Flea: Acid For the Children

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons, each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect. All right, enjoyed the episode. A few bands represent the eclectic nature of Los Angeles, as well as The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their blend of punk, funk and rap that they perfected on nineteen ninety one Blood Sugar, Sex Magic felt like it could have only come from southern California. That album, by the way, is produced by Broken Record host Rick Rubin, one of his first projects after moving from New York to LA. The secret to the Red Hot Chili peppers funky sound was their dexterous bass player of Flee, a prodigious bassis with massive stage presents whose charm landed him roles in movies like The Big Lebowski and Queen and Slim. His talent was incubated in Los Angeles that doesn't exist anymore. He writes about it vividly in his book, a memoir of his adolescence called Acid for the Children. Flee discussed the book recently with Malcolm Gladwell in front of an audience at the Palace Theater in Los Angeles. They also talk about Flee's upbringing and how he developed his distinctive style of bass playing. It was our very first live taping of the podcast, and we partnered with case or W, in my opinion, the best music station in LA to get it done. So here's Malcolm Gladwell and Flee live in conversation. I noticed no one's chanting. Yeah, Malcolm, it's a pretty much you guys know we're here to talk about books, right. I was trying to think, you know, this is a great thrill. First of all for me to be here. I think you're the I is trying to figure this out backstage, the third most famous person I've ever met. It's pretty I mean it's really good. Number three, Wait, you're saying I'm the third most person, most famous person you've ever met. I bet Obama once. You're not. I mean you're very famous, you're not that level. And number two I met Oprah once. I think you're three behind Obama and Oprah in my in my book. So so it's very very exciting. So where I, uh, we're going to discuss your book, which, by the way, is really lovely. Thank you. And I say that in all sincerity, not as a and I think that's the right word. There's there's something incredibly heartbreaking and beautiful about it, and that's where I wanted to start. One of the one of the many unexpected pleasures of this book is the picture that you paint of Hollywood in the seventies, and I wanted to start there because it's a Hollywood that doesn't mean may be wrong, doesn't really exist anymore, is that right? It doesn't exist in the slightest And I actually had written extensively lamenting the loss of that time and just how the city has changed. And I took it out because I kind of got into grumpy old man territory. But I thought it was kind of some of the best writing that I did, and I sort of would like to release a special little grumpy old man book of the stuff that I took out, just because it was a love note to a Hollywood of yesteryear that now exists on the tip of a real estate agent's tongue in describing you know that this was where Charlie Chaplin kept his woman or something, you know. But Hollywood was obviously, you know, its whole heritage coming up as the beginning of the film industry. But in the seventies when I got there, it was this place that was so I mean, in one way, very dangerous and predatory and kind of revelling in the free love of the sixties, and that being exploited and turned into money and created a really seedy, mean spirited, dangerous casting couch type of vibe which was really gross and disgusting. And as a young boy in Hollywood, I was, you know, I dealt with that. And also a young boy who was unwatched and a street kid and wild and out till five o'clock in the morning on the Hollywood streets when I was twelve years old, came into many a scary encounter. But also it was alive with a wildness. It was like the wild West, man, I mean it was there was so much art and so much music, and it was so untamed and ferrell and its way, and there was so much money. I mean, it was just a weird, wild I mean glam You you move here from New York and you're how old at that point, I was just turned eleven years old, and your family, you and your mom and your stepfather and your sister, moved first to where to Koreatown? Is that? Am I remember? We lived in a miracle mild districal mile. Yeah. And then you and then you moved from there to where exactly Hollywood, to Willoughby and Laurel in Hollywood. Yeah. And there's a I wanted to get into a little a little bit more. One of the things I remember you talk about when you went to high school, this sort of what is now a curious fact which would not have been curious to you at all back then, which is in that era, a public high school was still a place where everyone went, so they were You had friends whose parents were prostitutes, and friends whose parents were rich and lived in the absolutely and middle school too. And when I was in sixth grade, I mean back then, public school you just went where you lived, and it had every economic class, every racial class, every ethnicity, everybody together. And I don't know if the standard of education was higher than or not, but it was like private school was much more rare than I didn't hear about kids going, but I you know, I came across every kind of person from you know, gang members to rich kids who had lived with a wealth unlike anything I had ever encountered to, you know, kids who were like trading switchblades and bags of weed in seventh grade. You know, it's really the last moment in this city's history where you had that kind of full integration in the public school system. I mean, it's it's really odd. I mean, this is a race of nerdy sociological point to begin with. But I wonder, I think ultimately, well, I wonder whether it's connected to the kind of art that was coming out of the schools at that time. Like you you describe you had a friend Freddie Gold, yeah, who lives in the fancy house above Sunset. Yeah, and like so in the same in your same friend group you were living in under I guess your family had we're all right, I mean right, yeah, we're we're We actually had it like a pretty nice little spot. I mean, we were just getting by, but but we did find it wasn't like we were. Someone of your economic background today does not have a school friend named Freddy Gold who lives You're kind of no. Now, if you're rich, you're going to a private school, and it really speaks to where we're at now, like the devisiveness and the haves and have nots, and this gulf becoming wider, and the have nots being this entire new strata of society that is living on the street and sleeping in their own ship, you know, and being in Los Angeles. It's so prevalent and so intense. It's difficult to understand it. You know. Back then, when when I walked around the streets of Hollywood in the seventies, when you saw a homeless person was like, oh, there's a bum, there's a guy eating out of a trash can. It was a rare thing. And now it's just a huge segment of society, and it's, you know, part of the divisiveness of the country that we live in. To describe, tell us the touch points of your you know, your adolescent world in Hollywood. So you would go, where were you playing basketball? Where were you when you're you're thirteen or fourteen year old self? Tell me all your hangouts thirteen fourteen, I was hanging out at Laurel Elementary School. I was hanging out at Carthay Elementary School. I was hanging out at West Hollywood Park, shooting hoops. I was hanging out like around Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset and stuff because there were just so many little hustles that I had with my friends to get money. We used to me and my friend j D used to sit up on Hollywood Boulevard with kazoos and trash can lids and do songs, you know, play songs to get money. It was all about the hustle when I was a kid, because from a