Red Hot Once Again!
Last modified: 23:06:16 CET on 15 Jan, 2010 |
September 1999, Guitar One (USA)
Many thanks to Lauren Tobia, for typing it out.
Click the thumbnail for scans.
“Every time you put on a record or a CD,” guitarist John Frusciante explains, “it’s a dimension in time; it’s a piece of time that’s suddenly moved from one dimension to another. A moment in 1927, or a series of moment that accumulated into being one song in 1967, suddenly appears again in 1999 because I press a button. That’s like dying and waking up in another world.”
Truth be told, Frusciante, who first joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers back in 1988, only to leave the band mid-tour in 1992, did almost die, but he woke up in this world to return to the Pepper fold with a vengeance. What many regard as the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “classic lineup”- Anthony Kiedis (vocals), Flea (bass), Chad Smith (drums), and John Frusciante (guitar)- spent the summer of ’98 jamming in Flea’s garage, and the rest of the fall and winter writing and recording Californication: an album unmistakably akin to the band’s 1991 breakthrough, BloodSugarSexMagik.
If Pepper fans were surprised to hear that John Frusciante would once again be playing alongside Flea and company, they couldn’t have been any more surprised than the guitarist himself, who just a few short years ago would’ve been the last to predict such news. Back in May 1992, in the middle of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ tour of Japan, and with a stint on Lollapalooza II lurking on the horizon, John Frusciante suddenly decided it was time to pack up and go home. And for much of the next seven years, his Los Angeles home is where he would stay. The Peppers went through a string of replacements in his stead- Zander Schloss, Arik Marshall, and Jesse Tobias- before finally settling on the ethereal guitar stylings of former Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro to propel their successful follow-up, One Hot Minute.
Frusciante, meanwhile, returned to focusing on his primary passion- continuing his quest to capture the “colors” that swirled in his mind and wrench them from his massive collection of vintage guitars. For a while, he enjoyed a period of self-inflicted isolation, intense introspection, and fertile creativity- immortalized on a pair of inspired-yet-haunting solo discs- but eventually a bout with depression took hold that literally prevented him from engaging in the very thing he enjoyed the most: playing guitar. John Frusciante took the road less traveled and soon found himself in a downward spiral of drug addiction that eventually took a near-fatal toll- ironically, almost facing the same fate as the very guitarist he’d replaced back in 1988, the late Hillel Slovak. In the end, he lost almost everything.
Today, with his demons at bay and a new Chili Peppers album hitting the streets, a rehabilitated and reinvigorated John Frusciante is more focused and more productive on his instrument than ever. Fresh from an afternoon yoga class, between rehearsals with his Red Hot buddies for the band’s upcoming tour (which features a stint at Woodstock), John hung out with Guitar One to give us his perspective on where he’s been, where he is now, and where he sees himself and the band going.
Who first approached you with the idea of replacing Dave Navarro-or, in effect, having you replace your own replacement?
Flea and I were just hanging out at my house for a while listening to records, and at one point he asked me how I’d feel about being in the Chili Peppers again. We started talking about it, and we both got excited. A couple of weeks later, we started playing in his garage, and it went really well right away. I hadn’t been friends with Anthony very much over the last seven years, but when I saw him a few times during the few months before I joined the band, I felt like, “This is a person I can definitely be good friends with.” I never felt so comfortable around him before- and we’ve ended up being really good friends; now he’s one of my favorite people in the world. And that was the only way Flea would’ve wanted me to be in the band: if we were all gonna get along like that, not if Anthony and I were gonna be hating each other. Flea and I had been friends the whole time, but our different lifestyles stopped us from being able to keep our musical relationship as strong as both of us would’ve liked it to be. It made him really sad to be around me a lot of the time.
After you left the Chili Peppers, you played with Flea in something called Three Amoebas, didn’t you?
That was just me and Flea jamming with people; me and him and Stephen Perkins [drummer, Jane’s Addiction] used to jam a lot. We decided to call ourselves “Three Amoebas” as a thing to write down on the tapes of the jams that we would record.
Ever plan on doing anything with those recordings?
We wanted to, but Warner Bros. didn’t want to release them. I guess I can understand why. I mean, they’re all like half-hour long jams without stopping and we don’t want to edit them up. It’s really great playing, but it’s not something that a big label would want to release.
Do you have any opinion of the work Dave Navarro did on One Hot Minute while you were away?
No. I don’t have an opinion of it. I’ve never heard it.
Aren’t you going to have to learn some songs from One Hot Minute to play on your upcoming tour?
No. We’re not gonna play anything off One Hot Minute, and probably not even Mother’s Milk [Frusciante’s first album with the Chili Peppers]. We’ll play a few songs from some of the earlier albums-stuff Hillel played on that’s in the same vibe as what we’re doing now- and some songs from the first demo the way Hillel played them, not Jack Sherman [guitarist who recorded on the band’s self-titled debut].
You first joined the Peppers back in 1988 at age 18 and immediately became an international rock star. What was that experience like?
It was fun. We had a good time. We were at a real cool kind of level of popularity- and I was a little kid, you know? Basically, we had fun with each other and just tripped out.
