A Flea Insight

No I’ve not been staring closely at our dog again. Flea is the bass player that drives the Red Hot Chili Peppers . In my opinion he is one of the most difficult bass players to mimic he seems not to have a pattern in his playing and he slaps pops and strums with all his fingers whilst bouncing around like a madman. He has even been known to back flip whilst playing
Now for a long time I have struggled to find a pattern in his playing but last night the penny dropped. I will impart this knowledge onto any other budding bassist that happens to read my humble blogs. At band practice the other night the collective agreement was to practice for next session “Hand in my pocket “by the fantastic Alanis Morrisette. It was like a German salami hitting me over the head as I knew that the bass player on that album with Alanis was ......yes you got it......Flea. I resigned myself to working out a simpler bass line having seen the tab sheet for it a day earlier. We are asking SJ to sing out of her comfort zone....Chippy and Wifey are pushing their respective boundaries. Dominic has come up trumps surpassing expectations, so it is my turn to step up to the plate .....So I put on my headphones which make me look like a cyber man and grabbed my bass.
So there I sat, in the dim light of a glass 80s wall lamp (it’s going to get it! when we decorate) a lone figure in the dead of the night on a stool . Fender Jazz bass sat on my lap awaiting my fingers to play along it’s strings to make it sound as cool as it looks. I toyed with the idea of taking my headphones off but I do like our neighbours they must really detest the instruments but have never moaned but Papa neighbour told me that that they only ever hear wifey’s sax and my bass......oops. Mama neighbour sent us a Christmas card (at Christmas funnily enough) addressed to “the rockers” next door!!!! their three teenagers seem cool about it. Toddster is busy renovating his first car an old ford fiests which has more holes on it’s body than Phil Taylor’s dart board. I actually saw it wasn’t there the other day so I asked if someone had towed it away! His younger brother ,has hair that covers most his face he plays bass and sings in a band and their younger sister doesn’t say boo to a goose.........(mainly because we have no geese in our road) They all take in parcels for us and I bet recently they have been worried as The PA Mixer arrived and they took it in. The Speaker cables also went to them and they saw me lugging in our PA speakers the other day. I half expected them to deny all knowledge of the speaker cables when I went to retrieve them delivery card in hand........Papa neighbour is moving into the carpentry trade .I have visions of him batoning down all their hatches with bits of 2X4 in fear of his worldly possessions taking off when we try out the PA system that he has seen steadily arrive at Villa Machero!!!!......
Anyway back to the plot....I stuck with Flea’s tab for just under an hour........and finally I sussed him.......
What I reckon, is that he gets bored and say he is playing a bass line for a verse he will have two or three riffs which all sound great which he plonks into place as and when he fancies . the same can be said about Dani California ...he does it there too.......So there you go sorted......Though I nearly ended up in traction trying the back flip almost inserting Fender Jazz bass in a region that it’s sunburst finish definitely won’t shine