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TG’s First Guest Editor

Hey guitar people! It’s wake up time! Pick up that hunk of wood. Hold it close, real fuggin’ close. A hundred years in the making – the time has come to merge flesh with frets, to rewrite the rulebook, LA style. Hell, yes..

OK, so John Frusciante isn’t actually writing the mag (and no, he doesn’t talk like that either), but he is the one player TG receives constant and unrelenting requests to tab. So when we got the go-ahead to interview the man, we thought: “Why not get John to choose the songs we tab?” John, of course, didn’t select any of his own stuff but came up trumps with some unusual but well-worthy choices – songs and techniques that helped mould the guitar player that is Frusciante and that could improve your playing too. Like Joy Division’s Shadowplay (p84) or Blind Blake’s Southern Rag (p87), or an analysis of Jimmy Page’s soloing style (p92). So turn to page 30 to learn more about Frusciante’s world – like how he’s already working on his next solo album, or why he’s started to play synth parts on his guitar.

Every inch the performer, John also stripped to the waist (it’s hard getting the Chilis to keep their clothes on) for the cover. Who were we to argue? Our next Guest Ed, it would seem, has a lot to live up to…

Interview

From punk rock fan to funk rock icon, John Frusciante tells Helen Dalley how good it feels to be back in the fold, and how Depeche Mode synth lines have helped make him the best guitarist that he can be.

There’s not many guitarists who get to join their favourite band at 18, but then John Frusciante ain’t just any guitarist. One of the first things he told the press on signing up for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1988, was that all he really cared about was “playing guitar like I’ve got a huge cock”. He was the perfect candidate to join the band that made themselves famous by wearing nothing but socks on theirs.

Frusciante is a strange, yet heady, mix of fanaticism (he used to practice for 15 hours a day) and punk sensibilities. He cites bands like the Sex Pistols and L.A punks, the Germs, as the reason he picked up the guitar. But his real obsession, has always been the Chili Peppers. After seeing the band perform for the first time at age 15, John was completely hooked and before long, he had completely learnt the band’s whole repertoire. His fanaticism with all things Pepper impressed bassist Flea so much so, that when then – guitarist Duane McKnight bowed out in 1988, Flea immediately remembered Frusciante. Despite this guy never having been in a band before – and possessing nothing in the way of stage experience – Flea managed to convince the rest of the band, Frusciante was the right man for the job. John was in, and within weeks, was busy recording the now legendary Mother’s Milk.

Two years later, the Chili Peppers were at the height of their fame, reveling in the success that Blood Sugar Sex Magik had brought them. On paper, everything looked peachy, but beneath the surface lurked a different story.

A man who had always valued his privacy, the band’s superstardom began to take its toll on John (“The popularity bummed me out”) – so much so, that during a promotional visit to London the guitarist inexplicably turned round and flew back to L.A. Needless to say, the unity in the band was on the wane, and apart from Flea, Frusciante had stopped connecting with the others Chilis. Already dabbling in drugs, his heroin problem quickly spiraled out of control and he stopped playing guitar altogether in 1992, choosing instead to paint. He clung to the brushes – and the opiates – for three more years, until his friends, the actor River Phoenix and Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell, convinced him to record his first solo album, Niandra Lades And Usually Just A T-Shirt (1995).

John’s love of playing guitar couldn’t be suppressed indefinitely – largely because, he knew, that’s where his real talent lied.

“As a painter I couldn’t find my…I couldn’t do the kind of paintings that I really wanted to do,” he begins. “I wasn’t technically capable of it. But I knew that I could do it on guitar because I have the mind to think of the guitar technically. I was reading Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, and his advice to painters – about being able to represent nature with perfection. I took his advice and applied it to myself as a musician, starting from point A, as if I was a new guitarist. I quickly realised I had the mind of a great guitarist technically, but when I started writing Californication, I still had to practice all the time.”

Really?
“Yes, By the time I went into the studio, I was barely good enough to make the record. It took a maximum amount of effort. But for that reason, it’s my favourite playing I’ve ever done. When I was making Blood Sugar, I took my technique for granted – and starting again, it was only then that I realised I had so much. So this last time, I felt like I could be exactly the kind of guitarist I wanted to be, without having to balance out Eddie Van Halen and the 80s, which is what I was doing before.”

Half a decade after walking out on them, John was back in the Chili Peppers for the making of Californication. Things has never really clicked for the band with interim-guitarist Dave Navarro. Dave had been a reactive guitar player, preferring to put parts to music already created, whereas John prefers to jam – just like the other three members of the band.

