Killing Yourself to Live – The Trials of John Frusciante
Hollywood has always loved the misfits, and among a certain achingly fashionable clique, John Frusciante’s drug-fuelled spiritual quest was considered noble and admirable. Some time in 1994 Johnny Depp and Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes visited Frusciante’s home to document the guitarist’s lifestyle for a short movie (later sent out to journalists to promouse the release of ‘Niandra LaDes and Usually Just A T-Shirt’). Filmed in black-and-white, the abstract movie featured a cameo from 60’s drug guru Timothy Leary, and rambling, mumbled monologues from the man of the house which reflected his chaotic, squalid surroundings. As the camera panned around the house, scrawls of graffiti reading, “my eye hurts” and “stabbing pain with discipline’s knife” flashed into view. This was not the home of a happy man. The art set considered the piece, simply titled “Stuff”, haunting and affecting. Many others who saw it, though, considered it distasteful voyeurism of the worst kind, an uneccessary, cruel vacation into one man’s nightmarish existence.
In 1995, more strangers would visit Frusciante’s home, as Rick Rubin’s American Recodings label gently pushed the guitarist into promotional chores for ‘Niandra LaDes…’ Frusciante was a genial host to the media folk who dropped in on him, and more lucid and together than the rumours surrounding him may have suggested. He talked his love of artists Vincent van Gogh and Marcel Duchamp, sang the praises of his girlfriend Toni and told the world that he was jamming with Flea again, the two old friends having started an instrumental project called The Three Amoebas with former Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins. He was still given to bizarre pronouncements – one magazine sensitively titled their article on the guitarist ‘Space Cadet’ – but the general feeling was that John Frusciante was going to be okay.
He OD’d in February 1996 and clinically, died. This was a result of his body containing, he estimated, just one 12th of the blood it was supposed to have. After getting a blood transfusion, though, he immediately thought, “great, I’m good to go again, let me get my hands on some more drugs.” From this point, he was spending up to $500 a day on his habit. With only royalty cheques keeping him afloat, this was always going to lead to problems. At one point, Frusciante owed $30,000 to his dealer, and had to beg for cash from his friends to avoid taking a bullet to the head. That same year, he was kicked out of his house for not paying his rent. Temporarily housed in the rock star-friendly Chateau Marmont hotel in which comedian John Belushi died from a lethal narcotic cocktail – the guitarist was visited by Robert Wilonsky, a reporter from the Phoenix New Times, who was aghast at the transformation which heroin had wrought in the once cherubic guitarist.
“His upper teeth are nearly gone now,” wrote Wilonsky. “They have been replaced by tiny slivers of off-white that peek through rotten gums. His lower teeth, thin and brown, appear ready to fall out if he so much coughs too hard. His lips are pale and dry, coated with spit so thick it looks like paste. His hair is shorn to the skull; his fingernails, or the spaces where they used to be, are blackened by blood. His feet and ankles and legs are bocked with burns from unfiltered Camel cigarette ashes that have fallen unnoticed; his flesh also bears bruises, scabs and scars. He wears an old flannel shirt, only partially buttoned, and khaki pants. Drops of dried blood dot the pants.” If Frusciante was aware of Wilonsky’s horrified reactions to his appearance, he certainly did nothing to placate him. “I don’t care whether I live or die,” he calmly told the reporter.
Astonishingly, Frusciante still had further to fall. As he remembers it, 1997 was the worst year of his life. Desperate for cash to feed his addiction, he managed to scrape together enough raw demo tracks to compile a second solo album ‘Smile From The Streets You Hold’, but the albums release gave him no sense of pride or joy.
“I had a year of not feeling like myself, I had a year of feeling like I was an impostor who didn’t deserve to even be called John Frusciante,” he told Q magazine in 1999. “I was smoking crack all day long, shooting heroin, shooting cocaine, drinking wine, taking valium. I was this close to killing myself. But when I was going extremely fast in my head feeling I was about to die I would get these warnings from spirits saying, ‘You don’t want to die now.'”
Suddenly and without warning, Frusciante returned from the brink. In January ’98, the voices in his head told him that is he kept doing drugs he would die. Having previously tried to quit heroin by smoking crack and shooting up cocaine, he decided that he’d just quit drugs cold, promising himself that if he still felt the world was against him in 12 months’ time, he’d return to the drugs and calmly wait for death. He checked himself into a California rehab clinic that same month.
Flea was one of the first people to visit. He was delighted to see his old friend on the road to recovery and impressed with Frusciante’s mental strength and now outlook. He confessed to Frusciante that 1997 had been a disastrous year for the band and the Chilis, too, were in something of a mess. Two years on from the release of ‘One Hot Minute’, recorded with Frusciante’s replacement Dave Navarro, the band had not written a single new song. That summer they decided to regroup to play at one of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, but they pulled the gig when it was obvious that they were in dire need of more rehearsals. They did manage an appearance at Japan’s Fuji Rock festival that summer, but their headlining set was curtailed by a freak typhoon. Either side of this farcical gig, Anthony Kiedis and Chad Smith suffered inguries in motobike crashes, and that autumn both Kiedis and Navarro slipped back into heroin abuse. On a creative level, it was increasingly obvious that Navarro and the band just weren’t gelling.
In April ’98 Navarro left – or was fired, no one seems entirely sure. Flea told Kiedis and Smith that if they didn’t at least try to get Frusciante back into the band, he too was leaving. Kiedis was sceptical about the idea. Smith was astonished. “The last thing I knew he was ready to die,” the drummer stated bluntly. But both agreed to give it a try. That spring, the four men reconvened for the first time in six years, to rehearse in Flea’s garage.
“The chemistry was bombastic and beautiful,” Kiedis admitted. “All that resentment just evaporated instantly. It’s like a boyfriend-girlfriend thing. Sometimes you’re so fucking hurt by somebody that you won’t allow yourself to be friends with them. It doesn’t mean that deep down you don’t love them. But, you know… ego. Ego and mind games.”
“It was great,” Frusciante agreed. “The way they took me back made me feel good about myself. I had very little ability, but it didn’t matter to them, it was just the spirit of what I was doing and the fact that it was me. It felt good to have friends who really believed in me, when no one else did.”
John Frusciante’s rehabilitation was a slow and painful affair. He had skin grafts to mask the countless abscess scars on his arms, and $70,000 worth of dental work to turn what looked like a mouthful of crockery back into a beaming smile, but the real transformation had already occured internally. He officially rejoined the Red Hot Chili Peppers on June 12, 1998, walking onstage with them at Washington DC’s 9:30 Club to play a warm-up show for the band’s appearance at the third Tibetan Freedom Concert in the city’s RFK Stadium two days later. Back in Flea’s garage as that summer unfolded, it was clear that he was bursting with new ideas, fired up with enthusiasm for taking the Chili Peppers, to new creative heights.
The Chili Peppers’ seventh album ‘Californication’ was released in June 1999. Musically inventive, warm-hearted and filled with positivity and humanity, it was very much John Frusciante’s record. Critics loved the album, radio loved the album, fans loved the album, and for possibly the first time, the Chili Peppers began to sell to people who never felt the need to have a rock album – much less a Chili Peppers album – in their lives before. Those who understood the band’s history were universal in reading the album as a personal triumph for John Frusciante, a symbol of his miraculous personal resurrection.
As ever, the hyperbole and acclaim washed right over him. As ever, the only voices that mattered to John Frusciante were the voices in his own head. They said that everything was going to be okay.
—Paul Brannigan
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