Flea (musician)

• 1. Introduction

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  Flea, the bassist born Michael Peter Balzary, once played so hard that he wore a hole through his thumb. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins first saw him perform in 1984 and remembered him crying out in pain between songs. Someone kept walking onstage to pour crazy glue into the wound. That player went on to become the only continuous member of Red Hot Chili Peppers. Alongside the singer Anthony Kiedis, he is also the only musician who appears on every album the band has made. How did a boy from Melbourne who idolized jazz trumpeters end up as one of rock's most celebrated bassists? What held a band together through deaths, firings and addiction? And why did a player famous for flashy technique decide to play fewer notes?

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• 2. Melbourne to Los Angeles

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  Michael Peter Balzary was born on the 16th of October 1962 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. He is of partly Hungarian and Irish descent. His father, Mick Balzary, was an avid fisherman who often took his son along. When Flea was four, the family moved to Rye, New York, because his father had work at the Australian consulate in New York.

  In 1971 his parents divorced, and his father returned to Australia. Flea and his sister Karyn stayed with their mother, Patricia. She later married the jazz musician Walter Urban, who often invited other musicians to the house for jam sessions. The family moved to Los Angeles, where Flea became fascinated by the trumpet and took private lessons from Jane Sager. Rock held no appeal for him at the time. He idolized jazz greats such as Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.

  Behind the jam sessions, his stepfather made the house a frightening place. Flea described his childhood home as violent. The stepfather was aggressive, struggled with alcohol and eventually became involved in shootouts with police. Flea said: "I grew up being terrified of my parents, particularly my father figures. It caused me a lot of trouble later in life." To cope, he began smoking cannabis at 13 and soon became a daily user.

  Mike B. the Flea was how classmates at Fairfax High School knew him. He had first been called Flea as a teenager, because he seemed unable to sit still, and the nickname stuck. His taste in music made him something of an outcast. A boy named Anthony Kiedis was about to cross his path.

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• 3. Brotherhood and Loss

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  Anthony Kiedis never forgot how quickly he and Flea became inseparable. Their first meeting began with a brief confrontation. Kiedis recalled: "We were drawn to each other by the forces of mischief and love and we became virtually inseparable. We were both social outcasts. We found each other and it turned out to be the longest-lasting friendship of my life."

  Hillel Slovak supplied Flea's introduction to rock, while Kiedis steered him toward punk. Slovak taught Flea to play bass and soon asked him to join his band, Anthym. Flea developed his own style and joined, but quit several months later to play with the punk outfit Fear. He then reunited with Slovak, Kiedis and the drummer Jack Irons for what was meant to be a one-off band. It was called Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem. Its members admired the free funk band Defunkt and the hip-hop act Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

  A new name, Red Hot Chili Peppers, came next, along with months of shows at Los Angeles clubs and bars. The repertoire grew to nine songs. A demo recorded at Bijou Studios, produced by the then-drummer of Fear, secured a deal with EMI. Then Irons and Slovak left to pursue a "more serious" future with the rock band What Is This? Flea respected the decision but felt the band would be lost without them.

  Cliff Martinez and Jack Sherman became the replacement drummer and guitarist. Andy Gill, formerly of Gang of Four, agreed to produce the first album. Gill and Sherman clashed constantly with Flea and Kiedis over style, sound and production. Flea later called the result stiff and "a big mistake", and admitted that he and Kiedis were "just disrespectful and obnoxious." The debut reached shelves on the 10th of August 1984 to largely poor reviews and weak sales. Sherman was fired in early 1985, and Slovak, encouraged by Flea, rejoined.

  Funk musician George Clinton produced the next record, Freaky Styley, and the chemistry was instant. Flea later called Clinton "the warmest, kindest man in the world." Roughly 75,000 copies sold by the end of 1985. Flea barely minded, because he had just proposed to his girlfriend Loesha Zeviar, who was pregnant with their child. For the third record, the band turned to Michael Beinhorn, their last resort among producers. Irons returned as drummer in mid-1986 after Martinez was fired.

