truly had to keep up with the twists and turns of Flea’s basslines, particular on the bands most treasured album Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
But in their follow up album One Hot Minute, Flea worried about leaning to far into his genre-bending sensibilities. Because come 1995, hip-hop and funk had married perfectly to become a global phenomenon, and suddenly the bassist felt at odds with his performance of the basslines that meant so much to that culture.
“Actually, ‘Aeroplane’ was the only song I was worried about,” said Flea in his 1996 Bass Player cover story. “I thought it sounded like another stupid white boy trying to be funky! When I played it live in the studio, the bass didn’t record right, so it was one of the few things I had to overdub. I put it out anyway, but it’s the one thing I’d go back and fix. The part kept feeling stiff to me, as if it wasn’t my day. I wanted to redo it, but Rick Rubin said it was cool.”
Flea’s sensitivity to nuances of sound is ultimately what made him the bass player he is, for the end product of that riff sounded nothing like a pastiche. From the outset, it’s clear that it’s an innately Flea riff, and it does exactly what it should: drive Kiedis’ vocal melodies further into the groove.
At that time, Rubin also had his finger on the pulse as to what worked and what didn’t, and for all the doubt thats crept up over his suitability as a producer over the years, just look back on how he brought the best out of one of the world’s most complex bass players.
