‘Pea’: The only Red Hot Chili Peppers song sung by Flea
Anthony Kiedis will probably be one of the first to tell you that he doesn’t have the greatest voice in the world. Considering his way of rapping and the softer approach to singing, the Red Hot Chili Peppers is never going to be giving a Freddie Mercury-level performance in his life, and there’s not a damn thing wrong with that. He knows his strengths lie in delivering a funky, fresh vibe, but that doesn’t mean that someone like Flea can’t get behind the mic when he wants to.
If you break down how the band got together, the only reason why Red Hot Chili Peppers even exist is because of Kiedis. He’s the only one who’s been there since the beginning, and were it not for his close friendship with Flea, their first jam session at a dive bar in the middle of Los Angeles may have just been a goof that never went past the first few rows of drunk patrons.
Once the band started to really hone themselves as a bonkers live act, Kiedis started to settle into his groove as a frontman. Part Run-DMC and part George Clinton, Kiedis wanted to make the entire concert feel like one big party from the moment he started, only for the good vibes to stop when Hillel Slovak passed away.
Although the band recovered nicely with guitarist John Frusciante, Kiedis started singing in a different style. Suddenly, the dude could somehow sing melodies, and they were actually much better than they had any right to be on tracks like ‘Knock Me Down’ and ‘Good Time Boys’.
Going into the studio with Rick Rubin, Blood Sugar Sex Magik is a smorgasbord of everything Kiedis could do, from rapping on ‘Give It Away’ to the tenderness of ‘Under the Bridge’ to whatever he’s doing on his cover of Robert Johnson’s ‘They’re Red Hot’. Once the band took to the road, Frusciante’s departure and subsequent descent into drugs led to the band rethinking their approach for the next album.
For the first time since their inception, the band weren’t making songs out of jam sessions anymore. With new guitarist Dave Navarro in tow, One Hot Minute was focused on songwriting rather than a funky jam, with songs like ‘My Friends’ having greater attention to detail whenever they performed it.
Right in the middle of the record, Kiedis doesn’t show up for work on the song ‘Pea’. Sounding like a cute little interlude between the other tracks, the song is played only by Flea, strumming his acoustic and getting behind the mic to sing about how small he feels compared to the rest of the world.
Given how Kiedis had grown in just a few years, it’s easy to see why Flea hung in the background, though. His voice isn’t really as versatile as Kiedis’s, and the way he delivers the song makes him sound like he’s unsure of himself from the moment he starts singing. While the song is definitely interesting for what it is, there’s also a sad undercurrent to the whole thing.
Since the rest of the band had relapsed on hard drugs throughout the recording, a lot of the song feels like Flea is at the end of his rope, trying desperately to keep his band together before everything falls apart. One Hot Minute may have given the rest of the band freedom to work in different areas, but ‘Pea’ feels like the sad by-product of them having to deal with change once again.
