“I felt I deserved a songwriting credit because it was a No. 1 hit. They sold millions of records and I only got $200!” Flea’s bittersweet hip-hop recording experience

In 1989, when the Red Hot Chili Peppers had their first big hit with a frenzied cover of Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground, the group’s hyperkinetic bass player, Flea, could also be seen hopping around MTV in the video for Young MC’s colossal hip-hop crossover, Bust a Move.

The recording experience was bittersweet, however, as Flea told Bass Player in February ’96. “The bassline I wrote ended up being a major melody of the tune, and I felt I deserved songwriting credit and money because it was a No. 1 hit. They sold millions of records, and I only got $200!

“Afterwards, my lawyer told them, ‘You should throw down Flea some cash,’ but the record company said, ‘We told him exactly what to play.’

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“The truth is no-one was even in the room at the time but me and the engineer! It was ridiculous, but I learned from it.”

Check out the recording for Flea’s funky beat-four variations. In each bar, his staccato notes on beats one and three lock in a groove, while the ghost-note shuffle feel on the ‘and’ of three anticipates the snare on beat four.

When asked on X what happened to the gloriously bizarre trousers that he wore in the music video, Flea responded, “They were stolen from the trunk of my car along with my badass leather jacket. I had just moved into a nice house for the first time in my life and I got robbed on the first night.”

Needless to say, Flea ended up on firm financial footing despite the alleged snub from Young MC. With new members John Frusciante and Chad Smith in tow, the Red Hot Chili Peppers released Mother’s Milk, which was more cohesive than anything the band had previously recorded.

Higher Ground remains the album’s most celebrated track, with Flea’s slap bass replacing the clavinet of the original Stevie Wonder hit. It’s still one of his most widely recognised riffs.

Here he is rocking the same pair of stuffed animal pants on the David Letterman Show. With some help from bass legend Will Lee on backing vocals, of course.

Flea would be the first to call himself a punk rocker before he ever took on the mantle of funk legend. But his infusion of punk ethos into the playing style of Louis Johnson and Larry Graham hipped a generation of rock fans to what funk bass playing is all about.

“My playing has always been very physical. A constant whackeda-whacke-da-whack. I don’t do it to impress people; I just play what’s fun.

“My roots are in punk, which was all about playing hard, fast, and loud. As the Chili Peppers got more and more funky, it was a natural evolution: the energy of punk translated into the music we felt like writing.”