Killing Yourself to Live – The Trials of John Frusciante
What do you do when you’re the guitarist in a global funk phenomenon? Listen to the 400 ghosts in your head, leave the band and spend six years doing so much coke and heroin that all your teeth fall out, of course…
The voices in John Frusciante’s head were getting harder and harder to ignore. They had been speaking to him for as long as Frusciante could remember – it was largely because of them that he first picked up the guitar at the age of seven. But for months now, they were predicting disaster, telling him he had to move on, urging him to abandon the life he had carved out for himself over the past four years. And deep down the 22-year-old guitarist knew they were right.
In the quiet of a Tokyo hotel room Frusciante had time to reflect upon where it had all gone wrong. When he’d been asked to join the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1988, it was a dream come true. The Peppers were his favourite band: Anthony Kiedis and Flea his personal heroes. For the first couple of years, Frusciante threw himself headlong into the rock’n’roll whirl, taking full advantage of all the temptations laid before him. But it didn’t take long for the dream to turn sour. The sex became routine, the drinking and drug-taking monotonous, the fame and adulation embaraasing.
Frusciante had always wanted to be a musician, but music now played such a tiny role in the circus that was his day-to-day life. Being a rock star, he realised, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The voices in his head told him to quit when he’d finished laying down his guitar parts for ‘BloodSugarSexMagik’. But the band were getting on better than ever, and hitting new creative heights, so he chose to ignore them. On the road, however, it all started going horribly wrong. The record company wanted more photo sessions and more interviews. The fans wanted nudity and the hit singles played live exactly as they had been played in Rick Rubin’s Hollywood home in the spring of 1991. The guitarist hated the showbiz he felt the band were falling into and hated being treated as a performing monkey. But nobody cared much for what John Frusciante wanted at all.
And so on May 7, 1992 Frusciante announced his intention to leave the Chili Peppers, one day into the band’s Japanese tour. Though he’d been difficult to work with during their earlier European trek (“I did want to kick his little fucking ass sometimes,” Chad Smith would later confess) his bandmates pleaded with him to change his mind. Reluctantly, he agreed to play one more show. When the quartet took to the stage of the Omiya Sonic City Hall in Saitama that night, Anthony Kiedis took the guitarist aside and gestured to the 2,500 part faces staring up at them as if to say, “Look at this, look at what we’ve achieved, look what you’d be leaving behind.” Frusciante wasn’t swayed. The following morning he flew back to Los Angeles. And, for a little while, the voices in his head weren’t quite so shrill any more.
To get an idea of John Frusciante’s mindset in his final years in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you need only to listen to the music on his first solo album, 1994’s ‘Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt’. Recorded on a four-track tape recorder and heavily influenced by sonic eccentrics Syd Barret and Captain Beefheart, the bizarrely-titled ‘songs’ (‘Your Pussy’s Glued To A Building On Fire’, ‘Blood on my Neck From Success’), with their scratchy acoustic guitar and surrealist nonsensical stream-of-consciousness lyrics, are the sound of overloaded mental circuitry melting down. The recordings spanned a time period between the ‘BloodSugarSexMagik’ sessions and the months immediately prior to his departure from the band, and as the album unfolds, the decline in his mental state is all too obvious. As he told a US magazine at the time: “My recordings had gone 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.”
Frusciante wasn’t using this kind of language solely for effect. At the time he claimed to have “400 ghosts” in his mind telling him what to do. “I wasn’t spiritually protected against the spirits that meant me no good,” he related. “Ghosts that are just there to fuck with me and drive me crazy, I couldn’t discern between them and the ones that were helping me and I was so confused. Everything that I was learning seemed to be pulling me towards death. I saw death in everything around me. And everything that was beautiful represented everything that was sad, lost and gone.”
As Frusciante wallowed in depression in the Hollywood Hills in the summer of 1992, his erstwhile bandmates initially hadn’t time to offer their sympathy. ‘Under The Bridge’ was just breaking big on US radio, and the band were very much the new darlings of the alt-rock set as they embarked upon that summer’s Lollapalooza tour. Anthony Kiedis felt betrayed by the guitarist’s exit, and it would be five years before he spoke a single word to Frusciante. Flea, the Chili Pepper closest to the guitarist while he was still a member of the band, was more sympathetic. When the band returned to LA, he would occasionally drop by Frusciante’s home to jam with his old friend. More often than now, he would arrive to find Frusciante lying on his couch, wholly uninterested in doing anything.
In his bid to shake off this numbing torpor, the guitarist decided to embark upon a rather radical person of spiritual re-alignment. Step one involved putting his guitar to one side and channeling his artistic energies into his painting instead. Step two, he decided, even more radically, would be to start taking heroin and cocaine all the time. “When I was on them was the only time I was happy,” he reasoned. “So I figured there was no disadvantage in it. I felt I was doing something good and healthy for myself and I didn’t care if other people said it was unhealthy. Having being surrounded by junkies for much of his adult life, Flea initially stuck by Frusciante and his new lifestyle choice. But as Frusciante’s drug addiction rapidly escalated into staggering abuse, the bassist’s visits become more and more infrequent.
“I didn’t think his brain and body could stand up to the amount of drugs he was doing,” Flea would later confess. Frusciante understood. “Two people can’t have any kind of consistent relationship when one of them is a junkie,” he explained. “We did drugs together once in a while, but for Flea is was a recreational thing, for me, it was my life.” But he was too far down his chosen path to be deflected, even when the potential dangers of his addiction were highlighted in the starkest, most tragic way imaginable.
The Chili Peppers had been friends with rising Hollywood star River Phoenix for several years. The actor had worked with Flea on ‘My Own Private Idaho’ (directed by Gus Van Sant who also directed the Peppers’ ‘Under The Bridge’ promo) and had collaborated with Frusciante on two songs ‘Bought Her Soul’ and ‘Soul Removal’. On the night of October 30, 1993, Phoenix went with his sister Rain and girlfriend Samantha Mathis to Johnny Depp’s Viper Room club on LA’s Sunset Boulevard. Details of the night remain sketchy, but at some point Phoenix took heroin, and just after 1am, he staggered out of the club and collapsed on the sidewalk, his body racked by violent seizures. By 2am the young actor was dead, as a result of what the LA Coroners’ Office would describe as “acute multiple drug intoxication”.
The Chili Peppers camp were devastated by their friend’s death. Hearing the news in New York on the way before his 31st birthday, Anthony Kiedis claims to have wept for 24 hours. Flea – who would later celebrate his friend’s life with the lyrics to ‘Transcending’ (“I called you hippy, you said fuck off”) on the Peppers’ 1995 album ‘One Hot Minute’ – had something of a breakdown. Yet Frusciante, while talking about having lost “a playmate”, refused to see Phoenix’s death as a wake-up call. The previous year, the voices in his head had told him that he was to take drugs for six years: he still had five to go.
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