very young age. It wasn't that I was ever a homeless kid or anything like that, but I was completely unwatched and I was a street kid I got, you know, from that age. Home was just a place to crash. Sometimes I came home, sometimes I didn't, and I just got into everything that I could. But there were so many little hangouts you know that we found, like found older people that would get us high, so we'd go over to their house, you know, anywhere where. One of the things the first half of the book is about your childhood, and although you talk a lot about your stepfather, that point you just said about how you were unwatched is the striking you know, to a twenty nineteen year Yeah, the striking fact is where in God's name are his parents did? But none of you have friends seemed to have. I think, well, I think I met kids that fit into, you know, my social plan, you know, other kids that had that sort of freedom as well to varying degrees and form. My parents, you know, my stepdad, who was the main father figure around, was in and out of substance abuse and just wasn't paying attention. My mom had her own, you know, relationship problems and problems. They were just too involved in their own their own pain and their own difficulties in their own like struggle to navigate their way with your life to watch me, you know. And I know that they loved me, but they just didn't have the skills and the tools to translate that. Leven too being present and paying attention. Did your sister take care of you? Look? Well, no, she was wild. We were both wild, me and my sister. You know. Yeah, no because I no, no, uh. Because The weird the kind of fascinating paradox about the book is as you describe your childhood, you're describing chaos and mayhem one on the one hand, and you at the same time you seem to have had an extraordinar amount of joy as a child. Yeah, I did. I you know, It's funny like I've always, in general, had a thing inside of me that yearned so much to you know, to connect and to love, and to find things and to believe in, find things to believe in, like when it's a kid. I just I loved literature. When I discovered music, it changed my life. I loved the music, but the fact that I was unwatched and the fact that I was a wild street kid, even though it made growing up very difficult because I didn't have the structure and I didn't have, you know, my parents guiding me into growing up and becoming a man like that, that transition from being a kid. But by that token, I had freedom, you know, and it got me into a lot of trouble. I was a thief, I was aug user. I was out of control. I had to make huge mistakes to learn. I had to, you know, to to A lot of the book is my search for moral for my moral compass, but as well it's I looked from my family in the street. I looked from my family with my friends. And when I connected with my friends, it was it was profound and it was where I found, you know, extreme love and connection. The unhealthy part about it was I looked to my friends to fulfill roles that parents are supposed to fulfill, and you know, fourteen year old boys you're getting high with can't do that, you know. So that was difficult for me and kind of left me in an a raw and vulnerable, uncomfortable position many a time. But at the same time, it's you know, no accident that someone like me and the friends that I made as a kid ended up starting a band that was able to connect with people. Because any connection that any musician ever has with anyone is equal proportion to the connection that they can have with one another when they're playing together, or that if they're a solo person, the connection that they have with the divine voice of music. You know, it's it's equal. And oftentimes, like people talk about talent, you know, like, well you've got talent because you can do this, it's like, I don't know, you know what I mean? And sometimes I think like in music, the best talent is no talent because you might not have a natural feeling for rhythm or harmonic progression or whatever. But because you don't have it, you come at it from your own complete, your own way, and you invent something you know that is really unique, and yeah, yeah, I want to come back to that, but I just wanted to dwell for a moment on this paradoxical happiness. And there's a passage in your book and I'm going to make you read a little bit of it, but you're describing November twenty first, nineteen seventy eight. So how old are you in nineteen seventy eight years? Is this that the day that I'm happy? The happy day, happy day? Yeah? Well, you know, I think I'm fourteen. Yeah, you're like, you're like, yeah, and I you know, I had described so many sad situations. Yeah, and I only put things in the book that shaped me, Like I had many a wild tale that probably would have been the most exciting stories for people to read, and probably would have been the headlines and anything writing anybody about the book, in any article about the book. But it was important to me to not write things for entertainment values, but just to be honest to things that actually changed me and opened me up. So amidst all these like traumatic things and melancholy things, I was like, you know what I had beautiful days too, So I think that's so. This is this beautiful day you described, you walk a mile to school bouncing your basketball, and I love this little thing about the piece sign I drew in my ball popping up between potholes and sloping sidewalks. By the way, there's so much lovely language in this book. But anyway you get to I'm gonna have you to set up the little party I want you to read. So you get to class and you play. You played basketball before school. Then you sit in social studies class and you deliver an or report on the composer Hector Bosio Symphony fantastic. You get an A plus. You eat pizza, you you flirt with a girl that you have a crush on, and then just start reading by shot after after school, just read that last little bit. Shot more, Uh okay, shot more hoops? Okay away, I shot my hoops. Oh yeah, shot more hoops? After school? My shot was so on. Then ran home ah the house, all to myself, practice trumpet out of my urban book, The Trumpeter's Bible, the classical melodies resonating through my cranium and echoing around my bedroom. Then cooked myself a delicious spaghetti dinner, lay on my bed, satiated and content, reading Richard Box, Jonathan Livingston Seagull watch the Laker game, happy and cozy before falling into a deep and restorative sleep. So it's like, but it's to my point, this is this description of this perfect day as a fourteen year old, and there's no mention of any adult. Yeah, well right, it's it's kind of fascinating. Yeah, and it's about and also it's but it's about you find It's about you seeking out and finding things that bring you pleasure. Like you the book you read, the game you watch, the present, the music presentation you give, the basketball you take with you to school, the all you had to create this environment for yourself. I thought it was sort of such a striking contrast to the life of a contemporary fourteen year old. Yeah, I guess for me as a kid and really writing about this book, like, I learned a lot about myself and I wrote a lot of things I wrote about. I was like, holy shit, why didn't anybody talk to me about this stuff? Like earlier on when my parents split up. You know, when I was a kid, my father worked for the Australian government and he wore a suit, had a briefcase, went to work every day. We had dinner at seven o'clock at night. He played golf on the week. As it was, he ran a very tight ship. It was structured. It was almost like militantly so. And we came from Australia to America because my father got an assignment to New York at the Australian Consulate. We're supposed to be in New York for four years, then go back to Australian continue on in our very normal, proper life. But my mom, my wild ass mom, and all her heart following wildness