  "It began to seem ugly to me and not fun; our communication was not healthy," Flea recalled of the drug use that now gripped him, Slovak and Kiedis. Kiedis became dependent on heroin, which left Flea and Slovak to shape much of the album's material alone. Kiedis was briefly thrown out and given a month to rehabilitate. He finished rehab and returned to Los Angeles to record The Uplift Mofo Party Plan in 1987. Flea called it "the 'rockingest' record" the band had made. It reached number 148 on the Billboard 200 and far outperformed its predecessors.

  On the 27th of June 1988, Hillel Slovak was found dead of a heroin overdose. After the tour for the third album, his drug use had climbed sharply, and he had grown isolated and depressed. Flea reflected: "I didn't really know how to deal with that sadness, and I don't think Kiedis knew how to deal with it either." Irons, devastated, left the group. Flea and Kiedis took time to collect themselves and then kept the band going.

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• 4. Enter Frusciante

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  Guitarist DeWayne "Blackbyrd" McKnight and drummer D.H. Peligro were the band's first answer to Slovak's death. McKnight's style did not mesh with the rest of the group, and tension grew. Peligro, formerly of the punk band Dead Kennedys, had a friend named John Frusciante. Frusciante was an 18-year-old guitarist and devoted Chili Peppers fan. Peligro introduced the teenager to Flea, and the three jammed together several times. Flea was impressed by his skill and astonished by how well he knew the band's songs.

  McKnight was fired once Flea decided Frusciante could supply the spark that was missing. Frusciante accepted an invitation to join. Chad Smith took over on drums soon afterward, when Peligro was let go as well.

  Mother's Milk, the fourth album, was completed in early 1989. Critics gave it mixed reactions, but it drew far more commercial attention than its predecessors. It peaked at number 52 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold in early 1990. The band was attracting over three thousand people per show. Flea also lent his playing to other artists, adding trumpet to Jane's Addiction's 1988 album Nothing's Shocking. He played bass on Young MC's acclaimed 1989 album Stone Cold Rhymin' and appeared in the video for "Bust a Move", the hit single from that record. Not every moment of the tour was a celebration. Flea and Smith were arrested on charges of battery and sexual harassment after a performance on MTV's spring break coverage, and the charges were eventually dropped.

  When the Mother's Milk tour ended, the band cut ties with EMI and signed with Warner Bros. Records. Rick Rubin, who had passed on producing The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, agreed to produce the next album.

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• 5. Mansions and Stadiums

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  Rick Rubin suggested that the band record in a mansion that once belonged to the magician Harry Houdini. Flea thought it was "a creatively fertile situation" and brought his daughter Clara along. Everyone except Smith stayed inside the house for the whole recording process. Flea recalled: "It was the first time we went in to make a record where there wasn't this feeling of being sort of intimidated by what was going to happen."

  Blood Sugar Sex Magik arrived on the 24th of September 1991 to an extremely positive critical response. It peaked at number three on the Billboard chart and sold over 7,000,000 copies in the United States alone. Shows regularly drew more than 20,000 people, and Nirvana toured with the band on the West Coast leg. The attention made Frusciante deeply uncomfortable, and he abruptly quit during the Japanese leg of the tour. Arik Marshall filled in temporarily.

  Flea and Kiedis fired Marshall for lack of chemistry and briefly hired Jesse Tobias. Tobias was quickly replaced by Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction, who had once been recruited in 1992 to replace Frusciante. Kiedis was in the middle of a heroin relapse as the band prepared a new album, so Flea became a lyricist for the first time. He wrote most of "Transcending" and the intro and outro of "Deep Kick". He also wrote every word of "Pea", on which he sang and played bass. One Hot Minute came out on the 12th of September 1995 to mixed reviews and far lower sales than Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Injuries to Kiedis and Smith cut the tour short, and the band went on hiatus. Flea was so miserable that he discussed quitting during the tour.

  Navarro was fired in 1998, and Flea doubted the band could continue. He said: "the only way I could imagine carrying on is if we got John Frusciante back in the band." Frusciante had completed drug rehabilitation in 1997 after an addiction to heroin and crack cocaine left him near death. Flea visited him in early 1998 and invited him back. An emotional Frusciante readily accepted.

