When There’s A Will

With three records released thus far, and four more scheduled before year-end, John Frusciante places his trust squarely in the hands of his fans.

In a lot of people’s minds, it’s difficult to think of John Frusciante without thinking of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But in light of the guitarist’s nearly indispensable contributions to the band over the years and his eclectic, soon-to-become voluminous solo catalog, it should be more appropriately difficult to think of the Chili Peppers without thinking of Frusciante.

Insider: the Chili Peppers under the guitar ministrations of Jack Sherman and Hillel Slovak in the early to mi-’80s were little more than a cult funk/punk band with a great press kit and few discernible sales. Slovak’s overdose death in 1988 led to Frusciante’s hiring in 1989, resulting in the Chili Peppers’ first commercially successful release, 1990’s Mother’s Milk. Three years later saw the stratospheric multiplatinium release of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and Frusciante’s input into the album’s success cannot be overstated.

Still not convinced? Then examine the parade of guitarists who took Frusciante’s place in the wake of his departure in 1992 and the underwhelming results that followed. Not even Jane’s Addiction guitar deity Navarro could restore the Chili Peppers to their rightful place in the upper echelons of the charts with his work on One Hot Minute. It took Frusciante’s return on 1999’s triumphant Californication to send another Chili Peppers’ record racing across store scanners and into the hearts of critics.

Outside of Frusciante’s monumental additions to the Chili Peppers’ canon, he also been responsible for some of the most weirdly endearing solo works in rock and roll. His first, the spacily offbeat Niandra Lades & Usually Just a T-Shirt, was conceived while Frusciante was still in the throes of the heroin habit that led him to leave the Chili Peppers during the Japanese tour for Blood Sugar Sex Magik in 1992. His sophomore album, 1997’s Smile From the Streets You Hold, was the sound of an artist shaking off the emotional chains of the past and working out a tentative creative plan for the future. His next album, 2001’s To Record Only Water For Ten Days, was a much more traditionally structured affair which served as incontrovertible proof of Frusciante’s influence over, and importance to, the Chili Peppers’ sound.

Given all that, it’s worth noting that neither Niandra Lades nor Streets You Hold can be dismissed as lesser works because of Frusciante’s chemical dependency issues, or because of the hazy aftermath of their resolution. Both albums, while clearly exhibiting the stress fractures of the circumstances that framed them, are also just as legitimately representative of such avowed Frusciante experimental influences as Frank Zappa and Robert Fripp, and are daringly flawed translations of the musical ideas of his personally held heroes.

With his tumultuous problems well in the past; Frusciante has been utilizing his new-found clarity to serve both the Chili peppers and his solo muse. Earlier this year saw the release of the guitarist’s fourth solo album, the eccentrically polished rock of Shadows Collide With People; but that was merely a taste of what Frusciante has in store for his fans in 2004. Already released is the raw verve of The Will To Death (with longtime collaborator Josh Klinghoffer) and a punkish band effort titled Automatic Writing under the group banner Ataxia (also featuring Klinghoffer, along with Fugazi bassist Joe Lally). DC EP (produced by Fugazi front man Ian MacKaye) will be released within weeks and Inside of Emptiness is up next with a late October appearance. These are but the first four in a planned series of six total releases to be issued, one a month, before the end of the year. Such prodigious output is rare, but not unheard of. Over the course of a year in 2002 and 2003, former Be Bop Deluxe guitarist Bill Nelson self-released a double album of new material, two separate discs for attendees at his annual fan convention and a six-disc box set called Noise Candy. What is unusual about Frusciante’s string of releases is the fact that he has attracted the interest of an indie label to put them all out; his parent record company, Warner Brothers, will assist Record Collection in distributing the albums.

As impressive as six albums in six months sounds, Frusciante insists that he wasn’t attempting some novelty studio version of a frat stunt in concepting the half dozen works.”The way it started was I had just done Shadows Collide With People, which took probably a total of a couple of months; I was working at that pace that people are expected to work at nowadays,” says Frusciante with a laugh. “And at one point, I went in for one day and intended to make one recording to see how the place sounded without caring about making mistakes or making it perfect. I just went in with my friend Carla, who plays drums, and the end result were two perfect sounding songs. Our intention was to make mistakes all over the place, and make what I was assuming would be screwed up versions of the songs…and they ended up being way more perfect that anything that I’d slaved over trying to make perfect.”