left. My dad took up with a junkie jazz musician who lived in his parents' basement. And you know, my dad went back without us and we moved in with this new man who was a drug addict who lived in his parents' basement. And that's when everything just went crazy. And when I look at that in particular, and I had never really like I knew all this stuff that happened, but I had never really like looked at it with any real degree of objectivity. And when I wrote about it, it was very emotional for me to look at it and kind of like that was one of the times I was like, jeez, Mom, dad, stepdad, Like you never ever sat down and talked to us about it. And when I first kind of realized that I had a tanty, for a minute, I was fucking angry. And then I, you know, as time went by, I realized, like, you know, they did the best they knew, they just didn't know. But but oh sorry, But just to your question and your comment, I was really lucky as a kid to fall in love with books and the time that I had with any book, and since I was a little boy, and even when I was the wildest, out of control, drug shooting, freak out, criminal ass motherfucker, I read every day unless I was too high to do it, you know, and I and even then I would probably make some you know, bumbling attempt, but I got so much joy and felt so much hope and saw that there was a life like even if it was a fantasy life, it was something that was beautiful, and the same thing with music. It opened up these doors and these feelings of this limitless possibility that was so beautiful and beyond anything that I understood in a world that often seemed you know, hypocritical, and cruel that I did have, that I created those things for myself. But you're the first person to mention and that beautiful day that there's no parents around, And I never thought of that, but I realized that outside of like with my friends and the love that I got from sports, like playing basketball in particular, and the thing that I loved about it was an unspoken connection, you know, that sort of telepath thing you have with people, and the same thing playing music, and the same thing kind of with a writer when you're reading their book. You're connecting in this way and the things the magic of my solitude, with those things that gave me hope are really that's me, Like those are the pillars of the best of me. Yeah. Yeah. On the parental theme as well, what's interesting is that this book is full of kind of pathology and loss and dysfunction, but it's almost all adult. So you have a count, did I am I counting correctly? Three pedophiles, three adult suicides. I mean, it's like you're surrounded by all of these deeply screwed up adult figures who are making your life incredibly difficult and sad and complicated, and the simple and beautiful pleasures seems to be the are the ones that are kind of peer play measures as opposed to that's the kind of right well, I guess for me, like simple and beautiful, like it's also profound and complex and layered and and infinite. But in terms of the adults, uh, there are three pedophiles in there. There's a there's a guy you look up later he turns out to be a pedophile. Oh yeah, there's the guy who lies down next to you. You go to his house and he you met you miraculously escaped. And then there's another pedophile. I was keeping track, but after a while there's a there's like a lot of it. This is like Holly and the Seven very stuff. Man. But I you know, when writing about it, I there's different things I've had in life, Like I'm glad I never became a junkie and when I did shoot up drugs like a moron, I'm glad that I never owed eed and died or you know, got a deadly disease. And I feel like there's, man, there's some protective angel like looking out for me. Because also growing up with like I put myself in situations a million times growing up in Hollywood as a little kid, where I could have really been hurt, like this, will you tell that crazy story about the swimming pool that you guys would jump Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I would have thought it was burnt that. You're right, you were like you struggled to find out which of the swimming crazy swimming school stories I was referring to. Yeah, yeah, this is the one, because there's two swimming stories. One is like late at night we would go sneak into pools of apartment buildings to swim. I'm talking about when we jumped off the roofs. Yeah, well that was you know, Anthony and I, as you know, when we met when we were fifteen, it was very explosive. We met, and it was antagonistic right from the first second. And also literally from the first second. I looked at him and I knew that this was a person I'd be hanging out with for the rest of my life. And there was no doubt I knew. And it was intense, And you know, my mom said to me, my mom's passed away, but I remember her telling me like kind of towards her later years, She's like, Michael, I remember, you know when when you came home when you were fifteen, and you walked in and you were a lit You were glowing with something, something that I hadn't seen in you before. And you said, Mom, Mom, I finally found someone I can talk to. And that was the day that I'm in Anthony, And I remember like that week it was it was raining, and so for p class, we had to sit up on a and you know, we just to sit and talk. You could go down, but you sat in the gym and we just sat and we just started talking and it was just, you know, this NonStop river of communication had you Was that the first time you ever met him? Yeah, so it was just a kind of random encountering. It was just like, yeah, I had this kid and his shirt in a headlock. And it's so funny because Tony shirw could you know, could beat the hell out of me. But but he was my best friend at the time. And uh, I had come out of hanging out with these kids that were real like kind of bad kids, I mean relatively bad in terms of like every day it was just a what crime can we do to these kids that were good kids? You know, they different homework. We played sports in the street, you know, we might have smoked a little weed here and there, but you know, but and I had this kid in a headlock and I was giving him a noogie. I don't know if you're familiar with the noggie, but it's when you get some of the headlock and you grind your knuckles in. And Anthony came up and and he's lay off, and you know, and and he was. I was scared of him. And he looked unlike I can. In nineteen seventy six, seventy seven, in my tenth grade, every kid had had long hair or a big afro and pooka shells and ope shorts and like lead zapp and he had a crew cut, and like he just looked different. You had tight pants and uh, you know, and muscles buff and you know, and it's in cancers. I lay off and whoa, you know, and I just felt this, you know, this feeling of like that we both were apart from everything and that we would see things in a way that was different. And I was right. It's like that when you describe the moment you meet Anthony in this book, it's I mean, it's you realize the book is a love story, right, it's just extraordinary romantic in the in the most beautiful sense of that word encounter and it it's and what's amazing to me is like you say, you say, you came home that night and you you realize that this is almost your this was your soulmate from the get go. Yeah, yeah, I just knew that we'd be you know, I don't know what the right word for it is. And one of the things, and perhaps it's hard for me to have an objective view on it because our friendship is still this moving, fluctuating and sting that it's difficult for me to understand. And I tried to understand it as best I could because it was such a big part of my childhood, such a big part of my growing up, and but as I write in the book, it was it was difficult. It's difficult for me to understand because it's not like other things where people fulfill something for you in life, you know what I mean. You know, like