War Ensemble
Flea walks into the room bare feet, suit trousers and shirt. He’s tired and jet-lagged but talks incredibly fast, as if plugged in at the mains. A lot of what he says could be dismissed as hippy nonsense. He talks about love, about surrendering yourself to the power of music, about the universe and about ‘energy’. At times it’s as if you’re listening to a new age preacher sermonising. At times it also makes a lot of sense. He warily admits, “there’s been a spirit of competition,” between him and Frusciante. “During the making of By The Way it just wasn’t a good time for the relationship between John and I. there were things about him that were bothering me and I’m sure there were things about me that were bothering him. It became a constant argument.” He says he hasn’t ever listened to By The Way since recording it because, “there are moments I remember back to that aren’t pleasant to me.” So unpleasant, in fact, that he decided to leave the band, though he didn’t tell anyone about it. “The band just didn’t feel like a comfortable place to express myself. I felt tight and tense in the situation. All through the history of this band, no matter what was going on in my life, it was always the place for me to express myself and let go of everything. All of a sudden it didn’t feel like a place where I could be myself. That was completely unacceptable to me.” He says that he and John talked about their problems, got things straight between them. Still though, people are incorrectly convinced that Frusciante wrote a great deal of Stadium Arcadium, that it’s his album. Surely those impressions must hurt Flea? He’s calm at first. “No, God no. People can say what they want. It’s not John’s record, that’s not true. I love John. He’s my favourite musician on earth, my brother and my friend and I love him but this is not John’s record, it’s all of ours.” I try to ask him how far the relationship between him and Frusciante had improved, whether he feels more creative in the band. It’s not a question he wants to hear. Suddenly he’s ranting, raising his voice. “My opinion is as important as anyone’s,” he says as his eyes widen and water. Then he explodes. “If you really want to fucking get into it, I think it’s fucking silly and you’re kind of pissing me off right now. This is fucking bullshit and you fucking English people always do this fucking bullshit. Shut the fuck up, fuck you.” And then he hurls the bottle of water at my head and storms out, scattering insults in his wake.
Minutes later, he’s back, still screaming he’s upset that he thought our conversation was concentrating on the negative side of his relationship with Frusciante – perhaps forgetting that it was he that continued to talk about it. “I opened myself up about the tensions between John and I because we had gone through this process which was hard,” he says, beginning to calm down. “it was really tense between John and I but then it got better and there was this incredible sense of release. It feels like a rebirth, like the beginning of the band again.” It’s hard to talk about anything other than Frusciante now. Certainly Flea doesn’t seem to want to. In fact the only other thing he talks about is his anger. “It’s always been part of who I am, especially when I was younger. I had a fucking rage in me that was unbelievable,” he says. He changes the subject, talks about jazz for a few minutes then stops: “Did I scare you when I got mad? Did you think I was going to smack you or something? I’m sorry if I scared you. I’ve never hit anyone. You might have hit me back really hard. I apologise if I scared you.” We leave the room together, travelling in the hotel lift up to where the photo shoot will take place. He apologises to me again, leaning over and hugging me tightly. It seems this is a recurrent theme in both Flea’s and the Chilis’ life at the moment – arguments and reconciliation. “That’s the give and go of life,” he grins. “You’ve got to love the dark side as well as the light side.”
---Tom Bryant
