| INTERJK : Flea: 2006 BBS: Rock Solid |
Flea: 2006 BBS: Rock Solid
Rock Solid
Stability has never been a strong point with Michael "Flea" Balzary, the hell raisingf Red Hot Chili Pepper. But, as the Melbourne-born muso tells Dino Scatena, re-forging the bond with his father; a new baby and trips to his Australian bush property are changing that.
Flea, the muscular and tatooed bassist of supergroup the Red Hot Chili Peppers, looks unexpectedly blissful. Absent, for the moment, are the trademark hairdos he's sported for most of his professional career - the bleached blond, the red, blue and green and the occasional mohawk. Today, his hair is short, shaggy, could well be his natural shade of dusty brown and covers the tattoo of the word "Flea" on the left side of his head. Also hidden from view is Flea's portrait of Jimi Hendrix on his upper left arm, the chain of little elephants beneath, the Maori figure across his back and the Celtic and American Indian designsf on his chest and arms. The only visible ink you can see in the lamplight of Hollywoods Chateau Marmont are the letters L.O.V.E. etched aross the knuckles of his right hand. Meeting him in the infamous Sunset Boulevard hotel, you'd never guess there's anything Australian about Flea - his accent and suntan are pure California. It would probably be a different story if you'd seen him busking with friends outside the Moruya markets on the South Coast of NSW in january, blowing on a trumpet, which he's played since he was nine. Or if you'd seen him in his earliest years growing up in suburban Melbourne, where he remembers breaking his arm after falling off a backyard swing, spinning a cat by its tail.
This morning, Flea and the other three members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers are promoting the band's new CD, thier ninth studio recording, Stadium Arcadium (released this month). Four albums have reached No. 1 on the ARIA charts and the band have sold more than 50 million albums worldwide. As you'd expect of a multimillionare musician and occasionaly movie actor, Flea resides in a mansion in the Malibu Hills (his three-bedroom Hollywood pied-a-terre was listed for sale in February for $1.6million. But he also owns a beachfront property in the little town of Congo on NSW's South Coast.
"Chances are, I'll end up living there permanently," says Flea. "without wanting to sound corny, i feel it in my blood when I'm in that part of Australia. I get a lot of power and strength from the land."
The 43-year-old hasn't always felt what he calls "at peace". The band has been torn apart with substance abuse issues since forming in the early 1980s. The original guitarist, Hillel Slovak, died of a heroin overdose in 1988. His replacement, John Frusciante, credits Flea with saving him from a similiar fate by staying close as he battled addiction to crack, cocaine and heroin. "He's never judged me," says Frusciante now, "no matter what changes i went through. He's the most supportive friend I've ever had."
For much of his young life, Flea, too, had a drug problem, regularly using cocain, heroin, and acid and smoking marijuana daily. "I went in and out of a very chaotic lifestyle," he says. "I could go into a lot of reasons but i think in the transition from boyhood to manhood, there were a lot of things i didn't learn. You're supposed to have a father to walk you through that, and i didn't. Nothing against my father or my stepfather but niether of them were present."
In 1967, the four-year-old Michael Balzary moved from Melbourne to New York when his father, Mick, then a customs officer, was transferred. His parents divorced when Flea was seven. When he was nine, his dad returned to Australia alone, where he now lives on the outskirts of Canberra with his second wife, Margaret. Flea's mother, Patricia, also remarried to American jazz musician Walter Urban Jr, moving Flea and his elder sister, Karen, to Los Angeles. Those were unhappy days; Urban Jr was alcoholic, abusive and rarely home.
And so, in the early 1970s, the seedy Hollywood backstreets became the playground for the boy who would grow up to be "Flea", a nickname his friends picked up from TV cartoons.
Flea holds dual citizenship and in the summer of '72, he paid his dad a visit in Canberra. During that month together, father and son went on a fishing trip that would provide Flea with one of the happiest memories of his troubled childhood. "He took me down the the [South] Coast and we walked around those beaches,' recalls Flea. "We went fishing and walked around the rock pools and stuff."
It was a glimpse at something resembling a personal paradise, a time he'd remember when he returned to Los Angeles. But Mick and Mike would see each other only once more in the next two decades.
