A Quote by Flea

Later in high school, I met Hillel Slovak, who was the original guitar player of the Chili Peppers, and we became really close. We had a band, and we didn't like the bass player, so I started playing bass, and I got a bass two weeks later.
Without getting real personal, we liked our bass player Ed. He was a great guy and he was a good bass player but his playing was suited for a different style of band.
Everybody besides my piano player has been with me since the very first day. We were a four-piece band for a solid two years. It was me playing acoustic and rhythm electric guitar, a bass player, a drummer and a lead guitar player. For a couple of years, we sounded like the Foo Fighters.
I didn't start off as a bass player, and Guns was the first band I really, like, 'Oh, I'm gonna be a bass player. This is what I'm gonna do.' And I really dove into it head first.
At the time, I didn't know that bass would not be enough for me. I'm not a bass player because bass is always a background instrument even to this very day.
I like Jaco Pastorius' 'Portrait of Tracy.' He was this bass player who played jazz fusion. He was the dopest bass player who ever lived.
You have to understand that the bass guitar is the party instrument. It only has four strings. If you see a bass player playing five strings, take your shoe off and throw it at him.
In 1972, I got my first electric bass and started playing the kind of instrument I play now. I found that the majority of musicians couldn't bear that. They are not used to listening to the bass because they think the bass is in the background to support them.
A bass player has to think and play like a bass player. A drummer has to play and think like a drummer, and stay out of the way of the vocalist. The guitar player has to respect everybody else.
I don't look at my instrument as having one specific role; I was raised to go as far as you can. But Raphael Saadiq hated my bass. He told me to throw it away. And playing in Snoop's band, there was a time when my bass was more annoying to everyone than helpful. They would get on my case: 'Can you make your bass sound like more of a bass?'
I've been in a band, so I understand the politics. Sometimes the bass player doesn't like what the guitar player is doing, and you have to sort of even that out.
I don't ever have any bass in my monitors at all; I instead like to lock in with the guitar. I know the bass player has got to be locked in with the drummer, but to me, metal music is about the guitar and drums locking in and operating like a machine together. I played with my brother forever, and we were magically locked in together.
My dad taught me to play bass. He's a bass player; he still plays in a band in Michigan to this day. He taught me to play bass when I was about 6. I used to just go to band practice with him, and whoever didn't show up for rehearsal that day, I would take their spot.
A lot of other bass players have told me I'm the only bass player who plays with a pick but sounds like he's playing with the thumb and fingers, which is a great compliment.
I was a guitar player in a band that had two keyboard players, sometimes two other guitarists, a bass player, and a drummer, four or five singers, and percussion. We did a two-and-a-half hour show where the music spanned from the early Sixties to the present. Whereas the David Lee Roth thing was like, Now. Very big and intense.
From the first moment that I can remember, I had identified myself as a bass player and it had everything to do with my father, who was a bass player. And he loved music, you know, as much as anybody I've ever seen. And that dynamic I just thought as somehow was a straight pass to me.
From the first moment that I can remember, I had identified myself as a bass player and it had everything to do with my father, who was a bass player. And he loved music, you know, as much as anybody Ive ever seen. And that dynamic I just thought as somehow was a straight pass to me.
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