“In the band we work very democratically,” explains Frusciante. “No one person is ever responsible for the direction. We also write as a band. You come up with a five second riff at home, bring it to the ban, and we all create and make a song together. Then whatever happens, happens. The energy that’s in the air when the four of us are playing together is so thick. But the music is just there, we gradually shape it. Writing a song can be a long process – a Chili Peppers song might take six months in between by the time we get the idea and the song being finished. Also in the Chili Peppers, I like to play games – games of balancing things out. Like, if Chad’s playing a certain drum beat with one feel, I create a different type of rhythm not implied in his rhythm – to add depth. We’re always doing that to each other. I’m constantly trying to change what the other people are playing by what I do.”

Frusciante’s energy and constant hammering at the boundaries of guitar playing led TG to ask him to be our first guest editor, and this month’s magazine is full of tabs and techniques that helped John define his inimitable style.

His enthusiasm and excitement at being back in the Chilis is obvious, and genuinely affecting.

“It’s so good to be in a band with people who love you. I really recommend it highly. To have somebody like Anthony to always be like… on my side and always getting off on my playing – it makes me feel so good.

“Sometimes, he’ll come to me with a melody that doesn’t really have a home – it’s kind of like a frame of a house – and we’ll build that together. Just the idea that: if I sing two notes in A then the same A again its not the same as the first one. I’m constantly trying to find ways to make people sound deeper.”

There is a spectre that stands across the stage from John. A man who is, in all likelihood, the most famous bass player on the planet. So what is really like trading parts with the ever extrovert, outgoing spotlight-hogger that is Flea? First up, John puts us straight by telling us that Flea is, in fact ‘quiet’, ‘small’ and ‘humble’. Very much the antithesis of his stage persona.

“In the band, everybody is an equal. Me and Flea especially have a deep connection in the way we play – we like a lot of the same music which is a big part of it, I think. And there’s no drummer who could be better than Chad. Maybe ‘cos I’ve played with him for such a long time, and he’s the guy I was playing with when I found myself as a guitar player, I’m so comfortable playing with him. I always know exactly what to play over it. It just comes so naturally.”

‘Coming naturally’ is exactly how John describes the process of writing and recording his solo efforts. He recently released his third album, To Record Only Water For Ten Days, a similarly lo-fi affair to his last two, but with a happier, new-found, respect for life. Written while touring with the Chilis between November 1999 and April 2000, John recorded it on an eight-track, and is the only musician on the album.

“I get the idea for a song and I can have it completely finished in in two hours,” he says. “They just come to me, and as soon as they do. I don’t stop writing, or singing into the tape recorder until the song is finished.” His speedy working means he’s already working on number four. “There’s a lot of harmonies and stuff – me and Josh (the drummer he’s now working with) are really good at singing harmonies. I think we’re doing a really new thing here – it’s almost Beatles-like harmonies. Also Velvet Underground and Depeche Mode.”

John appears happier now as a musician than he has ever been. He is more confident, and has finally, as he sees it, “found his way”. The way, however, is a far cry from what were quite unsure beginnings.

“I was 11 years old when I first picked up the guitar. After hearing the Germs… I mean, I know I always wanted to play guitar – voices in my head were telling me: ‘You’re gonna be a guitarist.’ But I didn’t really believe it. When you’re a little kid and you look at Led Zeppelin, Kiss or whatever, it all seems so, like another world. When you imagine yourself being in the place of one of those people, it’s crazy but when I discovered punk rock and new wave, I realised I could do it. I felt spiritually we were made up of the same thing, and it made me see from what perspective and viewpoint I was gonna come from.”

No surprise then, that the first thing John learnt to play was the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks album: “I learnt the whole thing to convince my Dad that I was dedicated to the guitar. And I loved Black Flag… the song Revenge (from the Decline of Western Civilisation soundtrack) – the live version – that was the first time I ever tried to learn a solo. It wasn’t a very successful attempt ‘cos I was very haphazard,” he laughs. “And there’s a lot of noisy feedback so you can’t just learn the solo by playing all the notes.”

John describes the effect the Germs’ (later to become onetime Foo Fighters guitarist) Pat Smear had on the boy Frusciante.

“He was the main guitarist I was inspired by because, at the recording of the Germs first show that I heard on the radio, it sounded like they’d only been playing their instruments for a month. And that’s how long they had. But it was the spirit of going into it that was beautiful. It was more beautiful than any music I’d ever heard. It made the style that he would later unleash on the world in the shape of Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Despite the playing on the album still sounding fresh and funky ten years down the road, the guitarist confesses that he wasn’t completely happy.

