We returned to take the risks
Californians double their bet. While caring for their babies, they still have the time to release a double album, themed with love and mystical raptures. This is a face-to-face interview with the guitarist John Frusciante, about his new life, how his girlfriend saved him and we’re also remembering the show at River [Plata] in 2002.
Californians redouble the bet. While caring for their babies, they have themes of love and mystical raptures, released a double album. In a face to face interview, guitarist John Frusciante talks about his new life and how he saved his girlfriend. And remember the show that gave River in 2002.
The Chateau Marmont Hotel, in the famous Sunset Strip, used to be the place where the rock musicians lost control. There, Anthony, Flea, Chad and John talk about the story of the new album, wich is going to be released on May 9th. Stadium Arcadium has 28 songs, wich, they insure, are the best of their career. A lot of them, talk about love: It’s just that Flea and Chad are enjoying their babies and Anthony wrote a song to his girlfriend, a 18 year old model.
John can’t stop talking about his significant other, the singer Emily Kokal (who has just recorded with Tricky). He says she was who got him out of the crisis. Laying in the bed with melancholic air, he receives us, and surprisingly he starts to talk without stop, sometimes centered in what he’s saying, and sometimes taking a shortcut through internal labyrinths, that only he knows.
You are going to start a new tour. Are you nervous? Do you think that something like what happened in 1992 could happen again, when you left the band?
“Left the band is not a possibility. I’m not going to renounce. That was different, I was looking forward to leave since we finished the recording process of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and I’ll end leaving nine months later while we were travelling in Japan. But by then, I wanted really to leave. That’s anything that motivates me now. I’d like maybe to take a rest but not to leave the band. No way”.
There’re a lot of guitar solos on the album. Wasn’t it old-fashioned?
“I wish there’re more people playing solos. With Omar RodrÃguez (The Mars Volta guitarist and his best friend) we’re trying to play solos and to recover part of the spirit of guys like Carlos Santana or Jimi Hendrix. Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton played solos, and people went to see them doing it. It was part of the show. Let’s take risks again! Don’t be afraid to show what we can do! We can learn of the past. For me, guitar has never progressed since Jimmy Page played it”.
Is electronic leaving guitarist without work?
“I’ve been working in the sound of my guitar, creating effects with a synthesizer like Omar RodrÃguez, who has like a thousand of effects in his pedal. We are both trying to create textures with sound. I love the rhytmical expression of Hip-Hop so I’ve been trying to apply it with rock. Not everything have to be perfect like the sound that those guys get with their computers. I say: Leave the computer and look what you can do yourself. In the 60’s the Rolling Stones’ albums had every kind of percussions, guitars and drums, and they sounded good. I think good music isn’t reaching the people, and the bad pop is”.
Green Day have been very successful, speaking badly of Bush. Why The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ songs don’t talk about politics?
“I’m not interested in politics. Anthony and Flea are, but they don’t want their political ideas to be part of the music we do. It’s fine that there’re people worried about what’s happening around but it doesn’t work for me. When people come and ask me about how we do to be so well with the time I can say that my method is, like when I was recording Californication, watch films from the 40’s, the same ones that Hendrix and Lennon had seen. I don’t watch TV, I don’t listen to the radio. If I’d always listen the news I’d be like the people who do it”.
Anthony Kiedis has written his autobiography, will you write yours?
“I write a lot, I have my things in the computer, maybe in five years I’ll dedicate it more time…But by now I’m still in the process to understand what my true thoughts are. I don’t think I’m going to write any autobiography, except if I get some internal clarity. Some incredible things had happened to me but I can’t remember them sufficiently clearly to write it. Not yet. Every day I spend an hour meditating and always, when I read something I’ve written I try to clarify my thoughts”.
Frusciante says that besides play songs and sing them, writing is another thing he loves. He even has already 17 songs for his new solo album, the most personal that he has ever written and he’s sure he’ll be recording it in a year. “Sometimes I write to hide myself. I think it’s the first time I’ve tried to break the internal walls. If you’re my friend I want to show you how I am really. It hasn’t always been like that with me”. His assistant interrupts to inform that the interview has finished but he doesn’t get to take him out of his thoughts. “I learnt so much from my girlfriend, she’s teaching me how to have, for first time in my life, a good relationship with a woman. She has such a good effect in my music…” he gets to add.
