Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea has reflected on his "pretty violent, chaotic" upbringing, and the adventures he shared with Anthony Kiedis as a "feral" teenager growing up in Los Angles in the 1970s.
Speaking with popular YouTube personality Rick Beato, Flea (real name: Michael Balzary) admits that he was a "shy, weird" kid, and became "just wild" as a teenager after his family moved from New York to Los Angeles.
"I was in the street," he recalls, "unwatched, getting into trouble, running around doing dumb, stupid fucking crimes."
It was at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles in 1976, that the teenage Flea met a new best friend, his future bandmate, Anthony Kiedis.
"I came home from school that day, and said, "Mom, for the first time in my life, I've found someone I can talk to'," the bassist wrote in his autobiography Acid For The Children.
"When I met him, my whole life changed," the bassist continued in the book, sharing tales of the pair discovering drugs, girls. and a talent for getting into trouble. "I'd found the perfect partner in crime, a guy like me, who just didn't give a fuck about any kind of convention."
"Anthony and I, when we were kids, we were up to so much wild stuff," Flea tells Beato, describing their lifestyle at the time as "feral".
"We were just loose and gone... in Hollywood in the '70s, it was crazy. We didn't have any money. Both of us came from low-income families, so it was like, How are we going to get lunch today? What are we going to do?... Because we were always so used to just trying to survive on the street, when it came time to have a band, we had... this grit."
Red Hot Chili Peppers formed in 1982, with Kiedis and Flea joined by their high school friends Hillel Slovak (guitar) and Jack Irons (drums). From day one, Flea says, the band had diverse and eclectic listening tastes and influences.
"We didn't just listen to funk," he says. "We listened to Ornette Coleman, we listened to the No New York scene in New York in the '80s, the Lounge Lizards and James Chance and all of that. And we loved Led Zeppelin and the mighty rock bands. We went to go see The Who, and at the same time we go see Jaco (Pastorius), we saw Weather Report and Miles (Davis). We knew how to sneak in everywhere."
Flea then offers some advice to "kids" who want to absorb as much live music as he did as a teenager.
"I'm telling you, kids, you want to sneak into something, walk in backwards, they'll never notice you," he promises. "Just walk in backwards. I'm telling you, it works."
Watch the full interview below.
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