if it's a romantic relationship, it's an intellectual relationship, it's someone you might share spiritual path with. It's all these different things. But when he with He and I, it was like from the beginning this's just this electric motivation. And at the same time, it's sort of like North and South magnets, you know, how they have to be together, they have to exist together, but they push against each other too, And I wrote about it, like, you know, I write this piece about these these uh what do you call those big horn sheep, like ramming heads together and how they fight, and it might not it's just because that's what they do. It feels good to mash their heads into each other and they're alive and they're electric and everything is flowing through through them. And even though like with Anthony and I, we butt heads all the time and we have completely different world views and you know, different ways of going about life. But you know, you know what he reminded me of. There's a very famous marriage researcher called John Gottman who does this exercise with couples, and what he does is he had asked them to describe the very first time they met. And his theory is that in the very first encounter between two people are the seeds of their unual relationship. And he gave these hilarious examples, like, you know, the couple will be in some kind of therapy because the guy is like cold and unresponsive, and he'll say, well, what happened in the first time you met? It goes, well, he was twenty five minutes late for the day, he had forgotten his wallet, he was distracted by the baseball game going. You know, it's like it's all there, So maybe think when you yeah, you're you're goofing around and then incomes this kind of like dynamic charismatic Yeah, like weird dude who's not out of step with I think it's going around and instantly there's a kind of but this conflict from the beginning, absolutely right. Yeah, Yeah, it's a really interesting way to look at it. You know, I just got married a few weeks ago. As I was saying, and of course when you're thank you, but of course when you're saying that, I'm just thinking, like, the first time I saw this woman, it was just like, will you marry me? You know what they mean? Just like and I hadn't said a word. Yeah, but that type of fascinating it. Yeah. When we come back, Malcolm and Flee continue discussing Flee's relationship with the Red Hot Chili Peppers Anthony Keatis. We're back with Malcolm and Flee Live from the Palace Theater in Los Angeles. Talk a little bit more about your relationship at that moment from in that early stage with Anthony. So you have this kind of electric complex connection. What happens the next day We just started because this came. You know, the beginning of this conversation was. We used to go around in Hollywood and we'd most apartment buildings have swimming pools, so we'd go any apartment that had a building had a swimming pool. We'd try to get up on the roof to jump into the pool, and you know, we'd like getch our clothes, run in sometimes oftentimes naked, get up on top of a pool and just come flying out of the sky and you know, lad in this pool. And sometimes people would be sunning themselves by the pool and here come these crazy kids like literally flying out of the sky, screaming and yelling and landing in their pool naked. You know, people just oh and it was just like the thrill, like everything about it, the freaking out of the people, the wild flying through the sky, the running out of their being in trouble, the mixing up this like this like chaos happening for thriving on the chaos of the moment, and would you just basically like like emblematic of everything that we did, Like it was just like every day, like what can we do that will be wild? And would you have ever done those things without him? Did you need him to do that? I think I needed him to take it to that level because I found a like minded person. And it's funny because when my mom told me that I found someone I could talk to, Anthony's mom once told me, Oh, Anthony told me he found someone who will do anything. So maybe, you know, for both of us, we just kind of fed on each other. You know, I don't know, Yeah, yeah, did you did you? Did you keep a journal in those years? I never did know? The crazy thing I would now that I when I started writing this book, I wrote it pretty much all by hand in a journal, and you know, just kept filling up journals. And I realize that I've only ever written in journals when I'm absolutely miserable, like when I'm going through like a lot of like anxiety, panic attacks, deep sadness, deep like just being in horror of my being in my own skin. When I'll write to try to understand what I'm going through and but in writing and I just like, during the writing process of this book, I learned when you know, beyond like just like trying to understand my life and make sense of it. One of the big things I learned, I love writing. I just fucking love it. Like just the way the words sitting next to on the page, like the color of the way different words look next to each other. I learned what a literation means, you know, Like I just every time I sat down and wrote, when I lifted my head up afterwards, I felt connected and engaged to a part of myself that I had never really activated before. And it was such a beautiful thing, and I forgot what I was coming around to God, it was going to be great. Well, no, I was good. I was going to say, you're I thought, you must have because your memory for all this detail is astonishing. Well, you know, one of the things that made me end the book when the Chili Peppers started is when I started writing about my childhood. I think I don't have that grade of a memory, you know, I mean comes and goes. But once I started writing about something, I always wrote from a place of feeling like would be one little thing about an event that I remembered, but I knew it was something I've been carrying around my whole life and was one of those things that guides me without me even knowing that it guides me. It's like something like, oh, I'm scared. I don't know why I'm anxious, and because something triggers something from my childhood. But it's a murky memory. It's just like a color or shape and a distance. And so I'd start from feeling like how did I feel? And when I came from that place of like physical sensation and I started writing, it's like it would become clear. It would like the clarity and the and the thing would come into focus. And then I not only did the event itself in a narrative of the event come into focus, but then I would start digging underneath, like what was the thing underneath? It made it so? And why is it such an important thing to me? And that I loved that, I loved learning that. It's not like Keith Richards who had to hire a team of researchers to write his autobiography. What did he do? He had to heah, he literally had a team of researchers. Wow, reconstruct his own Yeah, memory, that's wild. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean that's like an extreme way to go in a way that I really did not want to go because it was important to me, and I think that I got my facts really straight in this book. I'm sure that I missed some things. I'm here and there, but I didn't care about that in the slightest. Like I thought, even if something happened and I have it completely wrong in my head, like the story, I've twisted it somehow through some neuroses or whatever, that this is the story that I'm carrying. You know, in all my life, I'm basing my actions and my thoughts and my relationship to the world based on this story that I'm holding. And if I learned that I had it wrong, that would be fascinating, you know, that'd be great, and that would be a you know, it could be a watership a watershed, not watership down, a watershed moment for me, and that you know, learning from my mistake. But but I felt like my the way that something lives in my heart is of equal validity, or even a dream is of equal validity to any like actual factual thing. That happened. Yeah, when you met Anthony, your your relationship at first was how much was it about music? Did you Was the music a part of what you were sharing in those early years or yeah, it was part of it. I mean from a young age, we started like going out and sneaking into clubs and getting into places and seeing bands played. And I was seeing rock music for the first time because as a kid, I didn't like rock music. I thought it was dumb music. I thought it was music for people who didn't care about music. Because I grew up in a jazz household and jazz being this like really sophisticated, cerebrally, emotionally, spiritually, I just saw rock music as something for kids who care about haircuts and silly magazines and stuff. And all of a sudden, now it's taking on a different meaning because I meet Anthony and then more profoundly with Hello later. But I start we start sneaking in, I started seeing rock music, and even though I still want to be Dizzy Gillespie when I grow up, I wanted to be a jazz drumpet player, I start feeling this visceral feeling about things, and I'm a kid, I'm starting to come into my sexuality. I'm starting to come in and I'm getting this. I'm out in Hollywood clubs as a little kid, and I'm seeing all this crazy behavior you're and you know, nudity and people making out and doing weird things in nightclubs where little kids don't belong. I don't get the sense of reading your book. Did you and Anthony ever paid admission to any club? No? And you're no. We we we like to sneak in, challenging you to produce a single ticket. Y. Yeah, no, we used to have this thing like it probably still works. If you want to get into a movie theater, walk in backwards. We used to do this thing, just walk in backwards. It works all the time. Yeah. Deep. How would if Anthony was sitting here undecided me, how would he respond to your account of your meeting. I'm sure it was, you know, very different for him. I know that with anthy and I, if we, you know, we work together in a room and we both experience the same thing, we'll walk out and we'll both have different stories to tell. So how do how do your stories differ? We just they just do. They're just we We were both very intense about who we are, and I don't think I can really put a qualitative same in us on how they differ, because that it varies from situation a situation. Yeah. Yeah, but you know, I feel like I'm talking about all these differences because you know, is someone that I love deeply, and we're brothers and we love each other. And sometimes I worry that in me trying to understand it that I wrote about in my book. And it is a love story of my book, even though there are many love stories in my book, and my book is a book of my story is a story of love, of yearning for it and being distracted and going wrong ways and and all of that. But with us, you know, no matter what, love has always been enough. Yeah. The other great love story of the book is about Helle el Slovak. Yeah, tell me, tell us about your first encounter with him. Well, I remember the first time I really noticed him because we were you know, it had been in school together since seventh grade. But I think I guess it was the last year of junior high and ninth grade eighth or ninth and for the school talent show, he and a few of his friends dressed up like kiss for the Talent Show and came out of the Talent Show and lip sync to Kiss and they had it down. It wasn't like they just put on a mask like they had spent days. They had you know, the makeup, that high boots, every outfit had been sewed and studded, and the belts and they really looked like other worldly kiss guys. And I didn't even know what Kiss was. It was, you know, I didn't know about this stuff. But I remember seeing him mime in the talent lunch show with my with Jack and with Jack Irons, who was, you know, the other founding member of the Chili Peppers, and just being amazed. I was like at their commitment and their intensity and their belief in this thing. There was like a cartoon to me, it was just like some silly, you know thing, But I was like, I was like, Wow, they really believe in this, like their commitment, their kicks and their moves, and they're back to back like rocking out, you know, wil Luila looking at tongues out like I was really like impressed in a way that I had never been impressed by, even like you know, real virtuosos and rock music and and so I noticed him then. And then there was one day and I, you know, count this story in my book where Anthony and I were out, like you know, stoned as usual, riding the bumper cars in North Hollywood, and we were always hitchhiking, always trying to get a ride and always had a hustle. And we were walking down the street and we saw him drive by. I guess we were just turned sixteen, were old enough to drive, and he had a green dots and five ten and it was blasting Lavilla strangiata by rush and rocking out and we saw him and we know that dude, that's that's he's in my social studies class. And we ran and chased him down, and you know, because you wanted to ride, and he gave us a ride. And right away, just like when Anthony and I connected, we became a threesome. Yeah, and it became every day. But to my point, you remember that it was a dots and five ten, Yeah, Well he was you know, yeah, it was a fantastic car and a banging stereo in it. Yeah, it's like Rick Ruben. On the episode of Broken Record that just aired, he was interviewing Tanya Tucker and she's remembering these touring in the early seventies when she was, you know, fourteen years old. Yeah, and she's the same thing. She's describing everything, and she's like yeah. And then we had like, you know, two brown Fort LTDs that we were saying, who remembers that particular model of the you know, nineteen seventy one four B. When you're a sixteen year old boy in Los Angeles, car is a very significant thing. Yeah. I wouldn't have said a DUTs in five ten was very significant. Yeah, but well, no, I remember it well because I mean he had a car. We were in it constantly. Describe sixteen year old HELLEL. Slovak. I fell in love with Hellel. He was just an absolutely beautiful boy, had long, curly hair, and he was an artist. He painted these beautiful paintings, and he had an interesting like penmanship, the way he would write, and he would get into drawing things, like he'd go through a phase of just drawing cows that he and he would draw these beautiful cows with these pastoral landscapes and he would he was just an artist. I'd never met a kid like this before. He was sensitive and poetic, and artistic, and he loved rock music. And he had this red Messenger guitar that he slung over his shoulder, and he just looked so sexy and cool the way he held it. And and like I said, I had never liked rock music, but when I met Helle, I fell in love with rock music because I fell in love with him, and we'd sit in his room and you know, he just played me all this this great rock music like Hendrix, like I had missed out on Hendricks. You know, it was already nineteen seventy seven, and I didn't know about Hendricks yet. I knew he existed, I knew the songs, but all of a sudden, like this sound, this virtuosity, this power, this thing is just filling me up and it's changing my life. And his belief in it and his dreams and his like yearning to connect and to this music to like breathe through him as a vehicle for his life was so intense. And we'd just sit and listen and look at art books, and it just changed everything for me. I you know, it was it was really beautiful. And and when I wrote about hellel in this book, I didn't it was important to me. I really just wanted to write about my childhood and to write about how I felt then and to be in my head is how I was when I was a kid, too, because I thought that like the value and the honesty of the story would be not like