With this revelation in hand, Frusciante contacted his frequent collaborator Klinghoffer and gave him the good news that their sessions were about to get shorter and more productive. Frusciante and Klinghoffer met eight years ago when Klinghoffer was in a band with a friend of Frusciante’s. Klinghoffer had announced himself as a fan of Frusciante’s solo work and the two eventually became friends.

“We started hanging out and at one point we were having these conversations – this was at the time of Californication – that I felt like there were a lot of sides to me, musically, that I wasn’t getting a chance to do in the Chili Peppers, amongst them more punk type or more electronic type things. It didn’t seem like either of those things were getting a chance to go anywhere in the Chili Peppers. We’d talk about doing more electronic things or maybe we’d play more punk type things but they’d never make it to the record. I felt like I wanted drummer who played more artistically rather than just bashing the drums all the time. My favourite drummer is Stephen Morris of Joy Division and New Order, and for him a drum part is not just keeping time; it’s a thing that weaves in and out of the music. When I said this to Josh, he said, “Well, I play drums like that.” I didn’t even know he played drums; I thought he was a guitarist. Eventually, we started working on stuff together and I started using him to help me with my demos of my songs, to play drums and to do whatever else he wanted to do on them, any other ideas that he had. He’s really talented on all instruments; bass, drums, guitars, vocals, synthesizers. So I have a lot of fun recording with him because he’s not only my really close friend and a really funny person to be around, he’s really good on every instrument.”

Klinghoffer was initially skeptical about fast-tracking in the studio, but the pair’s first foray resulted in three songs over the course of two days, while their next session yielded twelve songs in three days. Although it was the first time Frusciante had been so immediately successful, he wasn’t necessarily surprised by either the immediacy or the success. “We realized that we are able work at that pace, but we had always thought that was the pace people should work at,” says Frusciante. “We’d heard about Station to Station by David Bowie, which was recorded in four or five days, and the first Van der Graaf Generator was recorded in one day. I’m sure the third Velvet Underground album wasn’t recorded in more than a few days. That’s the pace people should be working at, but the accepted way of working nowadays is so backward. I’m glad I’ve broken out of that cage and I’m recording at what, to me, feels like a normal pace. It’s not like I’m rushing, it’s just that we get done what has to be done and we’re not intimidated by being in a studio. And we’re not making that attempt to make things perfect, because I don’t like the way it sounds when it’s like that.

Of course, it’s one thing to record an album in a matter of days. It’s quite another to create one in the same amount of time.

“It’s really important for the people involved to know the songs really well and have the songs’ arrangements completely worked out in advance to where there’s no question about them,” says Frusciante wisely. “But also to have refined your skills to make up a bass line really fast, or to come up with synthesizer ideas really quickly, and sing a vocal really quickly. And all that comes from practicing and a lot of home recordings and a lot of opportunities to be in the studio. To us it seems like it’s added a lot of excitement. You hear more moments when things are recorded faster. Somehow when people take longer to record things… to my ears, you don’t hear as many moments that weren’t planned for. Those are always the things that make listening to a record more meaningful for me.”

With that ethic as his recording guide, Frusciante made a handful of albums that he is not only proud of, but that are personally and professionally satisfying to him as an artist and as a listener.

“It’s the first time that I’ve ever made records and gone through the whole process of mixing and mastering; and then still carry them around when I’m traveling and listen to them,” says Frusciante. “It wouldn’t be that way if I’d taken more time to record them.”

As Frusciante and Klinghoffer progressed through the work at a lightning clip, it became apparent to them that they weren’t just churning out demos for future reference but legitimate, releasable material. The possibilities began to form rapidly.

“Once we finished one record, we made plans to do another record, and then I started noticing that I was doing about one record a month,” recalls Frusciante. “At that point, Shadows Collide With People had just come out, and we’d already made three records. I didn’t want to say anything in interviews about it because I didn’t want to frustrate my fans. I didn’t know how long it would take before I would have a chance to release this stuff. A major label doesn’t want you to release a record every month, because in terms of sales, and things, it doesn’t make sense. Eventually, when Shadows Collide With People stopped selling, I met with these people from the Record Collection label and they were really excited about the idea of putting out a record every month.”

Although The Will to Death is the first of the six records, and follows directly on the heels of Shadows Collide With People, Frusciante makes it clear that, in his mind, the proximity of their release dates is the only thing they hold in common.

