The artist that left Flea in tears: “I just couldn’t stop crying”
For any musician, listening back to some of their biggest influences is a very emotional experience. Even if someone hasn’t written the musical equivalent of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, any musician who has laid down their soul on a record has hit on something powerful when the audience can hear their heart through the speakers. While Flea has always had a visceral reaction to listening to his favourite artists, not everything was limited to the funk rock that the Red Hot Chili Peppers had made their own.
Many of the biggest names in funk, like Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament Funkadelic, might have been integral to Flea’s playing, but there was also a lot of punk rock. He knew that someone strumming one chord would have been equally as effective as a jazz prodigy playing 30 notes if they had the right idea behind it, and whenever he picked up the bass, he made sure to play every note like it was the last thing he’d ever get the chance to play.
Many of his best moments have to do with the rhythm rather than the note choices. After all, any good bassist is practically a drummer who can play musical notes, and whenever he locked in with Chad Smith during their golden years, Flea was more important to the groove than anyone else in the group, especially when creating the kind of rhythmic hooks that came out of ‘Give It Away’.
While the band had become a full-on rock outfit at that point, Flea never lost his love for old-school hip-hop either. The whole reason that Anthony Kiedis got behind the microphone was about trying to emulate the biggest names in the genre, like Run-DMC, and it was almost a happy accident that he managed to make some of the greatest melodies of the band’s career once they came up with ‘Under the Bridge’.
Whereas most people focused on the lyrics, Flea was more driven to the instrumentals when listening to people like J Dilla. Outside of being one of the holy maestros of hip-hop beats during his prime, Dilla was the one who managed to blend other genres under one roof, making a kaleidoscopic view of hip-hop even when no one was spitting over his music like on Donuts.
As Flea ventured further into his discography, he eventually became overwhelmed at the amount of work Dilla was able to do, saying, “I listen to Ruff Draft, and I was in Big Sur by myself. I was wearing headphones, and I was walking around, and it touched this thing in me so deeply. I remember I just couldn’t stop crying. It was so powerful. Some people just have the ability to touch you, and he does.”
And a lot of what people have done with Dilla’s beats since then has never been anything less than reverent of his work. Outside of the traditional hip-hop sphere, though, seeing his beats reworked by different jazz artists also may have helped Flea come full circle, having turned in time studying jazz before he even managed to pick up the bass.
But no matter what genre Dilla was making, he would always make something bigger than a traditional beat that went hard in a club. Whereas most people have a category on their streaming services for the term “soul music”, Dilla might be the clearest example of an artist who put a piece of their spirit onto vinyl.
