John Frusciante

John Frusciante is undeniably a man with a tremendous amount of passion. Be it with the Red Hot Chili Peppers or in his solo career, his appetite for music and the things he derives from it seems to transcend notes and songs, stretching to an almost obsessive degree of fascination with music and sound. In fact, this interview began late, which John explained by saying, “I need people to call me, I never remember to call anyone – otherwise I’ll just sit in my house and listen to music all day.” His continuing state of wonderment regarding music is so pure and almost childlike that it’s wonderfully refreshing.

Although best known for his work with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Frusciante has managed to create a name for himself as a respected solo artist, creating music that is miles away from anything on a Chili Peppers record. His first two solo records, “Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt” and “Smile From the Streets You Hold” have become cult favorites due to the raw nature of the recordings, during which Frusciante was in the midst of his strangely fascinating drug addiction. The bare, pained sounds of the records appealed to many who relished in the ‘falling apart’ aspect of the material, which came across to many as the sounds of a man dying.

If those two records were the sound of a man dying, everything he has released since he has cleaned up sounds like a man living – with a stronger voice and an emphasis on more cohesive songs, Frusciante returned with the excellent “To Record Only Water for Ten Days,” followed by “Shadows Collide With People.”

Now, it seems that Frusciante can’t record fast enough. He announced after “Shadows…” that he would be releasing six more records by the end of 2004 (through the Record Collection label), quite a feat by any standards. The first record in the series, “The Will to Death,” (recorded in five days) showcases Frusciante’s ability to slow things down and create a sort of mellow, brooding atmosphere without making it overly depressing, even when a good amount of the songs are about death.

In part one of the interview, Frusciante discusses why he chose to release such a volume of material, his interest in death, and how he was inspired to use a synthesizer by the Velvet Underground, who never used one.

This project you’re undertaking is a pretty ambitious one – what was the motivation to put out so much music in such a short time?
Well, I don’t see it as a project. It started out when I went to test out a studio to test out the room, and I had just finished a record – “Shadows Collide With People” – which I think took a total of a couple of months to record and mix, which I consider to be a really endlessly long time. I was just testing out the studio, and I went in there with my friend Carla, and I taught her these songs and recorded them and did all my overdubs and all my singing and everything in one day. The idea when I went into the studio that day was to leave mistakes, don’t worry if it speeds up a little or slows down a little or things like that, but once I’d actually listened to the final thing at the end of the day, it sounded incredible. It sounded perfect, and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it.

That was when I realized that I could record really fast. I had gotten into this habit of doing things the way people do them nowadays, because when you work with engineers and producers of today, they are used to doing things a certain way and they waste a lot of time. When I actually took the attitude of not giving a fuck, I ended up making really good music in the course of a day, so I went to my friend Josh [Klinghoffer] and said that I think we could record a lot quicker than we thought we could, because we didn’t want to go through that whole stressful thing of making a two month record. It sucks making a record like that, it’s a struggle. We went into the studio one day – we recorded three songs in two days – and that was how “The Will to Death” album started. Josh didn’t believe that we would be able to do it, but we were. He did his drums all in one take, the vocals were done in one take, and the things we spent the most time with were experimenting with the synthesizer or treating the instruments. We probably spent more time doing that than anything else, just because with that there’s always a lot of rewinding the tape and getting things just right, so it just rolled from there.

From there on, once we realized how quickly we could do it, we booked studio time – I have about seventy songs that I’ve written in the last three years that I have to chose from, so whenever I undertake the project of making a record, I just take a look at my songs and see which ones fit together in a way that I like, and we just made a record every month, as well as putting on little experimental shows around town. Now, going back into the Chili Peppers, I’ll definitely continue doing my recordings, because I can get a lot done on a weekend. Even if I’m working with the Chili Peppers all week, if Josh and I go into a studio for two days, we can record four songs. I don’t look at these albums – even though they’re coming out as a series – I just take them album by album, I just feel like I might as well release them as quickly as I recorded them, because that, to me, is the honest way of doing it. I don’t care if it’s worse business-wise or whatever. The important thing for me is that my fans are able to grow with me the way that I have been growing and they’re able to get a sense of the way that I’m growing. It’s a lot of fun making music, I hope to keep doing it.

