Flea Describes The Long Road Back To Bass Playing After A Scary Accident

Red Hot Chili Peppers are set to release their new album, The Getaway, this week but the album almost didn’t include key member, Flea, due to a snowboarding accident. Flea and Chili Peppers’ singer, Anthony Kiedis, went on a snowboarding trip to Montana in 2015 where the bassist ended up in the hospital.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Flea says of the accident, “We were jetting down the mountain, going, like, 50 miles an hour, when I just wiped out, it was like, bam. My arm started swelling up right away. I broke my arm in five places. Big pieces of bone were shorn off. ” Following the accident and major surgery, Flea endured six months of rehabilitation to get his arm back to its normal bass-slapping-self.

After his rehab was complete, Flea still struggled with returning to the bass comfortably, which is a major problem when you are about to record a new record. “I went to play one note and a bunch of pain shot up my arm,” going on to add “I tried to play the simplest things and my hand just wouldn’t do it. It felt like I let everyone down, because we couldn’t work on the record.”

Thankfully, Flea was able to overcome the injury, record his parts, and even perform the National Anthem as a send off for Kobe Bryant.  Pretty bad ass of him to come back from a severe injury like that, sort of makes us forget what he said about rock being dead.

(via Rolling Stone)

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