“I kind of did everything on The Will to Death to be contrary to the way I did it on Shadows Collide With People,” says Frusciante; “Or another way of putting it would be that I was attempting to start over again. Shadows Collide With People has a lot going on all the time. There’s lots of sounds coming in and out of is constantly, and in general I describe it as my version of a big production. On this album, I wanted things to be more understated and more subtle. Any use of electronics I wanted to be very subtle and not at all rooted in ’80s synth pop, which, I think, was a big influence on Shadows Collide With People. On this album, I didn’t want to use the synthesizer in that way at all. I drew a lot of my inspiration for the way I was going to use synthesizer from things that didn’t even have synthesizer. Or maybe I stopped thinking in terms of doing interesting things sonically with synthesizers, and started thinking about what interesting, beautiful sonics there are in a drum set in a room, and a guitar mixing with that drum set, or in a guitar and a bass. I was just starting to appreciate the rawness of the space being a big part of the music, and the way the different instruments mix with each other being more of the music, and not thinking in terms of creating this big, grandiose kind of sound which is what I was doing with Shadows. With The With to Death I was wanting to be small and, in general, for things to have a more raw sound to them.”

Frusciante is often guided by the sounds in his record collection and The Will to Death found twin beacons in John Cale’s Fear and Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, both of which were coincidentally produced by electronic guru and ambient savant Brian Eno. As luck would have it, Frusciante had the rare opportunity to spend a day with Eno, whose techniques he had been mimicking liberally.

“On both of those albums, Brian Eno was doing a lot of treatments, which is something I did a lot on on Shadows Collide With People,” says Frusciante. “In between those two records, I had a day I spent with him where a lot of his ideas got through really well to me, and amongst them was this whole thing of drawing one’s inspiration on the synthesizer from the Velvet Underground rather than synthesizer groups. On [Fear and Fear of Music] as well as on The End by Nico, which he’s also on, I was really paying close attention to the various ways he’s treating the other instrument. For instance, on the song ‘Electric Guitar’ from Fear of Music, he makes the bass guitar sound like a tuba. So I remember one night going into my room, where my synthesizer was, with a CD of that song and plugging my bass into the synthesizer, and I eventually got that sound, as an exercise. Or like on Fear, where he treats the guitar – but not by running it through something; on the song ‘Gun’ for instance, he’s treating the guitar by grabbing the whammy bar and turning the pick-up selector switch. I only know because he did that to me while I was playing and I recognized the sound from ‘Gun’. The way to treat something is not always by running it through something, but also by manipulating the instrument itself in a different way”.

Eno also had some philosophically technical wisdom to share with Frusciante, which he wound up referring to throughout the process of making all six of his albums. Eno recounted how John Cale had imposed a limit on the number of takes that could be recorded during the making of three takes, then it should be abandoned.

“That was a really inspiring though for me,” says Frusciante. “When I was in the studio during those first couple of sessions, and if I was spending too long getting a synthesizer sound, Josh would be like, “Remember John Cale!”.

Frusciante focused not only on the sound of Eno’s famed productions, but reflected down to the deeper psychological levels intended by the producer and his musical charges.

“I really appreciate it when I can hear somebody’s really captured the essence of who they are, with all their vulnerable parts and anything awkward about themselves,” says Frusciante. “Like someone like David Byrne, where so much of his vocals are accentuating his awkwardness. For me as a singer, that is really inspiring. A the time of Shadows Collide With People, I had gotten to the point where I had taken my voice apart so much that I think I was imagining the kind of voice that you could get by using a computer to tune it. I wasn’t using Pro Tools; I do everything on tape, but I was everything my natural voice would be perfectly on each note without bending, without making or anything like that. And that’s not how a human is supposed to sound. In my head, I had screwed myself up so much to the point that I was thinking that’s how this voice should be. As I stepped back after I finished that record and I was listening to all the records I love, I was like, ‘God, I’m not Freddie Mercury. There’s no reason I should be putting that pressure on myself.’ So I stopped being so hard on myself and started realizing that a certain amount of vulnerability in a lot of ways draws the listener to it. That’s where I hear what I want to hear. and the fact that I took that attitude with The Will to Death, my voice got a lot stronger in a way that it never could have if my intention was to have a strong voice.”

In addition to The Will to Death, Automatic Writing, DC EP and Inside Of Emptiness, Frusciante’s release schedule includes a collaboration with Klinghoffer (under both of their names) and, finally, an acoustic solo piece, all of which will street before year’s end. Each of the projects was recorded in various professional studios, except for the acoustic album, which Frusciante crafted in his home studio on an ancient piece of equipment.

“It was recorded on this Ampex 8-track machine from like 1970, which is the same machine that King Crimson recorded In the Court of the Crimson King on,” says Fruscainte. “It’s the best sounding tape machine I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s no mistake that all those great recordings from 1969 and 1970 sound as great as they do. 8-track is just a great format.”

