Magic John
Red Hot Chili Pepper John Frusciante channels spirits on his new solo album, To Record Only Water For Ten Days.
“Whenever somebody comes over to my house now,” says John Frusciante, “I ask them if they want to hear my new song – whatever I’ve just written. I’ll get my guitar and sing for them.” Frusciante’s recent guests are lucky. The first time I visited the guitarist’s Hollywood Hills home, for a 1991 interview, he vomited and exposed himself. But Frusciante has come a long way since the early Nineties, when he was by far the most drug-addled and out-of-control member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers – an outfit celebrated far and wide for being drug-addled and out of control. Frusciante’s problems led to his departure from the band in 1992, but good behavior led to his reinstatement in 1997. He’s now back in the saddle, drug free, and enjoying the success of the Chili Peppers’ recent album, Californication. And while his earlier solo albums – 1994’s Niandra Ladies & Usually Just a T-shirt and 1997’s Smile From the Streets You Hold – were abstract and often meandering, his newest disc, To Record Only Water for Ten Days (Warner Bros.) is a collection of focused, melodic, mostly acoustic guitar-based songs, with an overlay of analog synthesizers and drum machines that reflect Frusciante’s love of the synth-pop Eighties. The songs have the quiet, intimate feel of home recordings. Far removed from the Chili Peppers’ testosterone-drenched funk metal sound, they reflect a more contemplative side of Frusciante that will surprise many.
The guitarist’s music and manners have grown more tractable over the years, but he’s still a pretty unusual character. He claims to have spent much of the Nineties in contact with the spirit world, and that many of his best friends are visitors from the “astral plane.” He describes To Record Only Water For Ten Days as a musical expression of the feelings and ideas he’s received from the spirits.
He’s in good company. Down through the years, artists as celebrated and diverse as William Blake and Carlos Santana have described intimate collaborations with incorporeal forces. But only John Frusciante could have made To Record Only Water for Ten Days.
Guitar World Acoustic: When did your contact with the spiritual world begin?
Frusciante: Around the time the Chili Peppers were writing Blood Sugar Sex Magik. I started playing a little game with myself, where when I was playing guitar I’d say “Okay, I’m going to leave my body now.” And when I would do that, I found that the music coming out of me was much better than anything I’d ever done. It became obvious to me that these energies were possessing my body. I would just get out of the way and let the energies play my guitar for me. So I just started to have this natural sort of belief in these spiritual forces. And as my beliefs became more concrete, they started revealing themselves to me more. I always heard voices in my head as little kid, but now I had an excessive amount of voices in my head all the time. Having conversations with me. Telling me about the future. They’d say something was going to happen in two minutes – and it would. They would do these things to tell me they were in tune with and could see the future. Because the future has already happened many times. They don’t live in a dimension that has time, but they feed off the energies of people who do live in time.
So by the time I quit the Chili Peppers in 1992, I was devoting myself to nothing but magical progress. I got to the point, five years later, where I could sit in a room with a ghost or an astral body for half an hour at a time. Which takes a tremendous amount of concentration.
Guitar World Acoustic: Do drugs make one more receptive to the spiritual world? Or less so?
Frusciante: I’ve seen them do both. I would say that there are better and longer-lasting ways of getting in that kind of world than taking drugs. In my experience, drugs definitely were a good way of shutting out the real world and going headfirst into a world that had nothing to do with the material plane. But the thing is the material plane is very much a reflection of other dimensions. And other dimensions get a lot of juice and energy from the material plane. And I now have a very rich inward life functioning as part of the world.
So it worked out for me. But most people don’t have five years to throw away form their normal course of life to become a drug addict and shut out the world the way I did. I guess because of money and stuff, I had the opportunity to do that. But I’ve come back into the world now. And through the last few years of not taking any drugs, I found a way to feel even more high and get al the feelings I was trying to get from drugs. There’s a way to do it. It has to do with purifying yourself, eating extremely healthy and doing whatever kind of exercise supplies you well. And there are other things, like being pure of intention. I don’t have any kind of drive. I often think that’s the reason I’ve been able to be successful with music – twice! It has a lot to do with the fact that I don’t give a fuck about being successful. I don’t depend on that for my happiness. I can be happy whether I’m a loser or a winner. I still love myself either way.
Guitar World Acoustic: The album title – To Record Only Water for Ten Days – sounds a little like a reference to fasting. Because there are those who drink nothing but water when fasting.
Frusciante: Originally, that’s what it meant to me. But I started to realize that fasting was maybe the way a guru in India could purify himself. But somebody who’s lived the life I’ve lived had to do it another way that was gonna take longer. So the album title is a reference to what I had to do to purify myself. It’s like imagining one’s body as a tape recorder, and what it would mean to record only water for 10 days, or whatever period of time. I was so infested with all kinds of spirits eight years ago that it was really necessary for me to have a certain amount of fights and battles to cleanse myself. To make it so that I was capable of making music that was a pure reflection of the places in the universe that I think are really beautiful.
Guitar World Acoustic: But you didn’t actually record water at any point?
Frusciante: No. But to me, the music is as pure as if you were listening to the sounds of water. My music is that pure because I’ve worked at making myself that pure.
