Freak Patrol Reporting For Duty: Calipurification
“Music meant everything to me when I was growing up. I practiced constantly ,music was my whole life. But I reached where I didn’t want to listen to music anymore. I could not hear it, because it became ugly to me. Then, gradually, I could listen to it, but I didn’t want to play it. I had to build myself back up from nothing.”
John Frusciante, the former and now reinstated guitarist with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, reflects on the dark abyss within which he resided for the five years following his 1991 departure from the band.
“Up until about three and a half years ago, not only could I not make people feel good with music, I couldn’t make people feel good period. I couldn’t make people smile anymore. I was a very sad sight. I was still happy to be me, and I was proud of myself. But no one else was proud of me, and no one else was happy about where I was”
Frusciante has clearly come a very long way. His triumphant return to the Chili Peppers helped turn Californication into the most commercially successful album of the band’s career, and has sparked a renewed enthusiasm within the group. As the Chili Peppers take a much deserved break, Frusciante has released his third solo album, To Record Only Water For Ten Days, following 1995’s Niandra LaDes and Usually Just A T-shirt and 1997’s Smile From The Streets You Hold.
Written, performed, recorded and produced entirely by Frusciante, To Record Only Water For Ten Days reveals the influences of kindred spirits Lou Reed, David Bowie and Syd Barrett, not to mention Depeche Mode and New Order. Lyrically, the album explores the mental and emotional anguish that had tormented Frusciante for many years.
“The lyrics on this record reflect ideas, visions and thoughts that had been going on in my head from that five year period that I was not in the band, but which I had been incapable of expressing.”
Frusciante, sitting in a conference room at the New York offices of Warner Bros Records, pauses to open a suitcase filled with an assortment of natural food supplements and holistic remedies, and extracts two very large bottles of liquid from which he pours portions of each into his bottled water, concocting a cloudy gray-green elixir.
“The fact that I’m now able to write an album that can make people happy when they hear it is a great accomplishment for me.”
When told his return to the band was a welcome sight for a great many RHCP fans, Frusciante smiles broadly and says, “I’m glad I’m back, too. As a matter of fact, at the last show we played, I did the Gary Glitter song, It’s Good To Be Back.'” He laughs.”I just couldn’t resist.”
Guitar World: Where does the title of your new record, To record Only Water For ten Days, come from?
John Frusciante: When I left the Chili Peppers, I stopped playing and did nothing but paint. About three and a half years ago, I finally decided that I wanted to play music again, because I felt, with painting, I had been unable to create something that was a true expression of my spirit. I knew that with music, if I worked at it, I could create a truer reflection of the places in my head.
Guitar World: Had painting always been a part of your background?
John Frusciante: No. It was something I began to focus on while we were writing the music for Blood Sugar Sex Magik. I loved to draw when I was a kid, but that was about it. Following the great creative peak of recording BSSM, the positive feelings I had had began to dissipate. My recordings had gone to from these happy, optimistic things, to celebrations of the surreal, to really scattered, demonic-sounding things like the sound of someone whose mind was about to explode. That’s when I quit the band and stopped playing music. Then, about three and a half years ago, I knew I wanted to play music again but didn’t really have the ability. I had made some unsuccessful attempts at recording music. I heard this voice in my head say, “You are very off-balance and impure inside yourself.” The voice gave me this advice: I should imagine that my body is a tape recorder and figure out what it would mean to record only water for ten days. I know that it’s always a good idea for me to listen to the voices, because they have always spoken the truth to me, and they are never wrong. The correlation is that drinking water for 10 days is an act of purification for the body, but I knew I could not do that at that time. But I could record only water for ten days: I could record a river, a sink, a bathtub there are a million ways to record the sound of water. When you listen to a recording of water, the sound actually creates positive ions in the air, which has a very good effect on the vibe of a room. This is a proven fact. People who grow hydroponically will sometimes have a waterfall in the room, solely for the effect the sound of the water has on the potency of the weed. I know it works, because the strongest weed I ever smoked was grown this way. To me, the voice meant that I had to spend about two years purifying myself. I’m still purifying myself, and I will continue to for the rest of my life. But when I heard that voice, I was a person with feelings that I had no ability to bring out.
Guitar World: Were all of the songs on the new record written in the last three years?
John Frusciante: All of the songs were written between November 1999 and April 2000. I hadn’t written anything for five years before that, but I had spirits guiding me and helping me through hard times. At a certain point, when I started my life over again, I felt it was very important for me to work really hard on the lyrics. Music is once again the most important thing in my life. I practice now with the same ferocity that I did when I was a teenager, but my approach is much more efficient , and my view overall is much broader. One of the strongest forces of positivity in the world is music the purpose of a rock musician’s job is to make people feel good; it’s a purpose very much like that of a doctor or psychologist. Music can straighten out people’s lives in profound ways, because music helps us to make sense out of life, either through our interpretation of the lrics or our response to the music itself.
Guitar World: The intro of To Record Only Water’s opener, “Going inside” features a very bizarre-sounding, super-distorted guitar melody.
John Frusciante: That’s not guitar; that’s my voice. [laughs] I was singing through a compressor with the volumes all the way up, and I had the fader on the tape machine all the way up too, completely overdriving the channel. I did a similar thing on track 12 of Usually Just A T-shirt: I sang through a guitar amp, with loads of reverb, and I recorded it backward. When Flea heard it, he said, How did you get that crazy guitar sound?
Guitar World: During the second half of the “Going inside” intro, the vocal sounds like a slide guitar.
John Frusciante: That was done by adding silence: after the vocal part was recorded, I erased portions of the sound quickly pushing and releasing the record button. I was rather impressed with myself that it worked out so well!
Guitar World: That technique is in line with a painterly approach because, in painting, you can subtract by adding meaning that you eliminate parts of an image by painting blank space. By using the record button, you add silence, or blank space, to existing music.
John Frusciante: Subtracting by adding is a great way to put it. I always approach music with painter’s terms. I like to read Leonardo DaVinci’s notebooks, and his advice to painters serves as my main guide as a creative musician; I’m always trying to apply those things to the guitar.
Guitar World: Can you give a example?
John Frusciante: In painting, Da Vinci was trying to master nature, in terms of recreating the world around him. In music, I feel we’re reflecting places and shapes from the fourth dimension, where substantial, solid feelings exist in a nonphysical world. When a feeling or a thought inspires me, and I want to turn that into a musical idea, I have to take it out of a timeless dimension and bring it into a dimension based on time. DaVinci goes into great detail about things such as how an old person should be drawn compared to how a young person should be drawn, and I’ve made a correlation to playing the guitar. Specifically, when I practiced as a kid, I’d go through scales, or play what I considered to be the hardest things to play. Also, if I played a reggae song, I’d hit the guitar the same way as if I was playing a heavy metal song. But when you play reggae, the way you should pick or strum the strings is entirely different from playing fast metal solos. The same is true when you play a Ramones song [plays a series of power chords, using all down-strokes, at breakneck speed]. It takes a lot of muscle to be able to do that without tightening up. With the guitar, there are an infinite number of ways to hit it and to pull sounds out of it. It all comes down to the kinds of colors and shapes you want to put into the air.
—Andy Aledort