  Writing began in Flea's garage in the summer of 1998. He and Kiedis felt less confident after the disappointing results of One Hot Minute. Flea had also split with his girlfriend Marissa Pouw and sank into depression. His daughter Clara, then 10 years old, comforted him after weeks of crying. Californication arrived on the 8th of June 1999 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. It took under two weeks to record, against more than a year for One Hot Minute. It sold fifteen million copies worldwide, outselling Blood Sugar Sex Magik. At Woodstock 1999, Flea played completely naked. He repeated the stunt at the Reading and Leeds Festivals that year and at several other shows on the tour.

  By the Way was released on the 9th of July 2002 to positive reviews and went on to sell over nine million copies worldwide. Frusciante became the driving force behind it. When Flea introduced a funk rhythm into his bass lines, Frusciante would disapprove, and Flea almost quit because his role felt unimportant. The tour was a triumph. Three concerts in London's Hyde Park drew over 250,000 people and grossed US$17.1 million, the highest-grossing concert at a single venue in history. The double album Stadium Arcadium followed on the 9th of May 2006. This time Flea and Frusciante were more musically aligned, finding inspiration in Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen among others. It sold over seven million copies in less than two years.

  In November 2007, Flea's $4.8 million Corral Canyon home in Malibu burned down in a wildfire. It was not his primary residence, and the musician and producer Butch Walker was renting it at the time.

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• 6. Playing Less

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  Bootsy Collins was the main inspiration for the slap-bass style that Flea brought to the early Chili Peppers records. In Fear, his playing had centered on punk bass lines. The slap technique drew attention from the music world and was often copied. As a result, Flea felt compelled to remove almost all of it after Mother's Milk.

  On Blood Sugar Sex Magik, he set out to play simply. He explained: "I was trying to play simply on Blood Sugar Sex Magik because I had been playing too much prior to that, so I thought, 'I've really got to chill out and play half as many notes'." The result was more traditional, melodic bass work. He summed up the new thinking in three words: "Space is good."

  Some slap progressions returned on One Hot Minute, but the "less is more" approach stayed. Flea said: "I can't even think of anything I played that was complex on the record; even the slapping stuff is simple." The record also changed how he wrote. Instead of building songs from band jams, he often sat down alone with a guitar or bass. Only one groove on the whole album, "Deep Kick", grew out of a jam.

  Electronic music pulled at him next. During the Californication era he said, "I feel the most exciting music happening is electronica, without a doubt." He tried to make his bass imitate the atmosphere of synthesizers. He dropped the idea when he realized that, aside from Frusciante, the band was not heading the same way. On By the Way, many bass lines lost their funk entirely. Flea described the album's direction as "... a result of each one of us being who we are. The way we the band compose music is a very communal thing."

  His stepfather's bebop band left Flea with a lifelong love of jazz, and he credits Jaco Pastorius, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane among his influences. Black Flag and David Bowie came after Kiedis introduced him to punk and rock. Punk bands had given him the impression that one should play as hard and fast as possible, and he rejected that philosophy during Blood Sugar Sex Magik. For Californication and By the Way he drew instead on the Cure, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees and new wave. He also wrote an article for Rolling Stone praising Neil Young for his consistent authenticity.

  His 1961 Fender Jazz Bass has been his main studio instrument since 2006, and he treasures its "old wood sound". He also ran a company called Fleabass, active from 2009 to 2011, which aimed to make quality budget basses for beginners. The artist Damien Hirst built him a custom butterfly bass, and fifty of those instruments were auctioned for Flea's music school charity at a list price of 50,000 pounds. Before Californication, Flea did not believe the instrument itself mattered much. What counted, he said, was how you hit the strings and your emotional intent.

  In 2009, Rolling Stone readers ranked Flea the second-best bassist of all time, behind John Entwistle of the Who and ahead of Paul McCartney. A 2010 poll on the BBC Two series I'm in a Rock 'n' Roll Band! placed him in the ultimate fantasy band with Freddie Mercury on vocals, Jimi Hendrix on guitar and John Bonham on drums.

