It was the beginning of the nineties. I had just graduated college where I had majored in trumpet performance with my minor instrument being bass. That morning I was at Stapleton Airport on my way to Boston to visit relatives and hang out in places like the Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory. A plane arrived at my gate and passengers began to disembark.
While a student at CU I had gotten into the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their album Mother’s Milk had come out a year earlier and a funk band in Boulder I played with played their version of the Stevie Wonder song Higher Ground at our shows. I particularly liked Flea’s totally uninhibited bass playing. And then who else, but the Chili Peppers walked off the plane!
I quickly spotted Flea and pulled the paper pad I used for lesson notes out of my trumpet case and asked him for an autograph. He was very nice about it and didn’t try to shoo me away or anything. He said, “Hi...okay, sure...” and wrote “Hi I’m Flea” on the pad, smiled at me and and handed it back. Thirty minutes later Flea and his band were in a limousine going who knows where and I was on a plane flying to Boston.
What I didn’t know was that Flea the virtuoso rock/funk bass player had given up on his dream to be a trumpet player. He seemed to carry that low level of regret through several more decades of being a global rock star until now. Meanwhile I carried on with a life of trumpet playing punctuated by jobs in fast food restaurants, temping, secretarial work, software development, and finally opening my own coffee shops. It’s been a fun life and maybe less hectic for me by not being globally famous. Although it looks like he now plays a Monette trumpet which means being globally famous perhaps might grant one a little more FU money to lay down for an instrument.
What I didn’t do in all those years was play bass...until a few years ago when I finally bought one...sort of. I always liked the sound of bands like New Order and The Cure who often had some jangly line in their songs being played on a Bass VI so I bought myself a black Schecter HellCat VI, which is Schecter’s version of a Bass VI. You can hear it throughout my album Du Bist Kein Toy. So I guess Flea and I had been staring across the same abyss longingly at the instruments we’d flirted with as kids and always wondered, ‘what if?’.
According to an interview I saw with Flea and Jimmy Fallon, he finally came around to doing something about his wish to be a trumpet player and started playing every day a few years ago. He’s obviously a quick study and very disciplined because he just released an album, Honora where he sounds almost like Ron Miles! Actually the album reminds me of the one Ginger Baker did with Ron Miles called Coward of the County. How long is it before we see Flea touring with Bill Frisell and Rudy Royston?
Last night I played my trumpet along with a few songs from Honora, improvising harmonies and making up countermelodies which is something I often do with Sigur Rós, Murcof, or Eluvium albums. It was surprising and pleasing how similar Flea’s tone and melodic inclinations were to mine as I played along, hearing the songs for the first time and playing along.
Honora is probably not going to be the first choice for hardcore Chili Peppers superfans but anyone who has tastes broad enough to have in their record collection some jazz, ambient, electronica, and maybe even an old beat poet album or two will really like this release.
-V