John Frusciante
My alarm went off, but didn’t wake me. I was already up and had been for most of the night. It’s not every day that you get to meet your idol. As the car pulled up to Toronto’s Four Seasons, I began to have an ever-clearing picture of what it looks like to see a grown man shit his pants.
How many years had I been inspired and moulded by this guy’s playing? How many times had I day dreamed about meeting him? And how many times had I fantasized about all the things I would ask him if I ever got the chance? None of that mattered now. I was already on the elevator headed up to his room with three pages of trite, over thought questions that were not really of any interest to me that seemed like the intelligent type of questions you would ask if you were a reporter. But I’m not a reporter; I’m a guitarist and a song-writer who is about to meet his biggest influence.
There was no way I was going to ruin any of this by looking down at notes and talking about the same old shit that I hated being asked myself. As the door opened, we met face to face and my questions soared out the window as we talked about what has influenced the famed Red Hot Chili Pepper guitarist, John Frusciante, of late. Including his two hours of yoga earlier in the day, the big-breasted women of the Russ Meyer movie he watched earlier, and how Andy Warhol’s movies influence his music. But let’s cut to the chase: John’s guitar playing.
James Black: How do you write music? How do you form ideas?
John Frusciante: When I play the guitar or when I write music, I don’t do anything unless it’s an idea in my head first. I don’t let my hands just do whatever they want to do. I don’t play things as far as just not think about it, just do whatever my subconscious lets happen, happen. I have to have it perfectly formed as an idea in my head to feel that it’s worthwhile I’ll sit there and do nothing. If I’m at rehearsal with my band I’ll just listen to them play. If I don’t feel any music inside me, I just won’t play until I really hear something in my head that’s worth playing. Or I’ll play one note every bar or whatever. I don’t do something unless It’s an idea. To me when you hear things in which the idea is solid before the execution of it the feeling is much more pronounced and much more definite.
JB: That brings to mind the solo in ‘I Could Have Lied’ I wanted to ask you about it because it has always been a favourite and it has that feeling to roe that beyond the notes that you’re playing there’s some other magical emotion attached to it. When you’re doing solos do you have it ali mapped out first and then it’s just a matter of execution?
JF: That solo that I played on the record is pretty much the exact solo that I played the day Anthony [Kiedis, the Peppers’ vocalist] and I wrote the song when we recorded it on my 4-track. It was a real heavy day. He was really feeling bad about this girl who didn’t like him who he really liked, and we drove around talking about it all day. It was raining, really rainy He wanted to write a song about it and I came up with this music and he went to his house and came up with the lyrics we put our two things together and we recorded it, then I just did the solo. It was improvised, but every note that I played I was still imagining it before I played it. Which isn’t always how I played back then, sometimes back then I would do what I was just talking about. Just let my hands go wherever they went and separate myself from it, which I learned a lot from But that solo I remember I was very much trying to have every note be in its perfect place. When you’ve got feelings to work off of, like the fact that it’s raining, or the fact that your friend is feeling bad, the ideas that appear in your head before you execute them have more weight The ideas that come naturally to you at those points are going to be the thicker kind of feelings.
JB: I would say that no matter what environment I listen to that song in I would get that vibe, of a rainy day. With your new album [To Record Only Water For Ten Days], which I love by the way, are there those kinds of memories attached to every song, a certain weight to every single note?
JF: Thanks. A lot of the feelings and a lot of the images in the words are rooted in a period of time where I would have a lot of visions. It would be like I was dreaming but I was awake, but I would see a film in my head. I’ve always had all of these voices in my head since I was a little kid. They always kept me interested in life and always said interesting things to me but we didn’t really start working really well as a team in any way until I was 21, but it was short lived. Then went another few years of absorption, where I wasn’t really producing that much with my lite but they were telling me a lot of things and they were teaching me all kinds of things For the last three years, we’ve been working in conjunction with each other again I feel like it was those years of absorbing all the things that they had to teach me, has gone into every one of these songs, and everything to come.