coming from an adult point of view, but how I was then, like how I was trying to make sense of things, but it was I couldn't think about it. He died in nineteen eighty eight, and his life and death are so intertwined to me at this point it was difficult for me to write about him without writing about his death. So I did write about it. And because he's become for me in a way, like I have all these beautiful stories and memories and from him, and he's really tragic. It's like, you know, you talk about the book being sad and beautiful at the same time, and that's how my memory sorry for him. It's like all these beautiful things and in this tremendous sense of loss and sadness of his death at such a young age. And so I wrote about that too, you know. And because he exists for me now in my dreams and in my thoughts, and every day there's a the little throughout the book, you have these little moments when you which worked really beautifully where you in italics. You kind of give us either flashbacks or you jump into the future or asides, and you have one about his funeral that is one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read. I do want to talk a little bit about. You know, I wrote that it's been like, you know, the book was going to come out last this year, and I decided to wait a year just because I was going through some stuff. But so I don't remember exactly what I wrote. I haven't looked at it in a while. Yeah, this guy, I know, I wrote two pieces, one like the day that he dies. Oh that no, No, Then there's another one. There's another part. Yeah, well you know, hello died from a heroin overdose. Yeah. We were just kids, you know. I mean we were twenty six, but I was twenty six going on fifteen, and for a long time I've really kind of, you know, I'm way better, I don't know, but kind of beat myself up because I didn't know how to be there for him. Then, you know, I was angry because I was like, you know, we have this thing going man, we got this band. This is cool. You know, we the funk. We gotta like find our rhythm. We gotta and we he and I like he had asked me to start playing bass. We had this we all profound connection and we were had this music that we thought was unique, and we were propelling it forward. And when he got strung out on heroin, I felt abandoned. I felt left. I felt like he was leaving me, and I got angry at him. And so the way that I expressed my concern for his you know, drug problem was to be angry, and I got mad at him, and I you know, judged, and I you know, I came from a place, so come on, get it together. We got to do this. And it causes me great difficulty to now know, like from my knowing now and having obviously dealt with many a friend, with many a person in my life with substance abuse problems, like had I been able to be there, that maybe I could have helped a lot, that maybe I could have saved him, Maybe I could have helped him to you know, capture the beautiful light of who he was and to shed all these you know, deadly distractions from his life and too but I didn't know that then, and and uh, even though I know it's, you know, not my fault, I a lot of that. I guess that part that I was writing was driven by me coming to terms with that, with my inability to help him, and yeah, and I and just the feelings of of loss, and you know, I often for a long time, I had a recurring dream where he would come in my dream and there would be he would be be kind of upset, you know that I wasn't there for him in that way, and you know, so I guess it's just me working through that and understanding it. Yeah, he you talked about he was the one who introduced you to the base. Yeah, so he he'd been. He'd and them that that was his band in high school. Anthem with the why why yeah? And what kind of music did they play? It was rock music yearning could be prog rock. It's the best way I can describe it. It was, you know, it was it started off like when before I joined the band. It was they were doing a lot of covers Zeppelin and Queen and stuff like that, and writing their own songs which are kind of in that like hard rock vein like mid seventies classic rock. I guess that is what you call it now. But it started to become more progressive and more already and more crazy, weird court progressions and quirky, clever kind of things. And yeah, it was like that. So did you like the music of Anthem before you? Did? You? Did? You? Did? You? Did Anthem come after you became friends with Hello? Yeah? It did? Oh it did. So I didn't really know about it before. But when I first, you know, all my judgments about rock music started going away when I went over to Jack's house in his bedroom where they would rehearse, and I'd see them playing. And I had always played music in an academic setting. I played in La Junior Philharmonic, I played in whatever. I played in the LACC jazz band. When I was in high school, I played. I wanted to be a trump player, but it was always a teacher and a conductor and a stand with music on it. And I'm watching them play music just by themselves, with no parents and rocking out and rock posters on the walls, and like, you know, girls who were cool at school would come and watch, and I was like, wow, this is you know, this is a whole other world and I started, I started really softening to it and kind of, you know, opening my heart to the idea of it. So he comes to you and he suggests, yes, see, whether you will be the play the bass for the band. Yeah, And it's a night that I remember so vividly. It was another night where it was raining and we're sitting in his dots and I've ten in front of his mom's house, and uh, it was raining and we were listening to this DJ we really loved named Jim Latt and uh, yeah he was you know, he was good. And it was raining and he and he was playing. He started playing Riders on the Storm by the doors and we're laying back. I'm sure we were stoned, you know, and we were sitting back and there's a plan and he's like and he's like Mike. He goes, uh, you know if he had a bass player named Todd at the time, and he says, I think, you know, Todd, he doesn't really believe in it. It's like a hobby for him. You know, he doesn't live it. He doesn't breathe it. And you know, maybe you could learn to play bass, and why don't you learn to play bass and join the band, and I just started fucking shivering all over and in that moment, you know, I felt so like I don't know if honored is even the word, like seen and loved and valued, like because I knew it meant everything to him, that the band is a fucking sacred thing, you know, and like when he when he asked me to join, I just it was the most loving thing that anyone had ever said to me in my life. It was so great. And you know, sorry, I got I got emotional, but but you know, I was just fucking stoked. And the next day I ran out and got a basse and you know, got a base and right away to started whacking away at it. And two weeks later I was on stage at Gazari's and Hollywood playing a game, and that, you know, it became what I did for the rest of my life. Did you want me to come back? Fully picks up his bass and walks us through the evolution of his playing style. We're back with more of Malcolm's interview with Flee. You have your bass sitting there, very tendal risingly. I'd love for you to give us a little guided tour in your in the kind of evolution of your You play the bass in a very distinctive way. I would love for you to explain to us how did that come about? To walk us through the steps? Okay, well, playing trumpet, like I said, had been a very academic like institutional way of learning. And as soon as I started playing bass, like all that one out the window. And not that I wasn't that harmonically sophisticated or anything, but like when the first day I got my bass, I had one lesson from Hollel because I started going like this, and he goes, he goes, it's good when you walk with your fingers just like you're walking. So I started going, and I