Back From Hell’s Edge
There is nothing quite like talking to John Frusciante. One minute the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist is speaking serenely about organic diets and different dimensions, and the next he is fuming about some perceived slight at a photo shoot the day before, where another guitarist sidled between him and his idol Jimmy Page.
“You don’t cut in front of somebody just to be the hotshot standing next to Jimmy Page,” Frusciante spits. “What, he deserves to stand next to him more than I do?”
The guilty party, it turns out, is Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello. Or as Frusciante prefers to call him, the dude from Rage Against the Machine. “He’s supposed to be Mr. Nice Guy,” says Frusciante, 33. “But when you cut in front of another man to be seen in a photograph next to somebody else, that’s just greed. That’s a businessman move. That’s not a move of a rock musician or somebody that cares about music. That’s the move of somebody who wants to be seen a certain way. It’s a yuppie move.”
These moves do not go down well with John Frusciante.
People who remember Frusciante from his early days in the Red Hot Chili Peppers — the band he abruptly quit in 1992 just minutes before a show in Japan — are always shocked to see him now. His muscles have withered away. He’s got a mouthful of fake teeth and hideous scars running down his arms — the result of a huge substance abuse problem that nearly killed him in the mid ’90s. His lean punk sneer has been replaced with a blank stare and premature wrinkles. And when he speaks now the words don’t so much escape his mouth as slowly tumble out. Two years ago, while speaking to a British journalist, he famously referred to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as “the catastrophe at the Empire State Building.”
He wasn’t being funny. Frusciante exists in another galaxy.
Since cleaning up and returning to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with whom he co-wrote hits like “Under the Bridge” and “Give It Away,” his focus has been singular. Frusciante’s work on the band’s two most recent albums, 1999’s “Californication” and 2002’s “By the Way,” is staggering – clearly the product of someone who is totally possessed. His fourth and most recent solo album, “Shadows Collide With People,” out next week, is gorgeously odd and frighteningly original, the furthest thing anyone expects from a solo Red Hot Chili Pepper.
“Music’s my life,” Frusciante says. “The things that people do don’t seem interesting to me at all — going out to bars, carrying on, going to parties. What the hell do people do? Shop? Play golf? Have vacations? That doesn’t seem interesting to me. To me, my job as a musician is to be a good receptor. A lot of music comes through me.”
During his three-year drug habit, he recorded two wobbly solo albums, 1994’s “Niandra Lades & Usually Just a T-Shirt” and 1997’s “Smile From the Streets You Hold.” That these releases drew comparisons to such cracked geniuses as Syd Barrett and Skip Spence did not bode well for Frusciante’s physical and mental resurgence. The Red Hot Chili Peppers had already lost original guitarist Hillel Slovak to a fatal heroin overdose a year before Frusciante originally joined them in 1988. It seemed history was about to repeat itself. Yet despite losing his looks, logic and luxurious Hollywood Hills home, Frusciante somehow — some might say miraculously — pulled through.
“You don’t even know how amazing it is,” Frusciante says. “There were so many moments that would be the moments somebody would die, and I got through them constantly. I always got through them and I always got this good advice from the voices in my head, telling me how to deal with certain situations like overdosing. I used to overdose on cocaine all the time, and I always made it through.”
He contends that he functioned just fine as a drug addict. “But becoming a person that could function without drugs was really difficult,” he says. “The most difficult period of my life, for sure.”
Frusciante took up yoga and painting for a while, but even those things proved to be too much of a distraction from his main thrust. “I stopped painting five years ago,” he says. “I had that realization that I should devote my energies to the things that I really have some aptitude for. For me, I thought those things were writing words and writing songs and playing guitar. ” He gave up yoga for more practical reasons: “It hurt my back.”
Listening to fractured, dreamy songs like “-00 Ghost” and “Carvel” from his new solo album might lead people to believe that Frusciante’s head hasn’t fully recovered from everything he’s put it through. But the more he talks, the clearer it becomes that for all his eccentricity, he has come out of this whole experience with a clearer grasp on life than most of those around him. Especially shameless opportunists like Tom Morello.
“I don’t pray,” Frusciante says. “I don’t meditate. I don’t ask for help from elsewhere. I just live my life. But I don’t think what we see is all there is. I’ve been made to be very aware that there is a lot more going on here than meets the eye. It was made very clear to me a few years ago. So I just try to be the best person I can be and know a lot can be going on behind my head when I’m not looking.”
—Aidin Vaziri
