The Prodigal Son
John Frusciante, the RHCPs’ prodigal guitarist, is finally getting used to being liked. After a lifetime of displacement and six years away from the band he now calls home again, Frusciante, 29, and rated as one of the pre-eminent rock axemen of his generation, has settled into his own skin, coming to terms with demons in his recent past.
“I’m really enjoying having friends again y’know,” a pensive Frusciante says. “Because I didn’t even have any friends before I joined the band (again last year). No-one wanted to be around me, y’know. I was so on a different level to everybody else. I had no comrades. I was on my own course.”
“When we were writing this record (Californication), I was just enjoying the fact that people liked being around me again. Anthony liked being around me, Flea liked being around me. I seemed to be making people feel good again. I hadn’t felt that feeling in a few years, in six years really.
“Just me on my own making people feel good, not because I was giving them drugs. But because they liked me. That was really what it was about for me, that my life had some value, feeling like the fact that I was alive, made a difference to somebody.”
Frusciante jettisoned himself from the LA-based funk metal kings in 1992 at the peak of their success with the BSSM album because of his battles with drugs. They were left guitarless of the eve of headlining the Lollapalooza festival.
The band had weathered years of disinterest, record company changes and rug problems. Original guitarist Hillel Slovak overdoesed on heroin while the standout ballad on BSSM, Under The Bridge, was actually an ode to singer Anthony Kiedis’ scoring of the drug.
Frusciante, a fan of the band, credited with shaping their breakthrough album, wasn’t around long enough to tour it.
“I was very confused when I quit the band,” Frusciante said recently. “It got into my head that stardom was something evil. If you were a rock star, you were trying to put people on. I don’t see it that way anymore.”
A succession of replacements guitarists followed, most notably former Janes Addiction member Dave Navarro, who worked on their studio album, 1995’s OHM. However, tensions soon saw Navarro leave and Frusciante rejoin, after some well-received but poorly selling solo albums. Californication, their latest album, has become a major hit in Australia, while the first single Scar Tissue, has broken records for radio airplay in the US.
Frusciante’s return to the fold was painless and Californication, was recorded in three weeks. It was a long way from the time both parties didn’t speak for two years and Fruciante didn’t even own a guitar, let alone play one.
“Flea brought it up,” Kiedis said recently. “He said, ‘What do you think of playing with John again?’. I said, ‘That would be a dream. But what are the odds that the chemistry would work for even a minute?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, the odds are a million to one’. But from the first time we got together I felt completely levitated. Yeah there’s an instability factor. I couldn’t take the time to go over the history of dis-combobulation that this band has been through. We all know not to project how many years this thing is going to work. Right now, it’s working like crazy.”
Touring, previously Frusciante’s achilles heel, has not been an issue with the Peppers now a drug free unit (after Kiedis’ relapse into heroin passed).
Frusciante’s anguish with drugs, that main reason behind his leaving the Peppers at the center of the BSSM whirlpool in 1992, has been thoroughly and well documented. Not that he minds much.
“A lot of the joys I get from life are from people who are famous, whether it’s musicians or artists. I’m a person who likes to spend most of my time all by myself. And when I’m not writing music or practising my guitar – actually, even when I am writing and practising – I’m still always going into other people’s music for inspiration.
“And for me, ever since I was a little kid, looking at magazines and reading books about rock stars or, since I’ve been an adult, reading books about painters, these things are what make me happy. There are no other figures in the world for me to look up to more than artists: either writers or muscians or painters. These are the things that make me happy. So, you know, I’m just one of them. I’m here for people who I might mean something to, you know? I’ll give as much of myself as they want because I know how important it is for me.”
Frusciante says his now got a handle on his bad habits, and has found a new sense of self.
“I really don’t think I started having a clear image of myself until a couple of years ago. Taking drugs and drinking and smoking pot and stuff whenever I fancied it, it screws with your image of yourself – you don’t have a clear image of yourself when you’re just doing stuff whenever you feel like doing it. I think that’s the way it works. I don’t think I started to develop a clear image of myself until I stopped giving into every little fancy that my sub-conscious suggested. My sub-conscious would say: ‘Take this drug, drink this, take that drug, you feel like eating this, you feel like eating that’.
“Doing interviews isn’t uncomfortable for me anymore. There was a time when it felt contradictory within myself to answer questions properly. Now I’ve really gone inside myself to the point where nothing seems contradictory. I’m very comfortable with myself.”
Kiedis too has had his problems with heroin. “Over the last four years, the lion’s share of my time I´ve been clean,” he told one magazine.”All it takes is a short while of me using to really get dark and upset the balance. But it’s good now.”
Certainly being a Chili Pepper again has put Frusciante’s life back in focus. While he remains quintessentially a loner – virtually every minute off the road is spent locked away inside his home studio, practising guitar or programming beats – the old musical family is now everything.
“When you have four people that have got a really good chemistry with each other and they’re all at the point in their lives where they all really appreciate their need for wach other and they work really hard at writing songs for a year and then they record a record and do it right, it’s going to be good. And there’s not that many people who have the chemistry that we have. I wish there were more bands that did. We care about each other y’know?”
–Dino Scatena