You mentioned you draw your songs from a collection of songs you already have done – so you don’t write them for specific albums?
Well, a lot of the time, the songs I’m most excited about doing are the new ones. For example, on “The Will to Death” album, the song “The Will to Death” was a brand new songs, the song “The Days Have Turned” was a brand new song, the song “An Exercise” was a brand new song. A lot of the time, for me, the brand new songs are very alive at that point. Sometimes a songwriter finds that after a certain amount of time, a song kind of dies, even if it’s a very good song. If you haven’t recorded it – say if you wrote a song ten years ago or something – that song has a lifespan of its own. For me, when a song is first born is when it’s really exciting. Usually, whatever album I’m working on – whatever the best songs are I’ve written most recently – assuming that they fit in with the theme of the album – I’m always going to put those on there. In some cases, some of these albums that I’ve made recently have more new songs than old songs, even though the original intention of that six month break was to record as many of my songs as I had backlogged as possible.

But a lot of the time, the albums will have more new songs than old songs. I have chipped away at that list of seventy songs quite a bit. I’ve recorded a lot of them already and there are certain songs that I realize aren’t as good as others for whatever reason, so those go out of the picture. I definitely have enough songs right now to make – the next album that I plan on recording is, I think, song-wise, may be the best one in terms of the songs, and I have the cover all ready. [laughs] But I probably have enough songs for another couple albums. And then I have a progressive rock EP that I’d like to make at some point, but Josh can’t play drums on that one because it’s too complicated, and he’s not really a big progressive rock fan, anyways. I might use Jon Theodore from The Mars Volta.

In your solo recordings, there’s a certain simplicity that shines through – a very pure earnestness that comes across. Is there anything you have to do to achieve that or is that just how it comes out?
I think that’s just the type of person I am. It’s not something I consciously put into the music, I think that’s just who I am.

Death is a subject that comes up on the record a lot – were you in a period during the recording of the record where you were particularly fascinated with it?
I like death a lot. It comes up a lot, it’s always been in my songs, especially in the last few years, since I’ve really come to terms with all the confusing thoughts that I’ve had my whole life about the subject. And through the five years that I wasn’t a part of the world, I resolved a lot of my thoughts on the subject, and I saw a lot of things really clearly – clearly enough where for me, there is no doubt about that subject and I have no questions about that subject. A lot of people sit around and think ‘I wonder what happens after I die’ or ‘I wonder if there is a heaven’ or something, or ‘I wonder, do we live on,’ questions like that. I don’t think about any questions like that, everything is straight in my head. I write songs because that’s the only way I can express what I’ve learned. I can’t express it by talking about it in an interview or writing a book about it, at least not while I’m alive, so for me, the best way for me to get it across to people is to write songs which, in a lot of ways, are abstract, but to me, that’s…in a lot of ways, death is very abstract. The way our brains work on earth, death is a really…compared to the equivalent of our brains after we die is very abstract, and there’s a lot of abstractness to get used to.

For people who pay attention to the lyrics of people like Captain Beefheart and Syd Barrett, people like that have a good head start on death. I suppose, in my lyrics, it’s a combination of being inspired by those abstractly-oriented lyricists that, to me, seem like the most meaningful words that anyone has put to music. It’s a combination between that and to me, what are very concrete things that I’ve seen for myself about that subject. But it’s important to understand that when I’m talking about death, I’m not talking about ceasing to exist or something, that’s very uninteresting to me. If that was my philosophy, I definitely wouldn’t think it was important enough to put it into songs. For me, death is a new way of seeing things, and for me death is a new reality. For me, there is an endless amount of things I could write about that. I will write songs about death all the way up until I die or as long as I’m writing songs. To me, the songs that I write about that definitely deal with the infinite in that songs that tell stories don’t.

In the release you sent out with the record and in a note that’s up on your website, you mention the albums you were listening to at the time of “The Will to Death.” Several of the recordings are tied into the whole late-60s, early 70s proto-punk scene – does that influence show up on the record?
When you say ‘proto-punk,’ what are you talking about?

The roots of punk – you have listed some recordings by Nico, the Velvet Underground, John Cale, people that were in the scene attributed with birthing punk.
Yeah. For one thing, while we’re on the subject, those people wrote a lot of death-oriented songs, Lou Reed and Nico especially wrote a lot of death-oriented music and dark-oriented music that is very vibrant and fulfilling, and it’s not about something ending, it’s about another kind of way of living that has nothing to do with our reality. I’m always inspired by just the feeling of those recordings. I think I listen to so much music that I don’t think anything particularly sounds like anything else, but the Velvet Underground has been very important to all these records. I guess at the time of “The Will to Death,” the third Velvet Underground album was really inspirational to me, and I think if you listen to the song “The Will to Death” and you listen to the third Velvet Underground record, I think it’s pretty clear that it’s very influenced by it. At the same time, I think “The Will to Death” sounds like me, it doesn’t sound like the Velvet Underground, but that’s definitely the reference point.