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• 7. Demons and Causes

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  In February 2018, Flea wrote an op-ed for Time magazine about the opioid crisis and his own addiction, a subject he had kept private for most of his career. He hoped that exposing his past would help others and push doctors and government to offer support. "I've been around substance abuse since the day I was born," he wrote. He finally kicked his addictions in 1993.

  A broken arm in 2014 brought him close to a setback. His doctor, whom he credited with putting him back together perfectly, prescribed a two-month supply of Oxycontin. Flea took one a day for a month. "It not only quelled my physical pain, but all my emotions as well," he wrote. He added that he was not present for his kids and that his creative spirit declined. The same injury delayed the recording of the band's eleventh album by six months.

  Following the Blood Sugar Sex Magik tour in 1993, Flea was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, and ordered to rest for a year. He later attributed his exhaustion to nonstop partying and drugs. A self-help book by Jon Kabat-Zinn prompted a significant shift in his spiritual views. After the disappointing One Hot Minute tour he began Transcendental Meditation and yoga and slowly cut back on marijuana. In a June 2023 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said: "Yeah, I'm a praying guy." He says he is not religious in any way, but he believes in God as something like "a divine energy".

  On the 30th of October 1993, Flea was playing at The Viper Room with the band P when word spread that his close friend River Phoenix was outside having seizures from an overdose. Flea rushed out and rode with Phoenix in the ambulance to Cedars-Sinai Hospital. In August 2020, Flea played on two unreleased songs by Phoenix's band Aleka's Attic, released to mark what would have been Phoenix's 50th birthday.

  Politics found its way into his public life as well. In 1992, Flea and the band appeared in public service ads for Rock the Vote. In June 1996, the Beastie Boys and the Milarepa Fund invited the band to the Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco, and they returned for the June 1998 concert in Washington, D.C. In 2008 Flea and his daughter Sunny Bebop appeared in a Vote for Change ad supporting Barack Obama. On the 15th of April 2012, the band played a free concert in downtown Cleveland for Obama's re-election. On guns, Flea was blunt in 2013: "Melt em all down, turn em into sculptures; there is no need for them on earth." In September 2015 he joined more than 120 entertainers announcing they would vote for Bernie Sanders.

  On the 11th of May 2013, the band played a concert in Portland, Oregon, for the Dalai Lama as part of the Dalai Lama Environmental Summit. The Santa Barbara oil spill of the 19th of May 2015 pumped 100,000 gallons of crude oil into the Pacific. Flea was at the beach with his young daughter when she stepped in a tar ball, and he posted a furious message aimed at the pipeline company. That August he installed an apiary in his backyard, with three beehives of roughly 60,000 bees each, to help restore honeybee numbers. "I love my bees. Flea's bees," he wrote. In December 2015 he performed at the Pathway to Paris concert, held alongside the UN Climate Change Conference.

  In 2001, Flea co-founded the Silverlake Conservatory of Music with his childhood friend Tree. He said he wanted to "fill the void" left by the lack of public funding for school music departments. He explained: "I grew up in LA public schools and was in the music department. It was really an important thing for my life, it gave me something to hold onto." On the 20th of March 2011, he ran the Los Angeles Marathon to raise money for the school. He and Kiedis host an annual benefit for it, and in October 2015 the event was limited to 300 tickets at $2,500 each, with John Legend headlining. In August 2016 Flea visited Koko the gorilla, who strummed his bass during a jam session. On the 31st of July 2020 he joined Brad Pitt in a community food giveaway for Watts, Los Angeles.

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• 8. Beyond the Band

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  From 1995 to 1998, Flea performed on over forty records by other artists. They ranged from Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill to Mike Watt's debut solo album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat? In 1997 he also joined Dave Navarro on a Jane's Addiction reunion tour, filling in for the former bassist Eric Avery. He had once planned a solo album with the band's manager, Lindy Goetz, but dropped the idea in favor of lending his bass to others.

