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Chili Peppers on a red hot streak – Guitarist’s return brings band harmony

The first time the Red Hot Chili Peppers hit it big, John Frusciante enjoyed it so much he quit the band. The whirlwhind that surrounded “‘BloodSugarSexMagik,” the pioneer rap-rock-funk fusion band’s triple platinum 1991 breakthrough, was too much for the guitarist. He quit in the middle of a tour and subsequently fought a severe drug addiction.

With the success of 1999’s “Californication,” the first album with Frusciante back in the band, the clean and sober Pepper has decided to stick around for a while. “I suppose at that time, as we were getting more and more popular, I didn’t really believe it was because of our music,” says Frusciante, sitting on a couch backstage at the Cumberland County Civic Arena before a recent Chili Peppers show in Portland, Maine. The band’s tour, with the Foo Fighters, comes to the Tweeter Center this Sunday.

“I felt like we had become this ‘cool thing’ and that people were just finding out about it,” says Frusciante, who feared the group was getting lumped in with the trendy grunge scene. “I felt like it was a small percentage that were really there for the music. I guess I was wrong because this many years later, people are still into us, and it is because of the music and that we stick out from other groups.”

Approximately 3 million people are still into the L.A.-based group, who’ve weathered personnel changes, drug addiction and the death of founding guitarist Hillel Slovak to see “Californication,” the best record of the quartet’s career, spawn three cross-format hits: “Scar Tissue,” “The Other Side” and “Californication.’

All members with previous drug problems – Frusciante and lead singer Anthony Kiedis – have cleaned up and the group is getting along famously.

“We’ve all gotten along so much better than we ever possibly could have imagined when I was in the band before,” says Frusciante. “Because before it was always that (bassist) Flea and Anthony were at odds with each other and I was always friends with one of them. It couldn’t just be the three of us all being friends equally, which is what it is now.”

Throw in genial, rock solid drummer Chad Smith and they’re a happy group of funkateers. “It’s that way now because we all appreciate each other more,” says Frusciante. “In the past we were all so busy developing our individual styles that, by the time we were touring for ‘Blood Sugar,’ we were all caught up in our own worlds. The fact that we had such chemistry as a band was something we all just took for granted.”

Although he was conflicted about rock stardom, Frusciante missed his band and what it allowed him to do musically. “I realized while I wasn’t in the band that I had this whole style of guitar playing that was now dead. Without these people to play with I had no place to play this style I had worked so hard to develop.”

Frusciante wrote dozens of songs and released a couple of solo albums in the years that the Chili Peppers worked with guitarists Arik Marshall, now with Macy Gray, and Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction. Frusciante enjoyed his solo work but he and his bandmates felt something was missing.

“I think the four of us were born to play music together, so we just do it well,” he said. “And every day I’m trying to think of new ways to blend the different styles of music I think are cool.”

Which doesn’t include some current chartmakers. “You see a lot of these groups who are what they are because they want to be popular,” says Frusciante without naming names. “The same way I try to blend different styles of music, I think a lot of people try to weave different cultures together in sort of fads and gimmicks and stuff. To me I just really love music.’

That love is a primal thing for the sweet-natured musician who doesn’t think too hard about Kiedis’ lyrics, which range from dopily raunchy to poignantly observant. “I’m not really someone who tries to take something poetic and turn it into a literal meaning,” he says. To him the word “Californication” “is just a feeling.”

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