The album that’s coming out in October is very influenced by the “White Light/White Heat” album. There’s a lot of distortion on everything – a lot of distortion on the drums, a lot of incorrect recording where nothing was isolated – which is the way they recorded that album – where they had everyone playing loud, blasting all at once in one room with lots of mics left open and things like that. That was the direction we went with that album, which is called “Emptiness.” I think at different times, I focus on a different aspect of the Velvet Underground. I think that on “The Will to Death,” I was just listening to the beautiful things that can happen with things that are very soft and various elements…that’s why I didn’t really understand when you said ‘proto-punk,’ because I don’t see the Velvet Underground as proto-punk at all. “Lonesome Cowboy Bill,” does that sound like proto-punk? “Candy Says,” does that sound like proto-punk? “Pale Blue Eyes,” is that proto-punk?

Even with “White Light/White Heat” which is the one that is the most, what you would call ‘punk-oriented,’ it still doesn’t really remind me of punk. In a lot of ways, they were free in the sort of ways that punk groups were free, in a way that other people weren’t in the sixties, and there was a certain angry energy there and a kind of street energy there, and it has those certain philosophical similarities to punk, or maybe journalistic similarities to punk, but for me, I focus on real miniscule aspects of the Velvet Underground and blow them up in my head, so something like the song “The Will to Death” is inspired in that it’s about a very heavy subject matter but it’s a very soft song, and that’s the way the third Velvet Underground record – at least the stuff that sticks out in ones mind about that record – is.

I keep things in my head like that – like Eno’s approach to treatments, and I was just starting to get used to the idea at the time of “The Will to Death” of using something like the Velvet Underground record to be inspired to use the synthesizer in a certain way. The Velvet Underground doesn’t have a synthesizer, but for me, their music is sonically interesting all the time in a way that that’s what the intention of using synthesizers is for, to do things with sound that are interesting. And a lot of the best examples of people doing interesting things with sound have nothing to do with a synthesizer, because in the way, a synthesizer is the easiest way to make an interesting sound – so easy, in fact, that the sounds, in a lot of ways, end up not being very interesting, especially because you’ve heard them a lot of times before. So I’ve been trying to use the synthesizer in a certain way where I’m being inspired by music that doesn’t have a synthesizer, like the distortion and feedback in the Velvet Underground albums, which I think on the Ataxia record and on the “Will to Death” record, I think one can hear that that’s where that inspiration is coming from. So yeah, that’s ten minutes on the Velvet Underground.

Something that stands out on “The Will to Death” is the use of piano on the track “The Mirror.” It was a pretty interesting combination to hear your voice and the piano together – what inspired you to give that a shot?
Well, I wrote that song about three years ago when I was playing piano a lot, and I think that the sort of classical feeling on something like “Because,” by The Beatles…I was inspired by something like that in terms of trying to do something that was just a piano part on its own, then just singing vocals over it. In terms of the way that I…there are more piano songs coming up. The collaboration album that Josh and I did, we both do piano song – he does one and I do one, and on that album, both of the piano songs were done live with me singing and playing piano and singing at the same time, and on Josh’s, he plays piano and sings at the same time. That has its own kind of exciting live feeling to it, and there’s a piano song on the album that will come out in December, as well. I love playing piano, it’s a beautiful instrument, and especially with this thing that I have – it’s an EMT-250 Reverb – it looks like R2D2, and it’s about the same size as R2D2. It was the first digital reverb, and it was what Brian Eno used on a lot of those ambient piano albums. That thing is just the key to getting this really beautiful piano sound, so we used that on “The Mirror,” and it’s just one of the best ways to get a really great sound.

