World Record

Star cult and money don’t mean a lot for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ guitarist. Only his music helped him to get out of the drug-induced chaos of his previous life. Now John Frusciante beats the world record of workaholic Frank Zappa by publishing seven new albums – and with it erecting himself music monuments.

Maybe it was karma, kismet or plain coincidence / destiny.
It was Friday, the fourth of June of this year and a heavily breathing John Frusciante left the interview in his hotel room of Schloss Bensberg in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany. Thirty seconds later he comes back in, head held low, sits back in the chair and sadly looks around. “Pissed” he is and also tired. What a pity since everything had been going so well. Until this mini disc player plays up and 45 minutes of the interview disappeared into thin air.

His close friend Michael Rother, with whom he had just arrived two hours prior from his home up north, tried to comfort him.

On my part, I basically tried not to say anything wrong. Frusciante is an incredibly endearing contemporary and a wonderful interviewee, but with a very fragile/sensitive personality and needs to be handled like a raw egg. Finally he concedes another 15 minutes for the interview. Which eventually turned into 40 – and none wasted.

When I met John Frusciante for the first time in 1999 he wasn’t doing so well yet. He had just reunited with the Peppers and recorded “Californication”. John wore hip length hair and next to Anthony Kiedis, Flea and Chad Smith he came across as the little autistic brother who needs constant supervision at the dinner table.

The years of heroin had marked him, as they still do today. Despite this, people started wondering what had made “Californication” such a remarkable album.

Two years later F sat in a Hamburg hotel room, rummaged through a wooden box with bags and little containers, he had outlandish herb mixtures brewed up for him and he added even more bizarre powders to it. Inbetween he evaluated his life as a junkie and dreamed of a life as a musician left alone by fame. Later that night he appeared in a dark Hamburg bar, just him, his guitar and a mysterious metal box with heaps of dials and made out of chrome and Bakelite, like in the old days of the invention of the radio. Thus he presented his solo album To Record Only Water For Ten Days. A magnificent and hard to access piece of music. After repeated intakes it’s finally obvious on whose ideas the great Pepper albums BloodSugarSexMagik and thus “Californication” are based. Because if you stripped them of the exalted vocals Mr. Kiedis, the thumping bass of Flea and the never hesitant drums of Chad Smith you’d still have the complex songs of John Frusciante. That man can create indelible songs/catchy tunes without the kitsch and ballast and set them in totally new contexts. Almost as if Picasso had painted a middle class car with a spray can.

What’s so special about F’s fantasies was that he never lived them long enough to start analyzing them “ I’m changing incredibly fast” he says today, in the castle hotel the night before his gig with the Peppers at Rock am Ring. “Sometimes, when listening to my 5 or 6 month old recordings, I don’t feel as if I had actually created them. I might still think they’re interesting, they might just bore me. All I know is I don’t want to be held up by them and I won’t let them hold me up.”

February this year his record company almost put a spanner in his works, inadvertently. They had published JF’s new solo album, “Shadows Collide With People” nearly a year after he had finished it, yet another wonderful piece. “When I told them, I’d rather not remember the songs, because I don’t want to think that far back, I think, they just didn’t get it”. This seems to happen to JF quite frequently, the hermit amongst the Peppers once in a while causes confusion.

The biggest coup for Frusciante was on 22nd of March 2003 when a fantastic Peppers concert continued with the encores. Suddenly the guitarist took the pressure out of his set and played an incredibly chilled guitar. Chad Smith relaxed at the drums; Omar, guitarist of the opening band The Mars Volta shuffled on stage and warmed up. No one in the auditorium knew the song, which had been going for 10 minutes by now. Neither did Frusciante, as he admits grinning. And the majority of the audience wouldn’t have known the guitarist who joined the group last and had some fantastic ideas.

In the mid 70’s Michael Rother was the head of the band NEU!. They had been the first to take Electronica out of its intellectual or drug heavy environment and turn it into innovative pop. Rother had been an idol of Frusciante’s, who was as happy as a boy in a sand box [a child at Christmas] about the visitor. “ Could be, some people may have left the arena”, Frusciante says today, but even if everybody had left, the experiment would have been worth it. You have to do these things, otherwise music loses its meaning and worth”.

The more than 50 minutes lasting jam session in Hamburg seems to have been a sign for John Frusciante. “I never liked the long drawn out stays at the studio, where every day you kidded yourself that wasting time is making your art better”. A disparaging hand movement, a glass of water downed in one. “ I believe a good album should be done and sorted in five, maximum eight days”.

His friend Rother looks a bit concerned, being more a sedate creator and trying out different things. Frusciante continues “ basically I could release an album every month, and I’m doing it at the moment”. No joke, on Monday “The Will to Death” comes out, and by the end of the year JF will release five more. Not on the internet as his personal ravings, but with his record company Warner Music, who have to be commended for such risk-taking. “ I like it like that”, says F. “ I might do the same next year”. He’ll have to discuss this with the record company. But who could deny JF his most heartfelt dreams?

John Frusciante and Michael Rother – the dream duet

What started in public on stage in Hamburg, is being continued in private. John Frusciante, a declared fan of German prog rock of the ’70s, can now call his “absolutely favourite guitarist” a close friend. According to Rother “we’re miles of a joint project, but we’re not working towards that anyway”. But already this summer he and Frusciante will be sharing the stage for two concerts in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Frusciante discovered the “Krautrock” labeled music experiments when colleagues continuously raved about bands like Harmonia and NEU! “The first sounds I heard by Michael were a revelation. There was someone who played guitar like I had imagined it for years.” Last June the two very different men spent three days in Rother’s studio. Frusciante was trying to relax for the festival gigs with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Rother had just released his solo album “ Remember – the great Adventure”. Stress was apparently absent, the friendship seems to work for them as a quiet oasis for them – and naturally a base for artistic exchange. Which could spread even further: not only is Frusciante enthusiastic about early Krautrock, other musicians like Jeff Tweedy of WILCO always come home from their Germany trips with suitcases full of strange sounding records!

Record review
John Frusciante
The Will to Death
Warner
Rock experiments: “the puzzle freak with new ideas for nerds”
Confusing, as always. And absolutely fantastic, as usual. Slowly, but surely JF has created his own personal universe with sounds, rhythms and bizarre fantasies. How generous he shares it with the world.

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