Flea Talks ‘Crazy’ Snowboarding Spill, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ New Direction
Flea can’t pinpoint the exact moment he knew the Red Hot Chili Peppers needed to take a different direction on their new album, The Getaway, out June 17th, but he vividly recalls the feeling. “I felt like we we were starting to do the same thing we’ve always done,” the bassist tells Rolling Stone. “I could kind of feel it on the last record [2011’s I’m With You.] I knew what we were gonna do or how we were gonna do it before we even did it.”
He decided it was time for a big change: Rick Rubin, who had produced every RHCP album back to 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik, would sit this one out. In his place they brought in Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, who radically switched up their working methods. We spoke with Flea about the band’s creative breakthrough, his devastating snowboarding accident that significantly delayed the recording, their ongoing tour and what the future might hold for Atoms for Peace.
First off, tell me how your broke your arm snowboarding.
Oh, dude, it was crazy. I was at this fancy ski resort in Montana. I had been snowboarding for three days. I was having the greatest time of my life and the funny part of the story is this: I was snowboarding with Anthony [Kiedis] and we ran into Lars Ulrich. He had a house up there so we were snowboarding down with Lars’ kids and me and Anthony. We are laughing down the mountain – hooting and hollering, having the greatest time.
Metallica and Red Hot Chili Peppers have the same managers. At one point we stopped to have a cup of tea. I said to Lars, “We should take a picture of one of us lying in the snow all misshapen and stuff, like Pollyanna when she falls off the house. And take a picture and trick [our management company] Q Prime that one of us broke our leg.” We were laughing about it and literally 40 seconds later, we were jetting down a mountain going like 50 miles an hour, and I just wiped out so bad. I couldn’t see and I had this flat spot on the mountain and bam: I just smashed my arm. I broke it in like five places and got really bad nerve damage. Big pieces of bone got shorn off. I just completely fucking trashed my arm. It was a big, big complicated surgery to get it all back and six months of not being able to play bass.
What happened after you fell?
They stuck a jar of Vicodin down my throat and I was on a morphine drip in the ambulance. I went to the hospital in Montana. I went back to L.A. to have the surgery done. It was hard. It was a very difficult, painful, sad experience.