On much of your previous work, your lyrics were delivered in an almost proverb-style – not seemingly about things that were too specific or certain events, but more about the way things are and how you perceive the world. The track “Far Away” seems to stray from that a bit, as it seems more specific and perhaps a bit more personal. How did that one come about?
I write a fair amount of songs like that, especially if I’m in a relationship with somebody, I seem to end up writing a lot of songs that say that we need to break up, [laughs] which is what that song is about. With most of those songs that I write, I don’t feel comfortable about releasing them or even playing them for other people. In the case of “Far Away,” for some reason I felt comfortable about putting it on the album. There’s been other situations where I’ve left songs like that off of an album because it’s just too personal. It’s nice for variety, to have something that’s personal. To me, actually, my other songs are more personal, because my other songs are about my actual feelings inside, and about the way that I’m actually thinking about the things that I’ve seen and things like that, whereas a song like “Far Away” is about a sort of interruption that occurs in your life that takes the form of a relationship, but to me, a song about a relationship seems to be more personal…but it’s more like seeing something that’s somebody else’s private life or something and having that in a song, whereas the other kind of personal is like looking in somebody’s notebook, or reading somebody’s diary or something. To me, I feel closer to a songwriter if I hear something like that.

For instance, I think Jean-Luc Godard films – in his movies, he was accused of…in these movies that he’s made now in the 90s, and in his last film, of not being as personal as he was in the 60s. To me, his movies in the 90s are more personal than his movies in the 60s. His movies in the 60s were about these more romantic situations or whatever, but his movies in the 90s are his own thoughts – his movies in the 90s are like you opened up his notebook, and I feel closer to somebody seeing something like that, and that’s why my songs are more general – they’re more like ideas rather than things about my personal life.

To me, the real world and the various interactions we have with other human beings and things like that – that’s not really…for me, that’s not the core of what life is about. For me, the really important things about life are what takes place inside of people…the things that have nothing to do with the course of time or anything like that, but the things that take place within. That’s what I’m interested in hearing in music and that’s what I’m interested in in terms of my writing. I do like a personal song now and then – I’m definitely a sucker for songs about love and things like that. Sometimes I wish that I could feel totally comfortable with writing songs about love like the doo-wop songs of the 50s or something. I definitely love that kind of music, and there’s something about the simplicity of those kinds of lyrics that I love. And that’s why I do, occasionally, write songs like that, but they just don’t seem to make it onto my records because for that reason that they just seem too personal.

Well, I’m glad you opted to stick it on there, it’s my favorite one on the record.
Cool – sometimes, you know what I think? I think that I should eventually take those songs and give them to someone else to record. Because then they won’t be as personal [laughs]. Sometimes I also have a problem with songs that are too pop-sounding or something. Maybe someday I’ll give them to a pop singer [laughs].

Sometimes people – even people that are really passionate about music – grow disillusioned with it, and say something like, “This is what I cared so much about…these little notes?” Have you ever had a period where you weren’t interested in music and felt sort of removed from it?
[yelling] That’s bullshit! I don’t think that music is just little notes. Music is energy, and energy is the single most important form of it in the world. Without energy, there is no life. The only difference between a dead person and a live person is the energy, the electricity flowing inside their system, and that’s what makes music. You can’t make a good record with people who have no life inside them and people who are totally bored just playing the notes. Yeah, the Velvet Underground could have taught four fucking businessmen who knew how to play instruments their songs, and they would have played the same fucking notes, but would it have been the same music? Fuck, no. It would have been crap. Music is what it is because of the energy.

If I feel totally drab one day, and I try to record a song, and then I feel totally alive another day and I try to record the same song, the one that I recorded when I had the life flowing through me is going to be a the one that’s good. There was a time in my life where my energy was not flowing right inside me. I knew, technically, how to put notes together and how to put chords together to make songs. To write a song, you need to have a flow of energy from the second you get the idea until the song is finished. Your energy has to be flowing. You have to have a feeling inside, and you have to grab a hold of that feeling, and you don’t let go of it until the song is finished. At the time that my energy wasn’t flowing right inside me, I was incapable of doing that. If I had an idea for a song, yeah I could start it, but it just tended to go off in nothingness, and it started to drift and drift until I lost interest in doing it and I couldn’t really find anywhere interesting to go. You have to have a lot of energy to write music, and that’s what the music is.