JB: Do you write lyrics from beginning to end or are they just pieced together from different writings you’ve had?
JF: When I write a song I finish the whole thing When the idea comes to me I write all the lyrics in one sitting, sometimes it takes two or three hours, or maybe longer, or maybe shorter. But I don’t stop until the song is finished until all the lyrics are written I’m very disciplined just about the craft of writing songs and if I can’t think of words for a song then I just figure it’s not meant to be a song if no words come to me but usually they do.
JB: Your earlier solo stuff was very bare bones, mostly just a guitar and a voice did you use keyboards and drum loops on this new album as a result of having too much to say, so much that just the guitar wouldn’t do?
JF: Well that was just the sound that I heard in my head. A few years ago, about four years ago, I’d pretty, much been painting for five years but I was really starting to think about music and really thinking about the possibility of making a third record. I felt that I had written some really good songs in my life but I knew that the versions of the songs that I’d released weren’t the ultimate versions of those songs I felt like the versions that I’d released were beautiful and they were perfectly representative of a feeling and a time but they didn’t have any drams and they didn’t have any bass. They weren’t fully orchestrated songs. I just felt like the feelings of thee songs I used to write what would be the way to make them full because it never sounded right when I played them with a bassist or a drummer.
JB: Why was that, just not on the same page?
JF: Maybe I was just playing with the wrong people but it never sounded right to me. I didn’t really know about the vocabulary of electronic music because I didn’t really listen to much electronic music. I think the only completely electronic music I was listening to in 1991 was the Residents They do have some completely electronic things but even they’re not completely electronic.
JB: Did you listen to Depeche Mode or anything like that?
JF: Now I do, but at that time I didn’t I was hearing Depeche Mode type sounds in my head when I would hear my music but I lust didn’t have any friends into it When I finally started listening to stuff like that, about 3 1/2 years ago, Depeche Mode and Homogenic by Björk, I was hearing all these sounds that I had been hearing in my head for all these years. I’d been writing songs but just didn’t really know they were possible.
JB: Would you say your writing was limited to the extent of what you were listening to? Or are you someone who shies away from listening to all kinds of music because you want to maintain you own original, personal vision?
JF: I listen to everything. And back then I was listening to a variety of music it just didn’t include completely electronic music. At that period in my life, when I made my first solo record, I was listening to things like Eric Dolphy and Charles Mingus and blues people like Robert Johnson… ragtime people like Blind Blake.
JB: I read you were into Syd Barrett.
JF: Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart. That was the kind of stuff I was listening to when I found myself as a songwriter. But it all lead to a period where I didn’t write songs at all. My music became so scattered and all over the place that it wasn’t really focused and I wasn’t really making coherent songs. So three years ago I decided it was going to be my objective to pull myself together and really do some things that were focused and whatever music I was going to make I wanted it to be the best that it could be I felt like I know the feeling that is John Frusciante’s life I know the feeling that is John Frusciante’s music. I have to make music that is exactly that feeling, and music where that feeling is in as simple of a form as absolutely possible.
JB: How do you go about picking the right sounds? On this new record there’s so many great guitar tones and keyboard sounds, did you take a lot of time to mic your guitar, or was it just set up and go?
JF: I don’t know anything about engineering. I’m just going by the feeling in my head. I have this sort of building, built in my head, of the song. When I’m flipping around on my synthesizer, turning knobs and switching switches when I hear a sound that can be used it locks into a part of the building in my head.
JB: Have you always done that?
JF: No, this is lust the way it’s been the last couple of years. Like I said, when I made my first record I didn’t know I would hear just the guitar chords and the vocals and I would hear feelings in my head like I do now but I didn’t know what corresponded with those feelings.
JB: Would you say that rhythm is a huge part of your guitar playing style and your writing style? Not so much notes but I find that your strumming is always so strong, it’s like every note you hit has its own percussion to it, is that a big part of the way you hear music?
