Funny how people’s goals change. When he was a young rock ‘n’ roll fan, Flea, the bassist and co-founder of Red Hot Chili Peppers, hoped his band would one day be able to headline at Perkins Palace.

The now-closed Southern California venue had a capacity of maybe 2,000.

“I thought, if we could play Perkins Palace, that would be the greatest thing in my life,” Flea, 33, says by phone from Chicago. “If you can play Perkins Palace, you can make enough money to pay the rent and to eat. You didn’t have to have another job. You’re doing real good.”

He and the Peppers have achieved somewhat more than that. On Monday, they’ll be headlining Market Square Arena, part of a tour in which they’re playing their chaotic alternative funk-punk rock in basketball arenas.

The Peppers built to this point over 13 sometimes-rocky years during which they lost a founding member (guitarist Hillel Slovak) to a heroin overdose, conquered their own drug abuse, endured several lineup changes and, basically, just beaten the odds.

Now, with new guitarist Dave Navarro (formerly of Jane’s Addiction) and a disc, One Hot Minute, that peaked at No. 4 on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart, the band appears to have everything together.

They still perform with the same out-of-control dynamism that seems to run on an overload of nervous energy. “If I didn’t feel like this was the most smoking band in the world, I wouldn’t be out here playing arenas,” Flea says.

“We’re entertainers and we believe in being entertainers and giving entertaining shows – a sonic, audio entertainment as well as a visual entertainment, trying to be as theatrical and exciting as we can.”

But off stage, the Peppers – Flea, Navarro, singer Anthony Kiedis and drummer Chad Smith – are calmer, saner, more thoughtful. (They’ll have a meditation room backstage.)

On the phone, Flea rarely sound like the guy who prowls arena stages in his underwear, screams profanity and radiates excitement. Most of the time he comes across like a New Age philosopher.

Consider his pronouncements about:

The Peppers’ song Pea: “I think it was mostly inspired by being in nature and by having a feeling of getting away from being in the big city, where I feel like I’m so important. I’m dealing with all these things that are really insignificant, like money and power and property and all these material things. These things are all so meaningless, but you feel like you’re important because you’re controlling them.

“When I get out into nature, I start becoming very small because I’m dealing with things that are actually very meaningful, like sky and rocks and dirt and ocean and wildlife. That’s what it’s really all about. That’s what the beauty of living is. We are all insignificant little specks of s – – -. It’s an intense spiritual realization. That’s beautiful to me.”

God, religion and their song Shallow Be Thy Game: “The idea of spirituality and God, which is a beautiful thing and I’m very much into, is one thing. But the idea of organized religion as a controlling thing, which has been used for thousands of years to keep people down and to keep people poor and to keep people ignorant and to keep people unhappy while the rich get richer and the fat get fatter, is another issue.”

Being the father of a 7-year-old girl: “To be a good father is to instill in our children a sense of self-esteem and give them lots of love and strength so they can love themselves and take care of themselves and not be victim to put themselves in situations where they might be treated less than respectfully.”

His past drug use: “Everything that every person has done is something they have to be happy about because it’s the truth. People should always be happy about the truth, whether the truth is something you need to learn from, to realize something you need not to do again and realize that there’s a better way, or realize that that was the excellent way and it’s something you want to keep doing and improve on. But I think the truth is always good.”

The truth about the Peppers is that they’ve mellowed musically. Though their songs still contain a liberal dose of Flea-led funk grooves, softer songs like the No. 2 hit Under the Bridge (from their 1991 breakthrough album, BloodSugarSexMagik) and the current single, Aeroplane, brought the band a much wider following.

They’re a long way from Perkins Palace – and an even greater distance from Flea‘s initial aspiration to be a classical trumpet player. He picked up the bass as a teen-ager, when his friend and Peppers co-founder Hillel Slovak told him “we have a bass player in my band and we don’t like him. Maybe you should learn how to play the bass.”

“And I said, `OK, I’ll give it a whirl,” Flea recalls.

He developed his style – creating, and then playing off, deep, syncopated grooves, “by playing and listening to music that I like and listening to a wide variety of different music and trying to understand different feelings of music and lots of different types of music.”

“And just by being myself and not trying to be anyone else. And by really loving it, mostly. Loving the way it feels when my fingers hit the strings, loving the way it feels when I get inside someone’s kick drum.”

The audience, in turn, gets an adrenalin rush. On this tour, the Peppers have “as much general admission space as we can at every gig” for a mosh pit. The Market Square Arena floor won’t have any seating for Monday’s show, though the floor will be regulated to prevent overcrowding.

As far as Flea‘s concerned, “The wilder it is, the better – as long as people don’t try to hurt each other.”