The notes are the least important part of music. There’s a lot of great music that doesn’t even have notes, but the people that make it are people of great personal power and personal conviction and people who life means something to. Someone like this guy, Rosy Parlane, who just put out a great record, it’s called “Iris,” I think. It’s on Touch Records. There are very little notes on that album. It’s not about notes, it’s mostly sounds. But it’s such an incredible, beautiful energy inside of it that to me, it sounds like listening to a great pop record or a great rock record or a great classical record or whatever. The notes don’t matter at all. Aside from notes, you have to remember that it’s a combination of rhythm, notes and texture. Music is not just notes. Rhythm, notes and texture. The notes have a correlation to the way that life goes up and down and the notes go up and down. Inwardly we go up and down, and notes go up and down. That’s what they mean to us. When you put chords behind it, it starts to work into appealing to your subconscious in a way that expresses things that we can’t intellectually express.

You can say things with music that there’s no way to say with words. The meaning is much more than anyone can say with words. The reason for that is that music plays directly to our subconscious. We feel what we feel when we listen to music because it’s playing with our subconscious. Billboards that we see when we drive around play with our subconscious, the media plays with our subconscious, and commercials play with our subconscious. But those things fuck with your subconscious, those things hurt your subconscious, and those things confuse your subconscious. Music puts your subconscious back in order, music gives your subconscious some sort of semblance of order and some sort of feeling of beauty, and that’s why we feel what we feel when we listen to it. Especially somebody who’s had a fucked-up life, we need that – we need to feel like everything makes sense. At the end of the day when I sit down after doing everything that I need to do for the day, and I sit there in front of my speakers and I listen to some beautiful music, it puts everything in place, and I feel like the whole world is perfect. That is not stupid. That is the most important part of my day. It doesn’t matter what I’ve accomplished that day, or shit, how much money I’ve made that day, or anything like that doesn’t mean anything. What matters is at the end of the day where I can sit there, put on a Velvet Underground record, and the world is perfect, nothing is wrong with it. Everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be. That’s how I feel when I hear music, and that’s how it’s been my whole life.

When I first heard The Germs, I had had all these feelings of rage inside of me, and I didn’t know how to express anything, and then all of a sudden there was this music that totally calms my brain, that totally soothes my brain. I don’t even understand what’s taking place inside of my brain or why I’m so confused. All I know is that when I hear The Germs, I’m not confused anymore. Don’t ever let anybody tell you music is stupid. Fucking assholes.

One thing you often speak of is the spiritual aspect of your music and how you feel in some way guided or impelled by these spirits – is that still a prevalent idea in your life?
I think that when I first started talking about that, which was in 1991, I guess, that was when I was really first starting to understand that this music that was coming out of me wasn’t coming from me. All I knew was that my music was coming from outside of me, and once I realized that, I started to see that more and more, I could find an explanation for that in terms of the spirit world, because from the way I understood it, that was a world of thought that was completely separate from the world that everyone else calls the ‘real world.’ It was a realm where they seem to understand everything in a way that human beings didn’t understand everything, and they seemed to have a different perspective on the creation of music because they were in a reality that had nothing to do with time. Yeah, the fact that we are able to write music, we are only able to do it because we live in a reality in which we’re living in a linear time structure. We need that help from people who are living in a non-linear time structure, because they are able to see the whole process as one thing, where we see it as a series of things. In actuality, it is one thing. The moment of creation of a song and the moment that somebody is sitting there listening to the song in their room, that is one thing. To us, it’s a process, but those moments are equal. There is no difference between the moment of the creation of a song and the moment that someone is listening to it in their living room. Those moments interact with each other, but we don’t see it that way, because we see it in linear time.

So spirits end up…I think they’ve had a lot to do with all the music that’s ever been made. I think that they even have everything to do with the fact that we even are able to reproduce. I think the place where all our thoughts go to once they’re thought has created another world – which we call the spirit world – and that that world is a place that constantly teaches us without us knowing we’re being taught. There’s a lot of ugliness there, too, but for us artists, the spirits that tend to teach us things have very beautiful things on their mind, and they’re trying to do something that’s very beautiful. There are equally as many spirits, probably more, that are trying to create ugliness and trying to stop beauty from happening, who are basically working for the same things that most human beings are working towards – for war, for conflict, for repression, for fucking up sexuality, and all kinds of things like that. For the artistic spirits and the spirits that want to see things be beautiful, we’re doing the best we can to fight those other ones, and to me, every time anyone creates something beautiful, that’s a triumph. I don’t care if anybody sees it, I don’t care if you do a drawing and you’re the only one that sees it. If you do something beautiful, that’s a triumph for us. It’s a triumph for every artist everywhere. That’s the way I think of it.

