Red Hot Chili Peppers Overcame Broken Arm To Create New Album

(Radio.com) In 2011, the odds of recording a great Red Hot Chili Peppers album were stacked against the band: Flea was recovering from a 2010 snowboarding accident which shattered his arm in five places.

"We were jetting down the mountain, going, like, 50 miles an hour, when I just wiped out," he told Rolling Stone. "It was like, bam. My arm started swelling up right away. I broke my arm in five places. Big pieces of bone were shorn off."

The twist of fate effectively required him to relearn how to play bass. "I went to play one note and a bunch of pain shot up my arm," he said. "I tried to play the simplest things and my hand just wouldn't do it. It felt like I let everyone down, because we couldn't work on the record."

While Flea's bad break didn't affect the band's creative shift on The Getaway. That came after the Chili Peppers realized their writing process was becoming formulaic. "We were starting to do the same things we've always done," Flea said. "I knew what we were gonna do before we even did it." Read more here.

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Copyright Radio.com/CBS Local - Excerpted here with permission.

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