When Flea talks about his childhood, he doesn’t romanticise it. He doesn’t dress it up as some gritty origin story engineered for mythmaking. He simply calls it what it was: “pretty violent, chaotic.” And in a new conversation with Rick Beato, the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist lays out exactly how a shy, awkward kid transformed into the feral, fearless teenager who ran wild through 1970s Hollywood with Anthony Kiedis at his side.
Flea, born Michael Balzary, says the switch flipped when his family moved from New York to Los Angeles. Suddenly he was in the streets, unsupervised, aimless, and blasting headfirst into trouble. “I was… doing dumb, stupid f***ing crimes,” he admits, as if describing a weather pattern he once lived through rather than his own adolescence.
Then came Fairfax High School, 1976. And Anthony Kiedis. The future frontman didn’t just become a friend, he detonated something in Flea’s sense of self. Flea remembers coming home that day with a kind of awe: “For the first time in my life, I’ve found someone I can talk to.” That connection became a partnership, a mischief engine, and eventually the backbone of one of rock’s most enduring bands.
Their teenage years? Pure feral chaos.
No money. No direction. No supervision.
Just two kids carving existence out of the streets of Hollywood, scavenging for lunch, discovering drugs, girls, danger, freedom, and crucially, music. “Anthony and I, when we were kids, we were up to so much wild stuff,” Flea tells Beato, sounding both nostalgic and faintly baffled that they survived it.
That survival instinct hardened into grit, the same grit that powered the Red Hot Chili Peppers when they officially formed in 1982 alongside Hillel Slovak and Jack Irons. By the time the band existed, Flea and Kiedis already had the battle scars of people who’d lived ten different lives before turning twenty.
And despite their reputation as funk-rock ambassadors, Flea is quick to clarify their influences: “We didn’t just listen to funk… We loved Ornette Coleman, the No New York scene, The Lounge Lizards, James Chance. We loved Led Zeppelin and the mighty rock bands. We went to see The Who… and Jaco, Weather Report, Miles Davis.” They consumed everything. Because they had learned to get into anything.
Which brings us to Flea’s closing act of charity, a gift to the youth, a masterclass in mischief from a man who once treated backstage areas as public parks.
The secret to sneaking into shows?
“Walk in backwards,” he says. “They’ll never notice you. I’m telling you, it works.”
Half advice. Half confession. Entirely Flea.
