(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
Thu 11 December 2025 19:15, UK
It can’t be overstated just how essential Flea’s aggressively funky bass is to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ high-octane groove attack.
They’ve traversed an eclectic, genre-hopping throughout their 40-odd years together. Since burnished in Los Angeles’ hedonistic clash of party punk and funk metal, Red Hot Chili Peppers have charted a course of psychedelic soft rock, hip-hop leaning pop detours, and the occasional acoustic ballad, growing across the decades from a fiercely underground alternative crew to a stadium-selling behemoth well into the 2000s.
Through such stylistic fancies and from one Billboard monster to another was Flea’s malleable but unerringly robust bass attack. Veering between incendiary rhythm and melodic jaggedness, Flea’s driving basslines and novel slap technique bounce feverishly along with his hyper-animated live performance style. Many would-be bassists have taken notes on his bass style, but his flourish always remains burningly inimitable.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ chequered musical mosaic is reflected in the songs Flea’s namechecked over the years as a foundational influence. When quizzed on the basslines that opened his eyes to the power of those four strings in a 2023 X post, Flea opted for Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz piece ‘Journey To Satchidananda’, and the cosmic conjurings of Parliament’s squelchy ‘Flashlight’, likely taken by Bernie Worrell’s hefty Minimoog groove rather than the traditional bass parts.
For his third selection, Flea reached into classic rock’s canonical core and selected Led Zeppelin’s ‘Ramble On’. One of the essential cuts from 1969’s Led Zeppelin II, the Tolkien-inspired strut between rock swagger and contemplative folk whimsy sees all the band firing on all cylinders as they always did during their peak.
But, as is often the case with Led Zeppelin, John Paul Jones’ dextrous and creative eccentricity is what anchors ‘Ramble On’, his bass both subtle but bristling with a guarded power affording the various showboating around him.
Similar to Flea’s previous bassline mentions, ‘Ramble On’ flexes a heady brew of sonic character, all marvellously twirling together in Led Zeppelin’s unique alchemy, another string in the bow that touched on escapism without ever feeling like prog warlock silliness.
Despite such a jewel amid their holy album run, ‘Ramble On’ was never played during their classic run up to 1980, save flashing the odd tease during their many shows. Fans were eventually treated to the live debut in full for their 2007 O2 Arena reunion get together, rounding off their fantasy number with a bridge of the same album’s ‘What Is and What Should Never Be’.
‘Ramble On’ would sit in Led Zeppelin’s legacy as just one piece of the eternal standard Flea would spend his career trying to pole-vault over. “I knew we were going to make a good record,” he reflected on 2010’s The Red Hot Chili Peppers: An Oral/Visual History, looking back on the band’s LP that broke them into the mainstream.
“When we made Blood Sugar Sex Magik, I wanted to be as big as Led Zeppelin. I wanted to have a profound effect on culture like them.”
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