Following this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony – which took place over the weekend – Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea has shared an anecdote about once misplacing his own, only to find that his daughter had repurposed it as a gardening tool.
Flea won his first Grammy in 1993, taking home the gong for Best Hard Rock Performance for the Chili Peppers’ smash-hit single ‘Give It Away’. His first child, daughter Clara Balzary, was five years old at the time, and evidently took more of an interest in his accolades than he did; in a new interview with LA radio station KROQ, Flea joked that he while he was “grateful to win” his Grammy, it ultimately went on to become a plaything for Clara.
“Grammys are awesome,” he said, “but after we won our first Grammy, like three years later, my mom said, ‘Michael, where’s your Grammy?’, and I was like, ‘I don’t know, mom, I put it somewhere.’
“Months after that, my gardener came out of the backyard, in the garden, and you know how the Grammy looks like an old record player with the horn on it? My daughter had unscrewed it and was using it as a shovel for the garden. It had been out there in the dirt for the whole winter. It had been out in the dirt for the whole winter and stuff.”
Flea went on to say that he’s “just not really an awards guy”, and finds the albums themselves to be much more gratifying. On his typical release-day celebrations, he said: “I usually drop about six or seven hits of acid, get naked, paint my whole body in lipstick, and run down the street screaming like mad… It’s not really a celebration, I actually do that every day.”
The band released their 12th album, ‘Unlimited Love’, last Friday via Warner. In a four-star review of the record, NME’s Ali Shutler wrote: “There’s a lot to ‘Unlimited Love’, both in scale and ambition. It’s at once familiar – without being boring – and fresh (but never at the expense of the band’s identity).”
Sales-wise, the album is currently on track to top this week’s UK chart, outselling its closest competition – Ed Sheeran‘s ‘=’ – by 8:1. If it holds on until Friday (April 8), it will be the Chili Pepper’s fifth UK Number One album, and the band’s first in over a decade – their last being 2011’s ‘I’m With You’.
At a surprise album launch show in LA last Friday (April 1) – which also John Frusciante’s first time playing guitar with the band live since 2007 – the Chili Peppers played ‘Give It Away’ with none other than Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton. The day prior, Clinton – who produced the band’s second album, 1985’s ‘Freaky Styley’ – appeared at the unveiling of the Chili Peppers’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The same night as their album’s release and its accompanying launch show, the band appeared on both Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. It was part of an April Fool’s joke that saw Kimmel and Fallon swap places, hosting each other’s shows as part of an elaborate prank.
On Saturday (April 2), drummer Chad Smith shared a poignant video paying tribute to his late friend and colleague, Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died last month aged 50.
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