Flea

And the first time that I ever saw him play with his friends in New York, his buddies came over to the house, set up in the living room and they started throwing down.

They played fast.

They played furiously.

They played with great tenderness.

They played with great violence and physicality.

And it was wild.

Well, for me, all music is music.

So if I think of punk rock, you take a song like Nervous Breakdown by Black Flag and it goes, I'm about to have a nervous breakdown.

And it's a beautiful song.

I love it.

And then you take a song like Cherokee, best played by Clifford Brown and Max Roach, and the bass is going... The drums are going... And they're both very fast, very aggressive.

They both have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And they are both played by people yearning with every fiber of their being to make sense of the world that they live in.

But, you know, I love both and I'm studying.

But anyway, so yes, when I was a kid and I heard them playing that jazz, it just blew my mind and changed my life forever.

It was difficult.

Um, I, you know, when my mother and Walter, his name, you know, Walter, when they got together, um, it was really exciting at first because, you know, my dad was, was very much by the rules and every day was kind of the same.

And there were these strict, you know, codes of conduct that you did not break or you got the belt.

You know what I mean?

You didn't mess up.