remember the first thing I ever learned to play there was a song at HELLEL had written called one Way Woman, Hey the Baby, have you heard the news? He used to sing it, and we keep going. I can't remember, and like, I am a fucking awful singer, and hello was worse than mean it but it went, it went, It went like that, and I can't remember, and I'm making it, you know, I don't mean to make a mockery of it, because, believe me, when I got on stage of the Gazari's. I played that thing with every fucking atom that I had investigents in it, and you know, and so I just started playing. But then the way that I really learned to play, and then I started figuring out, like remember of the first things I learned to Kashmir by Led Zeppelin. You know, I just started playing and learning things. But the way that I really learned was we would get in a room and we would just start improvising and and you know, no plan, no no song, We just we just improvised. And I just started making up rhythms, you know, and even at first that they'd be very simple. Because I came from I didn't know rock music at all, and I came from wanting to be a jazz trumpet player. I didn't approach the bass in the normal way so like most rock bass lines would, you know, And I didn't know that at all. So right away I was like, you know what I mean, I just was nutty, you know, and and I just started, you know, growing as a bass player, and it wasn't really you know, and I just kept doing that and like following, as my friend Ian Mackay says, follow the thread, so say you'll you write something, you're like, you're like like just that right, and anything like okay, so that's good, you know, and just following the thread and finding the next thing. And I just kept doing it and doing it and developing my style. I didn't really have like the normal ramp up because I just right into playing gigs and jamming and stuff. There's a part, you know, I was listening to rocky music, and you know, I didn't really even learn other people's songs, which is kind of a weird way too, because most people learned songs and I still don't do that that much. But I when I was in I just started playing. And it was eleventh grade and then I saw a kid named Ray, Like there was Anthem was a band in high school, and there was another band. It was a funk band called Star and they had a bass player named Ray. And I had only seen bass play like this with the fingers, and Ray was going like this with his thumb and I was like, what the fuck? Ray? You know, and he was like bouncing is bouncing and popping and plucking and thumping. And I watched him. He was like, yeah, man, you know, are you hitting your song? Slide it down? And that, you know, blew my mind when I saw Ray do that, and then the kind of a big so I started doing that. I started you know, playing punk and slapping. And then but then, but then what happened like a big change for me was at a certain point I discovered punk rock. And when I started liking rock music, I disliked. I liked the virtuoso players I liked, you know, I like Hendrix, and I liked prog rock like Alan Holdsworth and Bill Bruford and Yes and these guys that were very proficient, technically accomplished virtual show players. And I saw, like I'd seen punk rock shows and it was wild, and I appreciated, like the intensity of it, but I was like, they don't know how to play. I didn't like it. And then I had a one night I took acid. And by the way, my books called as of the Children, but I do not recommend children taking acid. That's not the point of it. But when we could talk about that if you want. But but I saw this band called Fear playing and they're playing this really fast, hardcore punk rock and I was just you know, granted I was on LSD, but I was entranced. You know, I was absolutely entranced, and I just the movement of it. They actually, you know, were actually really good players within the context of this really fast, relentless hardcore punk rock. And when I saw them play it, it's like opened the door. You know. It might have been on assets, so the door was there to be opened, but the thing was there for real, you know, and you know, so I'm blown away by this band. Afterwards, I'm telling everyone about it. Oh my god, there's band Fear. There's no crazy and the singers so charismatic, and the music and the crazy time signatures. And then three days later I see an add in the paper Fear fires bass player looking for a new bass player, and I call it, and I, you know, I call up. I go down an audition and I was like, you know, I'm the wildest man that ever lived, and I love this music like there's no way they're not going to hire me, and they did hire me, and so then I started playing in Fear and the music was really fast. It was punk rock, very simple but fast, and also like, here's a Fear song it's called give Me Some Action. It goes anyways. But when I coupled, when I thanks when I when I coupled that feeling of punk rock, because and I fell in love with punk rock. I had a real awakening, the real Even though I played in Fear and I loved being in Fear and it was exciting and thrilling, the thing that got me was the germs I heard. Thanks I I you know, I heard the germs. I was like, what's that? And person I was with it was like, oh, the germs. They couldn't know how to play there. You know, they're obnoxious. The singer was a creep. You know. That's what someone told me at the time. And I was like, yeah, but I was getting my head. They were saying it and it was someone I admired. But in my in my head, I was like that that I got to hear that, And I remember the next day I went out and got their record GI and when I heard it, I remember it like, let's another thing. I write about it my book. It's a very vivid memory because it changed a part of me forever, which was that when I heard it, it had this magical, spiritual, intangible quality to it that just affected me, that made me tingle all over, that made me get lost in the ether. And here's this like really violent, like relentlessly intense music with no melody and the singers snarling and yelling. You know, it doesn't it's not like he's even singing, And but it just like I just like I was on. It just took me away. It took me into the ether, and I was so moved by it that it changed the way I looked at music forever. It made me feel that it didn't matter if you knew how to play fast, if you're a virtuoso. And even though I still you know, love that the discipline and all the work ethic that it takes for someone to become a virtuo. So I realized that the motivation and the integrity and the intensity of the message someone wants to to communicate their vehicle might be something really remedial. And the love of the connection of the people in the band and all these these these things that make music sacred can exist as vibrantly and the most simple thing as they can. And like the greatest John Coltrane solo, So the Germans did that for me. And that sivnity is when am I really fell in love with punk rock. Then I took the energy of you know, punk rock and funk, and I started putting them together, you know, and I started developing a style of my own, even though I already I did have my own voice as a bass player, but I kind of there started playing these these bassline, these like fast funk basslines with punk rock energy from those two different styles, and you know, created this new kind of hybrid of a sound and also you know, influenced by a lot of the great kind of post punk bands. I guess you call it, like Uh from New York. I really loved Defunct with Joe Bowie and James Chance, the contortions. There's kind of that no New York sound and stuff, as well as just the reckless freedom of the great free jazzers when they played punk, like the Uh. You know, lots of lots of people when when you say that, the moment you you said, fuse those two traditions in your own playing, When is that happening? Is that early Chili Peppers? Is that just before the Chili