The solo EP (DC EP) is a short but potent work recorded in Washington, DC with Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye and Jerry Busher, who has performed second drum duties with Fugazi and also plays with his own bands, the improvisational All Scars and French Toast with James Canty of the Make Up.

“Jerry’s always been one of my favorite drummers, so I went over there and recorded four songs in two days,” says Frusciante. “Ian produced; it wasn’t planned out that he was going to be the producer, he was just hanging out and wanted to be around. He ended up playing that role: he had a couple good suggestions about arrangements of songs, and I normally would never let anybody say anything, but I respect him about as much as I could respect anybody. And then when we were in the studio, he knew that equipment really well. They work differently from how I work. They record on 24-track, I don’t. I mix to 1/4″ tape; they mix to 1/2″ tape. They use automation, I don’t. The equipment I’m used to using is really good vintage equipment and their equipment is from the ’80s. I left it in Ian’s hand as far as mixing, and I was really impressed with the results that he got from that equipment. I have friends who think it’s the best recording I’ve done.”

After DC EP, Frusciante’s solo electric album, Inside Of Emptiness, will be the next release. Frusciante describes it as noisy work, driven by distorsion and static in the higher frequencies, with an even more extreme sonic posture than the dense atmosphere of the Ataxia album.

“For The Will to Death, the Velvet Underground that I was listening to was the third one, which is very mellow and has a lot of soft power to it,” says Frusciante. “For Inside Of Emptiness, the Velvet Underground album I was listening to a lot was White Light/White Heat, which is full of lots of distorsion – and you can hear that in the sound of the album. We did everything we could to be contrary to the way people do music nowadays. It’s been a trend in the music industry to use isolation booths for everything. Our idea with this album was to open up all the doors and have as much bleed as possible and to use the bleed an a way that has a good atmosphere. I’m most proud of this one and the acoustic one. If somebody was only going to buy one of the albums, I would probably suggest either Inside Of Emptiness or the acoustic one.”

Although Frusciante initially considered releasing these last two albums of the long recording process, Inside Of Emptiness and the acoustic project, as the first in the series because of his obvious pride in their results, he has since decided to slate them in order of their original creation – The Will to Death, Automatic Writing, DC EP, Inside Of Emptiness, the Frusciante/Klinghoffer collaboration, and what is currently being called The May Album, i.e., the acoustic project.

“It was hard for me to put them out in this order, but it’s really the only way to do it,” says Frusciante. “I’ve just got to have a little self-restraint. My favorite ones are the ones that are a few down the line, but I feel like, in a lot of ways, this whole thing is about honesty and about letting people see me for what I am. So I feel like I’ve got to put them out in the order I did them so people can grow with me.”

It seems logical to assume that, after such a prodigious amount of work, Frusciante might want to kick back and enjoy a break from his labours, but that would be far from the case. Frusciante spent the summer in Europe touring with the Chili Peppers whili Klinghoffer spent his summer vacation on tour with P.J. Harvey. When the two reconvene in the fall, after Frusciante and the Chili Peppers decamp to write their next album, they will likely begin work on yet another album. At some point, perhaps early next year, Frusciante will also release the second half of the Ataxia Writing’s five-song, forty-five-minute composition.

As Frusciante noted, conventional industry wisdom arches a bottom-line obsessed eyebrow at the idea of flooding the market with seven releases by the same artist in a single year. There is a novelty aspect to the whole concept that could easily overwhelm the content of projects that Frusciante has very carefully considered and undertaken, regardless of the speed with which he has completed them.

“I feel like my fans, the people who specifically want to buy it because it’s me, that’s enough for them and they can digest it that quickly,” says Frusciante honestly. “Anybody else, I don’t really care if they buy my albums. It seems like I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 people who buy my albums, and those are the people whi I am happy continuing to make records for. And I think those people can digest an album a month. I think it would be a really bad idea if I was actually trying to grow in popularity or trying to have a hit record or something. But that’s not my intention. I’m not interested in pushing this stuff or getting it on the radio. My intention is to communicate with the people who want to be communicated with by me. I know when I was such a fan of Frank Zappa’s when I was a teenager, if he would have put out a record a month, I would have bought a record a month. That’s all I’m hoping for… to have an audience that’s a buit-in audience, and trusts me… and trusts that I’m going to give them music that has a certain feeling to it. Beyond that, I don’t expect anything.”

–Brian Baker