Flea’s daughter really digs his Grammy trophy — literally. As the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist noted in a new interview with KROQ in Los Angeles, he once lost his first-ever Grammy, only to discover months later that his first child Clara Balzary had been using it as a garden shovel.
The anecdote came up as Flea attempted to explain how much — or how little — these accolades mean. “Put it this way, I’m grateful to win a Grammy, 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.’”
He continued, “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. I’m just not really an awards guy.”
Related Video
In the same interview, Flea also said he felt, “Happy, excited, [and] fulfilled,” to put out the new album Unlimited Love. He added that his tradition on release day is thus: “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.”
Flea’s indifference to his Grammy joins a long and noble transition of not putting too much weight on these accolades. Eddie Vedder famously used a Pearl Jam VMA as a doorstop, while Kanye West actually urinated on a Grammy in order to, uh, get out of his recording contract, we guess? The reasoning there was never very clear.
Red Hot Chili Peppers were the subjects of our inaugural cover story, where Flea told us what he said to get John Frusciante back into the band. Their upcoming stadium tour is one of the can’t-miss live events of the year, and tickets are available here.
[flexi-common-toolbar] [flexi-form class=”flexi_form_style” title=”Submit to Flexi” name=”my_form” ajax=”true”][flexi-form-tag type=”post_title” class=”fl-input” title=”Title” value=”” required=”true”][flexi-form-tag type=”category” title=”Select category”][flexi-form-tag type=”tag” title=”Insert tag”][flexi-form-tag type=”article” class=”fl-textarea” title=”Description” ][flexi-form-tag type=”file” title=”Select file” required=”true”][flexi-form-tag type=”submit” name=”submit” value=”Submit Now”] [/flexi-form]
Tagged: Alternative, Alternative Music, music, music blog, NEWS, Quoteworthy, Rock