I don’t just think of the music I’m making as being for me, and I definitely don’t think of it as coming from me. I think of myself as…I work towards making myself as opened up as possible so I’m as open of a vehicle as possible for the spirits that want to send this information through me. I don’t know it’s going to last. I’ve got to do my best to make myself open, so that’s why I eat healthy and why I exercise every day and that’s why I try keep my mind open and all that sort of stuff, is because that’s the way I notice my energy flows through me without being interrupted. When I stop doing that stuff, that’s when I start noticing these fucked-up interruptions, and that’s when I don’t feel like I have as much control. I don’t ignore my conscious brain, either. I think it’s important to keep your conscious brain in order, and keep your technical view of things really clear, because for me, that helps translate the very complex information that one gets in their brains without understanding where it’s coming from or anything.

How often do you go back and listen to your first couple of records, and what do you think when you hear them?
I’ve been meaning to listen to that first record for a while, and I haven’t. But I really love it, I think it’s an incredible record. I think in a lot of ways, I still have a lot to learn from it. I think that as good as some of my fans think that first record is, I don’t think anyone thinks it’s as good as I think it is [laughs]. I know they think it’s my best record, in a lot of cases, but I really love it. I think I love it more than it would be tasteful even to talk about. I really think that I was doing something really important at that time. It was also totally out of my control. I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t know how it was happening, I didn’t know what the music was coming from, I didn’t understand…there was no thought put into it whatsoever. Still, I think I’m going more in that direction. I think as time goes by, I’m appreciating more and more where I was coming from then, and I’m trying to incorporate that sort of lack of control into everything that I do. Hopefully with what I’ve learned, it can be in a form that’s still concise and not all over the place, while still being reckless and awkward and all those things that draw one into that music so much. I’m talking about as if it’s a great thing, I don’t know if you think it’s a great thing, but is that sort of what you were asking?

Yeah, just how you go back and perceive that earlier work.
I love it, I really love it. In my opinion, the fact that it’s ignored as a guitar album is ridiculous. To me, guitar-playing wise, I think it’s some of the best guitar playing I’ve ever heard. I realize it’s tasteless to say that about oneself, but I can say it because I really don’t even feel like it was me anymore [laughs]. I feel like I was such a different person back then…not only did I look like a completely different person, but everything in my head felt like a completely different person. I just hear it, and I just think that I was doing something completely unique, and there’s not that many people who have done things that are completely unique like that.

I was just listening to Robert Fripp’s guitar playing on the album [by David Bowie] “Scary Monsters.” My friend Omar had never heard it, and before you called we were sitting there listening to it. To me, that playing is a similar thing. It’s just very brilliant guitar playing that has nothing to do with the musician that is playing it or anything like that. It’s just a great moment for guitar playing. It has nothing to do with any other guitar playing. His solo on something like the song “Fashion,” there’s no guitar playing that’s similar to that whatsoever. I feel the same way about, for instance, the last song on “Usually Just a T-Shirt,” or something, or the second to last song on “Usually Just a T-Shirt,” there’s just nothing like it. That’s going to make me sound egocentric [laughs].

What are the chances we’ll see you touring with this material any time soon?
I’m not going to be touring with it any time soon…I might do one show in Los Angeles in a couple weeks, but as of last time I spoke to him, the plan that Josh and I have is that when the next Chili Peppers record and tour is finished, Josh and I will put together a band and do a proper tour, and by that time, there will be so many albums out that we’ll really be able to choose from an interesting batch of songs. That’s the plan, so in about a year and a half, we’ll do a real…we’ll put together a band and do a real, proper tour.

[After farewells are exchanged, as the call is about to be ended, John quickly stopped me from hanging up to add a few more thoughts]

Oh, wait, you know what else about my playing on that first record, it’s very difficult for me to imagine how one could play like that. It’s not a way that I could decide to play. It was that point in time and it could have only happened at that point in time, and for me that’s the sort of confusing thing about reflecting on it and looking at the various merits of it and things like that. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t play like that anymore because it’s not 1991. Any other guitar playing – my playing on “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” or my playing on “Californication,” I could play like that if I wanted to now…but my playing on that first album, I think I was so free inside, that it’s just a moment that I can’t recapture. I can learn from it and I can retain aspects of it, but I’m not capable of duplicating it. So that’s why I speak of it from a detached place. It doesn’t really feel like I’m talking about myself. Especially that second half of it, “Usually Just a T-Shirt,” it’s just crazy.

—Chris Steffen