  When the Chili Peppers announced a long hiatus due to exhaustion, Flea enrolled in music classes at the University of Southern California. He studied music theory, composition and jazz trumpet. He explained: "It's so much fun to learn this stuff because I never knew anything." In 2009 he joined Atoms for Peace, a supergroup formed by the Radiohead singer Thom Yorke to perform songs from his solo album The Eraser. The band recreated Yorke's electronic music with live instruments, toured the United States in 2010 and released Amok in 2013. Another project paired him with Damon Albarn and the afrobeat drummer Tony Allen as Rocket Juice & the Moon. The trio played its live debut in London on the 29th of October 2011.

  The hiatus ended in October 2009 without Frusciante, who left to pursue other musical interests. Josh Klinghoffer replaced him, and I'm with You was released on the 29th of August 2011. Flea later admitted he had almost quit during the break. Then he realized something about his bandmate: "Anthony, man, he's my brother, I love him so much, and we started this band when we were kids." The Red Hot Chili Peppers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2012. Flea had once found it easy to mock such awards, but said he now felt grateful. On the 19th of July 2012, he released a solo EP, Helen Burns, with Patti Smith singing on the title track.

  Penelope Spheeris's Suburbia gave Flea his first film role in the mid-1980s, as the young punk Razzle. He starred alongside the band, who played themselves, in the skate drama Thrashin', and played the ill-fated punker Milo in Spheeris's Dudes. In Back to the Future Part II and Part III he played Douglas J. Needles, though he later called Part II "a multi-million-dollar piece of trash" and said he was unhappy with the film and his own performance. He played a German nihilist in The Big Lebowski and voiced Donnie on the animated series The Wild Thornberrys. Low Down, a 2014 film about the jazz pianist Joe Albany, marked his first acting role in 14 years. He and Kiedis executive-produced it, and it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2014. Flea then voiced the "mind cop" Jake in Pixar's Inside Out in 2015 and returned to the role in Inside Out 2 in 2024. He also appeared in Baby Driver as Eddie No-Nose, in Damien Chazelle's Babylon, and in the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  Loesha Zeviar, whose name is still tattooed on Flea's chest, was his wife from 1988 to 1990. Their daughter, Clara Louise Zeviar Balzary, was born in 1988. As a child, Clara drew artwork for the band's T-shirts, and as an adult she photographed the band's tours, including the promotional photos for The Getaway. Flea later became engaged to the model Frankie Rayder, and they had a son, Sunny Bebop Balzary, in 2005. They never married. Kiedis wrote "Hard to Concentrate" on Stadium Arcadium as a wedding proposal to the couple. In 2019, Flea married the fashion designer Melody Ehsani, and their son Darius Booker Balzary was born in 2022. In the documentary The Other F Word, Flea said of his children: "My kids gave me life. They gave me a reason." On the 22nd of May 2026, he announced on Instagram that his sister Karyn had died.

  Flea first held Lakers season tickets in 1988, and two songs on Mother's Milk were tributes to the Lakers stars Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. On the 13th of April 2016, he performed the national anthem on bass, in the manner of Jimi Hendrix, in honor of Kobe Bryant's final game.

  Flea began writing his memoir, Acid for the Children, in April 2014, and it was published on the 5th of November 2019. It covers his unconventional childhood, his adventures on the Los Angeles streets and his sometimes complex friendship with Kiedis. In December 2019, the band announced that Frusciante would return to replace Klinghoffer. Unlimited Love arrived on the 1st of April 2022 and Return of the Dream Canteen on the 14th of October 2022, supported by the band's first-ever headlining stadium shows in the United States.

  On the 4th of December 2025, Flea released "A Plea", the first single from his debut solo album, Honora, with a music video directed by his daughter Clara. A second single, "Traffic Lights", featuring Thom Yorke, followed on the 14th of January 2026. The album, released through Nonesuch Records on the 27th of March 2026, holds six original songs and four covers, with appearances by Yorke and Nick Cave. In February 2026, Flea confirmed that the Chili Peppers were writing a fourteenth album, recording at John Frusciante's house. As he put it: "Ultimately, once we start playing, it's about... just catching a magic groove and doing it good."

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