Actors - Flea

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Flea (born Michael Peter Balzary on October 16, 1962 in Burwood, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia) is the bassist for the alternative funk band Red Hot Chili Peppers. Flea is considered to be one of the most talented bassists in the rock and roll scene.

In March 1967, Michael's father, Mick, who worked as a Customs officer, was posted to New York, and the whole family moved to the United States. Around 1971, Michael's parents divorced, and his mother moved with him and his sister Karen to Los Angeles in 1972, to live with a jazzman named Walter Urban Jr, whom she would soon marry.

Flea got his start in music very early. He first tried the drums, and at age nine started playing the trumpet. After only a couple of years he had become proficient enough to enter the Los Angeles Junior Philarmonic Orchestra, and he also played in his Junior High School's orchestra. Balzary confessed to VH1's Behind The Music, that he originally had no interest in rock and roll and sought to become a jazz musician like his stepfather, but changed musical direction after being introduced to the music of KISS, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin by future bandmate Hillel Slovak.

He met bandmate Anthony Kiedis while at Fairfax High School, and started to play the bass around age 17, when he was recuited to play for Anthym, a band formed by his Junior High school friends Hillel Slovak, Jack Irons and Alain Johannes, to replace their current bassist who they believed was substandard. In 1981, he left Anthym, searching for new musical experiences. He then joined Fear, an aggressive and wild band from the LA punk scene. In 1983, he, Kiedis, Slovak and Irons went on to form Red Hot Chili Peppers together. They got a record deal with a major label in 6 months, and Flea then left Fear to concentrate on the Chili Peppers. At the time he even turned down an offer by his longtime idol John Lydon / Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols fame to join Lydon's new band Public Image Ltd., because he preferred to stay with his friends in the Peppers.

Flea is widely considered to be among the finest bassists in the field of Rock music. He still plays trumpet occasionally, for example, as part of a horn section on the second Jane's Addiction album, on Mike Watt's Ball Hog or Tug Boat?, on The Mars Volta's sophomore release Frances The Mute, and with Nirvana on a performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit
at Hollywood Rock '93, a music festival in Brazil. The songs "Subway To Venus", "Pretty Little Ditty", and "Taste the Pain" on the Chili Peppers album Mother's Milk, and "Tear" on By the Way also feature Flea on trumpet, and lately he has been playing some trumpet during the Peppers live performances.

Flea's style is influenced by Bootsy Collins, funk music and by the energy of early punk rock bands such as Black Flag.

Basses

Flea recorded with a MusicMan StingRay bass guitar on the Red Hot Chili Pepper's first two albums; Red Hot Chili Peppers and Freaky Styley, and appears playing it in the band's earliest videos 'True Men Don't Kill Coyotes', 'Jungle Man', and 'Catholic School Girls Rule'. This early StingRay of Flea's was adorned with various pink and green tape and paint, and he used it live for the band's earliest performances for the first two albums, adding more stickers over his own original pink and green additions towards the Freaky Styley era. An exception in this period is a Fender Precision Bass he used as a live backup, and ended up wielding in the band's 1985 Rockpalast (Germany) show, and a Silvertone, probably meant as a joke, which can be seen on some of the band's early videos.

For the recording of the band's 1987 The Uplift Mofo Party Plan album, Flea switched to using a black Spector NS bass with chrome hardware, dot inlays, J-J pickups and stickers of two reclining figures on the instrument's body horns, which he plays in the video for 'Fight Like A Brave' in addition to once more employing a StingRay for the video's day-glo paint/interior set shots. Compared to the band's earlier efforts, the superior mixing on The Uplift Mofo Party Plan and its 1989 successor Mother's Milk combined with Flea's introduction of the Spector, brought a fresh bite to the band's bottom end on these productions in contrast to Flea's prior use of the StingRay in recording. This new bass sound was consolidated with Flea's significantly faster and more advanced fingerstyle and slapping techniques, especially on Mother's Milk. Although on both of these albums the sound is distinctively that of the Spector, Flea swapped his original NS for a new one on Mother's Milk featuring gold hardware, block inlays and a P-J pickup configuration, which he performs with in the Chili Pepper's video for 'Knock Me Down'. Flea used his Spectors live at this time besides the studio, as in the 1988 live video for 'Fire' performed in Finland with the band in their classic 'socks on cocks' dress, and on live tracks from 1989 that feature on the remastered Mother's Milk and 1994 Out in LA compilation.
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Some related entries: Margo Stilley | Veronica Hart | Gilda Gray | Peter James Bryant | Frank Holden | Louise Vallance | Ken Chu | William Baldwin | David Threlfall | Art Baker | Bobby Madison
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Actors - Flea

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