Profile: John Frusciante

When John Frusciante left the Red Hot Chili Peppers just after the gigantic success of 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik, he disappointed a lot of guitarheads. While his playing on the previous Peppers’ Warner Bros. LP, Mother’s Milk, was frenetic, inspired funk-metal fare, it was on BSSM that Frusciante stumbled onto a thrilling alchemy. Blending acid-rock, soul-funk, early art-rock, and blues styles with a raw, unprocessed Strat-and-Marshall tone, he hit on an explosive formula which has yet to be duplicated.

Frusciante’s reputation for eccentricity was already growing when the band made their odd, stilted appearance on Saturday Night Live, shortly before his resignation. (Frusciante still jams with bassist Flea and Porno For Pyros drummer Stephen Perkins in a loose improv trio called the Three Amoebas.) His new dope-soaked American album, simply called John Frusciante, will do little to mar that reputation. A collection of extremely strange, direct-to-tape 4-track pieces and songs with titles like “Your Pussy Is Glued To A Building,” the album is best taken in the same spirit as surrealistic, shambly sets like Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, Marc Bolan’s A Beard Of Stars, and the cult classic Oar by estranged Moby Grape guitarist Alexander “Skip” Spence. With only his voice (and, on a few cuts, that of late pal River Phoenix), Fender Jaguars and Strats, an ancient no-name acoustic, some fuzz pedals, and tape manipulation, Frusciante has created something truly bizarre. Here he explains leaving the Peppers, tapping the subconscious, and the method to his madness.

A Soldier For The Air

Frusciante: I recorded the album partly just to have fun, smoke pot, and trip my head out. But I was also doing it for the same reason I’ve always recorded and written music, to create the feelings and sounds that I wish existed on a CD. There was no intent for anybody to ever hear it. But a lot of friends of mine that I respect artistically begged me to put it out – people like Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers, Johnny Depp, Perry Farrell, Flea, and River Phoenix. They thought there was no good music anymore, and that I was obligated to put it out. They really begged me in an emotional way, so I eventually decided to do it.

But I never do something for any other purpose than to be a soldier for the air that’s right there. When we were making Blood Sugar, the thought never even crossed my mind that this was something that people were going to buy all around the world. I said to Flea, “People are going to buy this and take it home and listen to our music that we recorded over at the house?” And he goes, “Yeah.” And I go, “All over the country?” And he goes, “All over the world.” That brought me to a point of freedom that’s sideways of all that. I was just closing my eyes and swirling around, like ten thoughts at once, and going places with no conscious thoughts at all.

Usually Just An Eighth-Note“Usually Just A T-Shirt,” which is what I call the second side, was an improv on acoustic guitar, and I just did a backwards solo over the whole thing. That might be the first really long backwards solo, and it has a right to be long because it goes somewhere, and it’s like a story. Emotionally, it has lots of dynamics. Usually backwards solos can’t help but be kind of nowhere-ish – people are just doodling around. Even the really good ones don’t really go from one place to another, and that one does. I could hear how it would sound forwards when I was doing it backwards.

I hired a guy, paid him like $20, 000, and together we transcribed “Usually Just A T-Shirt” for string quartet. It was difficult for him; I had to correct every page he did. I hadn’t done transcribing in a while, but it all came back to me right away, surprisingly. The guy would write three pages of 4/4, 5/8, 7/16, 5/4. He would write all these time signatures, and I’m going, “No, that’s just 4/4, man,” and he’d go, “No, there’s no way that could be 4/4.” He didn’t believe that if you counted “1,” then wait like 30 seconds, “2,” then wait 30 secs, “3”… you know, like, if you counted at a really slow pace it ends up on 4, which means that you can write every measure in 4/4, going across the time signatures, which are really just accents. He just tripped out. There were a bunch of things that he didn’t think were possible that cosmically ended up that way. It’s really trippy-looky on paper.

Will you get to hear it performed?
Not unless I can find a string quartet that understands why Ringo Starr is such a great drummer, can play Stravinsky, and also smokes pot. I was going to have the Kronos Quartet do it, but they play “Purple Haze” like a fucking marching band on speed. Smoking pot and laying back is all part of it. Smoking pot creates creative flow. It gets you in contact with parts of your subconscious that there’s no way you could get in contact with in any other way. I personally thank pot for the best transformation that anything’s ever made to my playing. When I became a pothead I improved more than the whole time I’d been playing.

Wouldn’t Ya Like To Be A Pepper Too?
I spent a long time in the Peppers not liking anything about it except for playing with Flea. Staring at his eyes and staring at my amp – those were the only good times. Eventually I quit. Right after we recorded the album is when I first wanted to quit, and that was because I saw the direction we were going to go in career-wise, and I knew I didn’t like that. At the last Peppers show with Hillel Slovak that I saw, my girlfriend at the time asked me, “Would you still like the Chili Peppers if they were so popular they played at the [20, 000-seat Inglewood] Forum?” I said, “No, but they would never play at the Forum, because that would go against the whole reason that I come to every show and jump all over the place and feel like one in the band. I can’t imagine that being gone.” In those days, to be at one of their shows was one of the heavier vibes experienceable on the earth. It was incredible. It was so magical, and you really felt like part of the band, even though you were in the audience.

Nowadays the audience like singing along with the slow songs, because it’s the only fucking thing they can be part of. They’re all stuck in seats, watching these guys jump around like wild maniacs. I saw that we were going to start doing what I thought the band wasn’t even capable of. That wasn’t the only reason, but that vibe had made its mark in many other areas of the organization, and that’s what I really don’t like. I don’t have a problem with being a rock star, because of people like Bowie or Hendrix. But I do have a problem with the shitty sort of rock star, like people treating Bowie like he’s Nikki Sixx, or people trying to turn Bowie into Sixx or expecting of Bowie what you do of Sixx. That’s the aspect of rock stars that I think is bad. When I was in the band I was like, “I’m not a rock star! I’m nothing! I hate the whole audience! They’re a bunch of fucking idiots, and I don’t give a fuck about them!”

Since then I’ve been able to see what was actually going on. Even though the audiences may seem in poor taste sometimes, they’re really in a horrible position in America, because music is the only affection that kids get that’s real. If you make good music, get it to as many of them as you can, because they really need it whether they know it or not. Their parents or their friends or their schools don’t give them any affection at all, so I feel proud to do that for them, period.

—James Rotondi

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