Peppers? You know, just before I started, Yeah, maybe six months before so, And at that time things are moving so quickly, you know, I guess it's like maybe that happens when you get older, time goes faster, but events, significant events. I think maybe that's like an archetypal thing or a developmental thing with people I don't know, but happen at that age, and if you're willing to have the diligence to to deal with them and integrate them into your life, they can be really profound. What were your musical peers, how are they responding to that, to that style of playing? Were you getting? I was doing it by myself at first, because I was playing you know, I left Anthem, which I had become what is this? I joined Fear, and and Fear was you know, punk rock. They didn't want to hear about me slapping and playing funk, you know. But when I got together and started playing with Hellell and Jack again and Anthony and we started with Chili Pepper, is it just all of a sad just happened. Like I had this stuff, I had this way of playing, and all of a sudden, I was like this, and you know, they just we everyone knew what to do, you know, as well as everyone else was. It wasn't just me. Everyone was finding their place and sometimes things it's just like a zeitgeist, you know, it's like something's in the air and you express it. I you know, I It's funny the more I learned about music, and when I went and iudied music even like you know, because I never studied music really academically, I mean like kid public school stuff. But when I was forty six, I went to college for a year to USC and studied music academically, academically, which I had never done. And it became so apparent to me that so you just start getting into saybak, which is you know, very like mathematically complex, but it's all these things are just there. It's like, you know, it's things that resonate at various speeds and you figure them out how to put them together to make these mathematical equations that formed the sound, and it just becomes like breathing because you're so good at it. It's just all there, you know what I mean. And it's like if our ten are anten are tuned, we pick it up. And I just think at that time it was there. Did talk a little bit about do you mentioned the beginnings of the Chili Peppers. Talk a little bit about Anthony's decision. So it goes from someone who's an avid fan of music to deciding that he wants to make y Oh, well, you asked earlier if we had if our relationship was musical from the beginning, and we appreciated music together for sure. You know, we would listen to music all the time, and he would play stuff like him and his in his house where he lived with his dad, and they would play me music that I had never heard, like Blondie's first album I remember hearing and just you know, stuff that I didn't know about because we didn't listen to rock music in my house. And but but he Anthony was an actor, you know, he was had done film parts, and he wanted to be an actor, and he was, you know, gearing himself towards a life as an actor. And you know, but we were so wild and crazy and distracted and running around on the street that neither of us like, even though we loved to do the things that we did, we were just all over the place. You know. It wasn't like we had we weren't that disciplined. But one night he went to go see Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and he came home the next day we were like all crashing in this apartment up on Wilton and Franklin, and he came in and he was just lit up. He was like, man, I saw these guys are rapping, you know. It was like we were just learning about hip hop, you know. And he saw Grandma's rest for his right. He was like, it was incredible. You know, these stories and these narratives and it's poetry but it's like it's rhythm and it's singing but it's not. It's rapping, and it's fucking amazing. I'm gonna do it, you know. And he just sat right down and wrote this, started writing this rap. And at the same time a friend ours who I write about in a book, My dear friend Gary Allen, was doing a show and he said, why don't you guys get something together and do an opening act for me? And I'm Anthony wrote this rap and I had this groove the song, and we made this our first Chili Pepper song called out in La and we got together and we played and that was it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you end the book on right at the moment at at the birth of the Chili Peppers? Does this mean you're running part two? At the time, I was absolutely convinced that I was going to do a part two, and now I'm kind of un offense about it. I don't know. I definitely want to write, and I have like a bunch of different things in my head and I'm writing stuff, and whether I want to release another memoir at least next I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I wanted to end with and sadly, I think we do have to with one of my favorite you know, the book begins with this incredibly powerful and evocative picture of the Hollywood of your preteen years of the early seventies, and then it ends with this extraordinary, vivid depiction of the Hollywood the musical scene of your early twenties. And one there's one little chapter, and I'm going to make you read again. Where you is when you have a part time job with the veterinarian and you liberate a whole series of pills. Oh yeah, yea from you remember this? That's office. I was going to actually try to because when I did the pill installation, because I had stole pills from the Veterinarian veterinary hospital I worked at and installed them as an art piece, and I thought, you know, I beat Damien Hurst to the punishment. Yeah, so imagine what hundreds of these pills, Uh, hundreds for sure, Yeah, for every variety of pill, so all along the kind of Yeah, there was like a mantle that went along the house that we're renting. So you have Santa Monica and Fromosa. I want you to read these last two chapters here that page. The pills were we had a party, by the way, and if that is an obvious yeah, yeah, and I put all these pills up. The pills were for various animal maladies like diarrhea, raw spots from excessive itching, and also included antibiotics and tranquilizers. The crowd of Hollywood high and low lives ate the pills and puped and pooped for days afterward. Emerging through the craziness of the party crowd came Snickers, a dude from a local punk band called The Stains. He commandeered the stereo, took off the artie music we're playing, and put on an ACDC record. When I tried to put on some Ornette Coleman, he jumped up in front of the record player and whipped out a bowie knife, a forty ounce of schlitz in one hand and the Knife and the other. He stood guard over his ACDC for the length of the album, stoically hanging his head, greasy hair hanging down over his wildly bloodshot eyes. I wasn't gonna fuck with him, true rocker. We later became friends. Snickers was a wild dude that I think, and The Stains were a great band. That h story I think in some ways sums up the the wild and magical and wonderful spirit of this extraordinary book that you've written. And I would I think I speak for everyone in this audience when I say that please please write Part two. I've been waited absolutely. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking please. Asting was good. We could have been more thrilled. I've done our first live Broken Record with Flee. Make sure to go pick up his book Acid for the Children. You can check out a playlist we put together featuring songs from some of Flee's favorite albums. It's that Broken Record podcast dot com. You can also sign up for a behind the scenes newsletter while you're there. Broken Record is produced by Pushkin Industries, with helping Jason Gambrell and Mia Lobell. Our theme music is by the Great Kenny Beats. Stay tuned for next week's episodes. You heard me right, We're dropping two. I'm justin Richmond. Thanks again for listening.