The Red Hot Chili Peppers basslines Flea struggles to play the most
It’s a rare thing for bass guitarists to be hailed as superstars on the same level as vocalists, guitarists, or even drummers, but one name is continually elevated to this status for his accomplished style, and innovation is Flea.
Even from the earliest moments of their career, Red Hot Chili Peppers were a band who were praised for their innovative blend of genres, and the musicians they had on board were clearly a cut above many of their contemporaries. Among those supremely talented individuals who allowed the band to excel and become one of the most acclaimed rock bands of their generation was Flea, a jazz-trained multi-instrumentalist who, as well as playing bass, contributed piano, trumpet and percussion.
Over the years, there have been plenty of personnel changes and shifts in direction within the band, with Flea and vocalist Anthony Kiedis being the only continuously present figures in the band, but these changes didn’t alter the fact that their talismanic bassist was constantly pushing to make his parts stand out.
Prior to joining the band, his personal influences all stemmed from the world of jazz, as a result of his father having also been an accomplished jazz musician, and he also had a significant involvement and interest in the punk scene. Both of these impacted his style when he began learning how to play bass as a teenager, but the result of these combined interests didn’t necessarily produce something that sounded entirely like the sum of its parts.
Of course, having this wide pool of influences didn’t mean that Flea was under any obligation to try and incorporate all of them at once, but large amounts of their early output presented itself as a hybrid of both punk and jazz, throwing in some funk for good measure.
Just because of his musical upbringing and vast array of influences doesn’t mean he was bound to know how to make it all work, and he had to push himself to another level in order to find the perfect balance between these disparate styles when writing basslines for the band.
As a consequence, Flea notes that some of the basslines in early Red Hot Chili Peppers material is some of the most complex and hard to pull off, and during an interview with YouTuber Rick Beato, he noted that two tracks from this period are ones he still struggles to get right to this day.
“The early ones are kinda the hardest,” the bassist asserted. “There’s ‘Get Up and Jump’ – I really need to warm up to fuckin’ play it. That part, or ‘Blackeyed Blonde’. It’s that early shit where it’s mixing the punk rock feeling those funk rhythms. Those are physically taxing, and also, it’s a groove. You really have to get in there.”
Both of these, with their rhythmically slapped low notes and melodic treble lines laid over the top are truly some of the toughest basslines for anyone to play, no matter how accomplished they are. For someone who seems as unflappable as Flea to struggle to play them only goes to highlight their complexity, and he’s the one who wrote them.
