Flea's six best basslines with the Red Hot Chili Peppers

Credit: Stefan Brending

The three basslines Flea calls the greatest ever

Sat 9 September 2023 18:30, UK

There aren’t too many rock bassists that have dominated their instruments quite like Flea. Throughout his time with Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea has delivered a clinic on how to make the four-string take up the same space as the average guitar, all while having the punk rock ethos of playing every note like it’s the last one he’d ever play. Although Flea seems to be channelling his influences from the ether, he does admit to having a few basslines that he based his style on.

When talking about what he considered the best basslines of all time, Flea’s first pick was ‘Flashlight’ by Parliament-Funkadelic. While it’s no surprise that the man behind the low end would pick a funk track, the song ‘Flashlight’ does rub off on a handful of the Flea’s iconic basslines.

Featuring a trademark slap approach, Bootsy Collins’ heavy use of octaves and the signature pop of the bass has turned up in various places in Flea’s playing, from the group’s cover of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Higher Ground’ to the massive assault of ‘Naked in the Rain’. There are even a handful of Flea basslines that feel like the distant cousin of ‘Flashlight’, like the signature groove of ‘Aeroplane’ from One Hot Minute.

Besides funk music, Flea had a soft spot for ‘Ramble On’ from Led Zeppelin II. Considering his pedigree as a session musician before working with Zeppelin, John Paul Jones does an exquisite job playing around the chord changes, making for one of the most lyrical bass lines of his career.

Flea has also incorporated that type of playing style into his later-era tunes with the Peppers. Throughout his work on albums like Stadium Arcadium and By the Way, Flea adopted a melodic sensibility to his basslines, using a distinctive claw grip that allowed him to play the low end with his thumb while stretching to pluck out melodies with the other part of his hand.

Then again, Flea has always been about expanding his craft as a musician, and including the Alice Coltrane song ‘Journey to Satchdananda’ is the perfect example of his versatility. Being the daughter of jazz great John Coltrane, this song picks up where the jazz legend had left off, bringing in world music elements alongside the various fusion elements of classic material like A Love Supreme.

Compared to the usual sounds of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea has always been a jazz fan, initially starting on the trumpet rather than the bass. When he did decide to delve into the world of rock and roll, though, those chops seemed to come with him.

Although none of the band’s classic material could be described as jazzy from front to back, the outro of a song like ‘Funky Monks’ is a prime example of Flea using his jazz chops to improvise his melody. Throughout the tune, Flea weaves through different chord textures under John Frusciante’s chord stabs, using what would generally be any random interlude and turning it into a jam session that just happened to be captured on tape.

That’s just a drop in the bucket of Flea’s influences, though, drawing from everyone from Sly and The Family Stone to Black Flag when turning in his signature performances. While most artists find their musical lane and stick with it, Flea sees every song as another building block in his musical development.