Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea made quite an entrance on The Tonight Show on Monday night (March 23) when the 63-year-old punk funk veteran rocker executed a flawless handstand as host Jimmy Fallon looked on in awe. The indefatigable musician was on hand to plug his upcoming debut solo album, Honora, which is due out on Friday (March 27).

Before all that, though, Fallon couldn’t help noticing that Flea had a white bandage on his forehead and when asked about it the bass thumper joked that it was the result of a very serious incident. “A few days ago I was walking down the street and I see this gang of thugs walking towards me,” Flea said of what sounded like a fictitious group of leather jacket-wearing toughs marauding through the neighborhood mugging old ladies. “They’re carrying bats, knives, chains,” Flea fantasized. “They looked like the bad buys in Robo Cop,” he added, noting that he’s trained in the rare martial arts method “Wang Chung” his entire life, so he was ready for battle.

After charging the bad guys and pulling off a series of acrobatic high kicks and flips, Flea said he subdued the hooligans and had just a “little nick” on his head for his efforts.

After accepting congratulatory applause from Fallon and the studio audience, Flea quickly fessed up, saying he was injured in a Spinal Tap-esque “bizarre peeing accident.”

What he ended up revealing is that while appearing on Apple Music recently to promote the album he was spinning one of his favorite songs, a Lee Morgan track called “Stopstart.” “There were three minutes left in the song and I said, ‘I got to pee,’ so I have three minutes before I introduce the next tune,” he told Fallon. So, he jumped up, ran down the hallway to do his business and as he sprinted back while wearing his reading glasses things went wobbly.

“I yell something to someone, running full sprint down the hallway and bam! Smack into a glass door, flat on my back, blood spurting out of my head,” Flea explained, adding that he then realized he needed a good cover story. “I’m laying there going, ‘Oh man, I’ve got to do the Fallon show in a few days … I’ll tell him I got into a fight.”

Getting real, Flea reminisced about learning to play trumpet as a kid and meeting one of his heroes, trumpet legend Dizzy Gillespie, and how he would pick the instrument up every once in a while, and then going back to it a few years ago determined to practice every day in preparation for the album’s recording. “It was just the process, the learning process,” he said of getting back to the trumpet. “And I’m so happy that I had the opportunity to do it.”

Flea then took to the stage to play with an all-star band featuring Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker, André 3000 collaborator drummer Deantoni Parks, bassist Anna Butterss (Phoebe Bridgers, Jenny Lewis), his LP’s producer, multi-instrumentalist Josh Johnson and a full string section. He started by plucking the song’s melody out on his bass before picking up the trumpet to add some flavor and going on a mellow walk with Parker as the two men traded off playing the song’s yearning refrain on their instruments.

The moving instrumental version of the lead single from the enigmatic Ocean’s 2012 debut solo album, Channel Orange, was transformed in Flea’s hands into what sounded like a lost relic from the 1940s jazz age, performed with a style and grace that breathed new life into the track.

To date, Flea has dropped the free jazz/spoken word jam “A Plea” and the thrumming, tropical “Traffic Light” featuring vocals from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke from the album that features six original songs alongside cover of tracks by Jimmy Webb (“Wichita Lineman”), P-Funk’s George Clinton and Eddie Hazel (“Maggot Brain”), Ocean and Ann Ronnell (“Willow Weep For Me”).

Watch Flea on The Tonight Show below.