JF: My right hand is something that I’ve worked at in the last three years, at making every kind of muscle that could be used in my wrist strong. I noticed that when I was a kid and I would practice guitar I would play a scale over and over, but I was using hardly anything, I was using these two little muscles in your wrist to do a scale It’s a very, small portion of what you have as far as musculature in your wrist on your right hand. In the last three years I’ve concentrated much more on all the different ways to hit the guitar — making all the muscles strong that there is in the wrist. Johnny Ramone, as far as I know, was the first guitar player who wrote a multitude of songs where he was always doing down strokes, he never did any up strokes.
JB: I noticed that in Funky Monks [1991 video chronicling the recording of Blood Sugar Sex Magik]. When you’re recording `Soul to Squeeze’ you’re playing it all down strokes. I realized that that’s why it sounds so good. So that’s something that you’ve practiced and obsessed over?
JF: That’s what punk rock is about Once in a while you get a punk rock band that doesn’t do that but that’s how most good punk rock guitarists play I find that by being good at that I have a lot more to work with when I’m playing funk, or reggae.
JB: So it always starts with a guitar and then you add the other stuff later?
JF: It starts with a guitar in the writing of it and that’s always the main element in the songs. But the first thing I do when I record is record the drum machine, program the drums first because you have to (laughs)
JB: Did you find that you had to readjust as a guitarist playing with a machine versus a live drummer as far as character and maintaining a human quality?
JF: No. Lately I’ve been playing with a real drummer — I found a drummer who thinks the way I think and plays the way I would play if I was a drummer. It’s been working a lot, but it’s because my new songs have a more natural kind of feeling than the songs on my album. To me, the songs on my album, when I wrote them, I was imagining them having this sort of mechanical kind of feeling That was the kind of music that I imagined myself making three years ago, for my next record I wanted to make music that was like the paintings that I wanted to do but wasn’t capable of doing, which would have been these machines from other dimensions or machines you wouldn’t find on this planet that were warm.
JB: I’d say that you achieved that. There seems to be a very fine line that you can walk to have all of these electronic elements, but still have it be a guy and a guitar. How does it work with the Chili Peppers, being one of four guys? Is it a different John represented in the Chili Peppers than your solo stuff? Would you want people to say that these are two very different musical people?
JF: Yeah. The way each person plays in the Chili Peppers is very much the result of the way the other people play When Anthony writes his vocals, he doesn’t feel like he’s responsible for the vocals for a song that he wrote. He feels like it was our music that made him sing that way and that made those words come to him He thinks he was just listening to the music and it was us that made him do what he did. I feel like the way I play guitar is completely a result of having Flea playing bass with me. If I didn’t have that I wouldn’t have the style that I have. If any individual person in the Chili Peppers made a solo record, it wouldn’t sound anything like the Chili Peppers. I’ve been writing music since I was a little kid. Since I was 11 years old, when I wrote my first songs and I’m lucky enough to have two musical lives.
JB: Were you playing guitar at 11?
JF: That’s when I started.
JB: What were your reasons for starting? Who where you favourite players?
JF: It was punk guitarists. It was Pat Smear from the Germs, Greg Ginn from Black Flag, Greg Hetson from the Circle Jerks, Steve Jones in the Sex Pistols and Johnny Ramone.
JB: I heard somewhere that before you were in the band, you used to jam along to the old Chili Pepper albums Is that true?
JF: Oh yeah! They were my favourite band. I knew all the guitar parts — all the bass parts I used to see them constantly in clubs — they were my favourite I used to just think about them all the time.
JB: I’ve found that when you finally get a glimpse of what goes on “behind the scenes”, when you see what really goes on behind closed doors, that it’s a bit of a let down. Is it still as magical for you now, being on the other side?
JF: It’s more magical than ever.
That’s when we were cut off. Our time was up I got the feeling from John, as I packed up my stuff, that we both could have sat there for hours talking about Robert Fripp, King Crimson and other things we don’t normally get to talk about, but all great things must come to an end And this was truly a great thing. An event that I will never forget and a glimpse of “behind the scenes” that was far from a let down.
James Black is guitarist for Finger Eleven.
