Flea

Michael Peter Balzary was born on the sixteenth of October 1962, in Melbourne, Australia. When he was four, his parents divorced and Michael, his sister Karen and his mother Patricia headed for New York; they didn't stay long and soon ended up in L.A. (in 1972), where his step-father, a jazz musician named Walter Urban Jr., intended to start a career. Flea would often sit in on weekly jam sessions with his stepfather and the constant flow of musicians who trucked through. High school was not always an easy road for young Michael. He was a misfit because of his unusual musical taste. While most of the kids were into disco and dance music, Flea preferred jazz artists like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Flea's first musical instrument was the drums, but soon he also began playing the trumpet. After school he would race home to listen to his Gillespie records and play along with his idol. He counts as his greatest childhood memory the time his mother got him back-stage to meet Gillespie