Courtesy of Dan Schawbel
Dan Schawbel and Flea.
- Dan Schawbel is a bestselling author, speaker, entrepreneur, and host of the "5 Questions with Dan Schawbel" podcast, where he interviews world-class humans by asking them just five questions in under 10 minutes.
- He recently interviewed Flea, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' bassist and the author of "Acid for the Children."
- Growing up, Flea wasn't close to his mother and considered his father a "difficult person," but they shaped his relationships and love for music.
- His desire for connection outside of his household was "a perfect setup for a rock band to start."
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Born in Melbourne, Australia, Michael Peter Balzary was nicknamed Flea as a teenager because of his inability to sit still. After moving to California, he attended Fairfax High School, where he started his lifelong friendship with Red Hot Chili Peppers lead singer Anthony Kiedis. Originally a jazz trumpet player, Flea later was introduced to rock music and bass guitar by Hillel Slovak.
Flea helped found the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1983, and since then they have released 11 studio albums that have sold over 80 million copies worldwide. In 2012, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Rolling Stone's readers ranked Flea as the second-best bassist of all time. Flea is also the cofounder of the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, a nonprofit music education organization for underprivileged children. I was very excited to speak to Flea about his relationships, life experiences, and views that he wrote about in his new memoir "Acid for the Children'' for this podcast.
In our conversation, Flea shares how the relationship he had with his mom affected future relationships, why his stepfather was a blessing and a curse, why he views his friends as his family, how vulnerability has been his strength, and his best career advice.
Dan Schawbel: In your book, you said that you didn't have a deep connection with your mom growing up. How did that impact your future relationships?
Flea: A lot. I think and I didn't really become aware of that until I was in my 30s, and I'm 57 now. I looked for love in romantic relationships in a way that came from a place of not feeling affectionate and close to my mother. That's not healthy in a romantic relationship to look for that type of attention. I'm so grateful to have consciously felt the pain of the relationship difficulties that I've had, and I've managed to grow beyond that. In one way, it was very difficult to go through those things. In another way, I'm grateful because it made me really look at myself and look at relationships, and forced me to want to evolve and change as a human being. Once I got past being angry about it, then I got to a real healthy place of forgiveness, and actually managed to forge a really beautiful relationship with my mother as an adult and in her later years.
DS: Your stepfather seemed to be both a blessing and a curse for you and you. Can you describe some of the lessons you learned from sharing various experiences with them?
Courtesy of Dan Schawbel
F: He was a difficult person. He was a drug addict and he was prone to really irrational fits of violence and stuff. But he was also an unbelievably great musician and he also loved me with everything that he knew. He was battling his own demons and had a really hard time. It was really scary being around him because we never knew when it was over. We were always kind of trepidatious that he might blow up and rage and destroy the house or whatever. When I started writing this book, I learned so much about myself and how I grew in my yearning, and my search to understand what happened when I was a kid.
And I realized that I learned from him that when he played the upright bass, he was taking all the pain and torment of his own life and turning it into something beautiful. When I tried to write about it, I realized that that's what I do when I play music. If it wasn't for him, I would probably never have played music. He opened me up to all the limitless, infinite gifts that music has given me in terms of being a place to express myself and something to focus on, and community and friends and all of that stuff. People are complicated. There's never good guys and bad guys. They're always both.
DS: I look at my friends as my family because I'm an only child. And you saw your friends as part of your family too. Can you explain those relationships and why they were so valuable?
F: I grew up in a very unconventional and oftentimes difficult household at a place where I didn't feel safe. I also was completely unwatched as a kid. I was out in the street running wild, getting into trouble. The friends that I made were really where I looked for family, where I looked for that bond, that togetherness, and that unity that we all want. We're all yearning for connection, whether it's an intimate one-on-one relationship or a sense of community or just that feeling of togetherness and people being there for each other. There's a perfect setup for a rock band to start. Because we pretty much all came from broken homes and all were running around wild, and all found profound meaning in our friendship and to be able to translate that into music, the music became more than the sum of its parts.
DS: Historically, people have always viewed vulnerability as a weakness, but you view it as a strength. Can you give me an example of a time when you were vulnerable, and how that drew you closer to someone and improved a relationship you had?
F: Even if sometimes my vulnerability might be irrational, like I might have my feelings hurt by you and I feel bad and I'll say, "Dude, why did you say that? That really hurt my feelings?" And you'll be like, "Oh, I didn't mean it that way. I meant to say that what you're doing is really beautiful. You know?" And I took it as an insult because I heard it the wrong way. Then we forge a bond because we connected over something. This has been the case very often, in so many different ways, especially being in a communal creative situation with my band. We get our feelings hurt all the time.
The willingness to be vulnerable and still express yourself and open yourself up to being hurt in a romantic relationship, a friendship relationship, a creative relationship, any collaborative effort of any kind takes courage, but it's where all love is. Writing this book has been an extraordinarily vulnerable feeling. But I think there's value in telling my story, and there was value for me in challenging myself to write a piece of literature that I thought could be a contribution to the world of books. It was scary because I thought there was a good chance I might fail, but I knew I had to do it on my own. I knew I had to have to be my voice and nobody else's and I had to sink or swim, so that's what I did.
DS: What's your best piece of career advice?
F: My best piece of career advice is to work from a place of love.
DS: How do you go about doing that?
F: The first step is asking yourself, is this act that I'm doing coming from love or is it coming from fear? If you're coming from love, it will guide you in the right direction.
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