The Red Hot Chili Peppers song Flea wanted to remake
No artist in the world can claim to be in love with everything they’ve ever made. While some songs may be more celebrated than others, there will always be a few tracks that never quite came together in the studio, leading to artists shying away from them when they play live or dreading having to dig them up in the archives. Although Flea has always kept the bottom end of Red Hot Chili Peppers rock solid, one of his biggest regrets is hidden inside one of their biggest hits.
Granted, it’s not like Flea had to worry about not playing in time. Before he had even picked up a bass, he already had a formal education about how music was supposed to work, being well-versed in the sounds of jazz before rediscovering his love for rock and roll during the punk movement.
Seeing the merit in playing as aggressively as possible, Flea combined all his influences when working with the Chili Peppers, crafting lines aligned with bass legends as varied as Larry Graham and Cliff Burton. Despite having the ability to play a mile a minute, Rick Rubin was the one who taught the band to appreciate simplicity.
After gaining John Frusciante after the tragic death of Hillel Slovak, Rubin signed on to produce them after their work on the album Mother’s Milk. Thinking they should strip their sound down to its essentials, many songs on Blood Sugar Sex Magik featured Flea playing iconic bass lines informed by space in the mix, like the sliding groove of ‘Give It Away’ and the descending figure in ‘The Power of Equality’.
While the band earned some of their biggest hits around this time with singles like ‘Under the Bridge’, they were thrown for a loop when Frusciante quit halfway through the tour, not wanting to be a part of a huge stadium rock act. Even though the group carried on with Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, Flea wasn’t so sure about his playing on the new lineup’s debut single, ‘Aeroplane’.
Despite the drastic lineup shift, the song fits with the classic Peppers tracks, with Flea playing a funky bass groove while Navarro gets to shred on the back half of the song. When relistening to the track, Flea thought that different elements of his performance could have been done a lot better.
For all of the great grooves they had laid down in the past, Flea thought that the song could have easily come off as a parody of funk, saying, “’Aeroplane’ was the only song I was worried about—I thought it sounded like another stupid white boy trying to be funky! 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 wasn’t flowing with the drums. I wanted to redo it, but Rick said, ‘It’s cool’”.
Even though Flea wasn’t proud of the band’s initial single, the rest of the album would feature some of his most inventive playing ever, including the massive bass freakout on the song ‘Transcending’ and the mellow groove of ‘My Friends’. Every musician tends to be their own worst critic, but even when Flea has an off day, it still sounds like the most effortless sound in the world.