Back in Hollywood, Flea went feral. "From when i was 12, I started doing drugs," he says. "Our crowd was running around the streets. I'd come home to sleep." He soon found his partner in crime, Anthony Kiedis, the future lead singer of the Chili Peppers, in the schoolyard of Hollywood's Fairfax High School. "We grew up together," says Flea. "When you come from a dysfunctional family, like we both did, you kind of raise each other. You develop a closeness that never fades."
Together, Flea and Kiedis raised hell as often as they could. "Growing up in Hollywood, we did a lot of pushing the envelope in every which way - creatively, physically. It was like, 'whats the craziest way we can spend the next few hours?' "
In his autobiography, Scar Tissue, Kiedis recounts the pairs misadventure, including their taste for leaping off apartment-block roofs into swimming pools below. (That ended one afternoon when Kiedis missed the water and broke his back.) "It was a lot of fun," Flea says of those happy days, "and it ws misguided and sad, too. I'm not happy about breaking into someone's house and stealing. That's not cool."
By 1983, Flea and Kiedis, along with Slovak and drummer Jack Irons, had formed the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a punk/funk act inspired by the likes of George Clinton. That year, Flea took his second holiday with his father in Canberra. The next time they saw each other was in 1992, during the Chili Pepper's first concert tour of Australia. By then, thier fifth album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, had sold more than 7 million copies in the US alone, making them music superstars.
During that Australian visit, a local invited Flea for a day out diving for abalone along the same beachs where, 20 years earlier, he and his dad had gone fishing. Flea says something stirred inside and, driving home to Canberra, he spotted a "for sale" sign in a secluded block of land in the bush. He bought it. "it was a spontaneous thing but i always had it in my head," says Flea, "Even when i was a kid, I said to myself, 'If i ever have money, that's what I'll do.' So i bought the land and built a house."
He goes there virtually every Australian summer for up to two months at a time, sometimes with a bunch of friends, sometimes alone "to sit in the bush". The property is only a two-hour drive from his father's home in the ACT so Flea had the opportunity to re-establish a bond he was deprived of for more than 20 years.
"I love my father," says Flea. "It's been a learning process for both of us, of accepting each other, because we're both headstrong people. But the bottom line is that i know he loves me and would do anything for me."
Mick, 70, feels the same way about the relationship. "It's very important for me, too, as you can imagine," he says. "Mike's very similiar to myself. He's willing to explore things, as i have done in the past."
Flea's mother and sister still love in LA, as does 17-year-old Clara Balzary, Flea's daughter from his marriage to Loesha Zeviar, which ended in 1990. Clara, whose name is tatooed on his arm between Hendrix and the elephants, is in her final year of high school, plays drums in a band and wants to be a photographer. She's lived with her dad her whole life.
Last october, Flea became a father again when his fiancee, 31-year-old model Frankie Rayder (whom he's taken to calling "my wife") gave birth to a baby girl, Sunny Bebop Balzary. "I never dreamed i could such a happy, sane, relationship," Flea says of thier four-year partnership. "I went through 17 years of having dysfunctional, addictive, unhappy relationships. Now, every day is great. And we have a beautiful baby girl and I'm such a lucky, lucky man."
Flea says that despite his own initial anxieties, daughter Clara is overjoyed with the new woman in his life. "With her, i was a little scared each step of the way," he says. "Because it's just been her and I for so long - she's my main girl, I've been her main man. So I was a little worried that she might be jealous, which would be understandable. First, I had to say, 'Well, Frankie's moving in - are you OK? ' " And here, Flea does a high pitched impersonation of his daughter: " 'Oh i love Frankie - great. ' Then, 'We're going to have a kid.' And again, tears of joy."
Flea has just returned to Los Angeles after spending a month in Australia, introducing Sunny Bebop to her grandfather and her 97-year-old great-grandmother, who loves in Melbourne and still calls Flea "Michael". With his new extended family, Flea feels he's clutched a previously remote opportunity to love happily ever after. It's the fulfillment of a lifelong fantasy: stability, family, contentment.
"It was a lot of work for me to come to terms with my relationship with the world," says Flea. "I just imagine how hard it must have been for my dad to leave his kids and go back to Australia all by himself. To love life, you've got to love all of it. You can't be self-destructive and angry but you can't just be the meditative, happy guy, either. You've got to love and respect and honour and accept it all."
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AJÁNLOM AZ OLDALT