“That time was a sort of balancing act, of the show-off style I had when I was a teenager, in between 15 and 18 when it was my sole purpose as a musician to show everybody how good I was. I was real flashy. But then I realised that that kind of guitar playing was lame and full of shit, and what mattered were the colours and the shapes and sounds that you created as a musician, and not what you were physically doing… This kind of balancing act worked really well for a couple of years, but then I just felt like I was left with nothing.” Which is another of the reasons John quit playing for a while. These days, he’s got a style that’s very much his own, and doesn’t feel the need to demonstrate how fast he can move his fingers up and down the fretboard.

Despite the perceptions of a large chunk of the record buying public, Frusciante doesn’t rate Blood Sugar Sex Magik as the definitive funk rock album.

“To me, funk rock came more from Mother’s Milk,” he argues. “There is elements of it on Blood Sugar, yeah, but to me Mother’s Milk is more of a one dimensional kinda funk rock thing. None of us in the band are really big fans of Blood Sugar. And when we meet other bands, it seems that Mother’s Milk is the album that they’re really excited about.

Suggest funk rock to John and he’d rather talk about his predecessors, anyway.

“I like those early Funkadlic records a lot – those are probably the best examples of funk and metal that I’ve ever heard (check out the Funkadelic tab in the boxout on the previous page). But when I rejoined the Chili Peppers, I felt like I wanted to get away from multitracking guitars and playing ‘cos I didn’t want my guitar sound to be like this big monster.”

Frusciante explains that he has developped his technique considerably over the last year and a half on tour with the Chili Peppers.

“I use [my technique] in a completely different way to what I did when I was a youngster,” he says. “I don’t learn from other guitarists. I learn synthesizer parts usually. Depeche Mode songs, I learn all the synth parts (check out the synth pastiche tab in the boxout below). I’ll sit on the back of the tour bus, listening to Music For The Masses or something, and play every part I’m hearing. I can play along four times and each time play something different – just taking on different parts. I’ll also learn techno music, sequencer parts. No-one usually plays everything that’s programmed, but I’ll learn it on the guitar. It takes a lot of technical precision, it’s often really fast. It’s things you would never hear in Chili peppers’ songs – the spirit of it is myself – but the sound of it is like nothing I’ve ever done, because I’m playing in a way that’s completely textural, not rooted in the blues or guitar playing at all. It’s more like Kraftwerk, I also like other guitarists who play very texturally – Keith Levine fropm PIL, Johnny Marr from the Smiths. During Californication, I tried to learn stuff like that, but I couldn’t hear the chords or the notes. But my ear’s gotten better again and now I can hear those sorts of things.”

John couldn’t be on better form. In over ten years – on and off – with the Chili Peppers, he’s become an icon for thousands, probably millions of guitar players. A hat he seems happy enough to wear.

“It’s great,” he smiles. “‘Cos I’m very pure with my intentions. I make music to make my friends feel good, and to make myself feel good. I don’t make music to get along and be a rock icon. I believe that the relationship somebody has with someone – as an idol – is such a beautiful relationship, and it brings out the spiritual life of the person. When you sit and absorb something – like a movie, or a beautiful song – you’re very spiritually potent at those moments.
“All I want, is to make myself the best guitarist I can be,” says John. An honest enough ambition, and one he shares with guitar players the world over. “I’ve got to be the best version of John Frusciante that I can be. A few years ago it might have seemed like there were better John Frusciante’s but now… Now I’m as good as I can possibly be.”

Editor’s Choice

We asked John to choose the songs that helped him become the player he is today, that he thinks could improve your playing. We couldn’t tab them all – but we managed half, and here’s his best list of recommendations in full.

Joy Divison – “Shadowplay”
The Germs – “The Slave”
Iggy & The Stooges – “Gimme Danger”
Fugazi – “Last Chance For a Slow Dance”
Blind Blake – “Southern Rag”
Bow Wow Wow – “Orangutang”
Led Zeppelin – “Can’t Quit You Baby”
The Smiths – “Back To The Old House”

Funkadelic Pastiche

Rock and funk have rarely sounded as good as with Funkadelic – George Clinton’s more rocky and psychedelic band after having founded Parliament (he moved freely between the two during the 70s). This example demonstrates guitarists Eddie Hazel and Lucius Ross rhythmic riffing using the A minor pentatonic (A C D E G) ‘blues box’. Use your bridge pick-up, a moderate amount of crunchy distortion and make sure it grooves hard!

Chili Peppers Synth Pastiche

This mixes up John’s playing on Parallel Universe with Flea’s sequencer like playing on Right On Time (ie repetitive 16th notes in octaves). It not only sounds great alongside the complimentary bass line (almost exclusively creating thirds), but its constant alternate picked 16th notes with string skips and palm muted, is a good picking technique workout. Add a moderate amount of phaser effect and a touch of delay to a mild overdriven tone, and you’ll end up with quite a 1970s Giorgio Moroder like synth part.