The moment Flea wanted to quit Red Hot Chili Peppers: “Anthony, you’re fucked up”
It would take something monumental for Flea to consider walking away from music entirely. From the moment he first picked up a trumpet, the bassist lived and breathed rhythm, whether he was laying down infectious funk grooves or immersing himself in the intricate sounds of the world’s tightest jazz ensembles. There wasn’t much that Flea couldn’t master. However, just before the Red Hot Chili Peppers hit the big time, he admitted that he came dangerously close to quitting the band altogether—and it was all because of one member.
Considering how they started, though, it wasn’t clear whether the band was going to last for a lifetime or a few weeks. The whole thing had been put together on a whim when Flea and Hillel Slovak were jamming in a club, and they convinced their buddy Anthony Kiedis to rap over one of their tunes, so it wasn’t like they were poring over their material with the same clinical approach that Steely Dan had or anything.
After making albums like Freaky Styley, something started to click. Despite Slovak having to return to his old band before releasing their debut album, he was welcomed back with open arms for the follow-up, especially with George Clinton behind the board to make the whole band lock into the funkiest grooves that they ever had. But if you know anything about Clinton around the late 1980s, that also meant dealing with some serious drug problems.
Suffice it to say, no one in the band was necessarily a choirboy when it came to their misbehaviour, and while Freaky Styley is still a decent record, it was clear that they were riding a cocaine high throughout every single track. Once Kiedis started hitting the hard stuff like heroin, things started to take a severe nosedive.
With Slovak following quickly behind him, a lot of their gigs started to dry up when Kiedis started to become too unreliable for gigs. When he was on, he could bring the same fire that Run-DMC had back in the day, but for Flea, it had stopped being fun, leading to him spending some time playing with bands like Jane’s Addiction as he figured out whether he should be in the band or not.
Despite his childhood bond with Kiedis, the frontman remembered Flea coming back to his apartment to tell him that he was the reason he was leaving the band, recalling at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, saying, “Flea had come to the end of his rope. He said, ‘Anthony, you’re fucked up. I don’t know if I can do this anymore.’ And I came out of my stupor and said, ‘But Flea, I was going to be the James Brown of the 1980s.’ And the look on his face was like, ‘Shit, you were, weren’t ya? Okay, let’s keep this going.’”
While Flea could manage to get through to Kiedis, it’s still a shame that Slovak never conquered his demons and passed away following an overdose. Even though that left the door open for resident guitar genius John Frusciante, not being able to hear what Slovak contributed to Blood Sugar Sex Magik is still one of the greatest ‘what-if’ scenarios for any iconic rock act.
Still, Kiedis’s ability to kick his habit is half the reason why some of the best Chili Peppers records work. While not every song is meant to be about recovery and the pleasures of California, there’s no way for anyone to create a song like ‘Scar Tissue’ if they weren’t completely honest about their habits.
