“I wrote Flea a fan letter, and I was like, ‘I want to do what you're doing. Do you have any advice?’ He wrote me back – it's unbelievable”: Vulfpeck’s Joe Dart on the priceless bass advice he got from Flea as a teenager

Left-Joe Dart of the band Vulfpeck performs onstage during Outside Lands Festival at Golden Gate Park on August 5, 2016 in San Francisco, California; Right–Flea performs during Soundcheck when Michael Dorf presents the 20th Annual Charity Concert, "People Have The Power - A Celebration Of Patti Smith" show at Carnegie Hall on March 26, 2025 in New York City.

For Vulfpeck's Joe Dart, Flea was (and still is), undisputedly, his bass hero. “When I think of bass vocabulary, for me, when I was in my teens, I was listening to a lot of Flea,” Dart divulges on Scott's Bass Lessons.

“It's him taking from Parliament-Funkadelic, so it'd be a lot of Bootsy [Collins] in there, and then a lot of horn players [like] Mayceo [Parker], Fred Wesley... My hero, Flea, was actually copying a lot of stuff from bass players that I wasn't hip to because they weren't as visible as he was. Flea was such a visible bass player, and he was the guy.”