Damaged Genius John Frusciante Is Back Again
There is a scene in Funky Monks, the 1992 documentary about the Red Hot Chili Peppers that was filmed during the making of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, where a rail-thin and anxious-looking 21-year-old John Frusciante crouches on an L.A. rooftop, expounding on his knowledge of the “fourth dimension” to the camera. He has a shaven head and he squints in the sunlight. Some months later, Frusciante left the Chili Peppers altogether. Now, twelve years later, Frusciante is at a stage in his life where he can take his own time in the studio to record his solo work. Upon being asked when he started recording his upcoming LP, Shadows Collide With People, Frusciante says it was “when Radiohead were across the hall recording their latest album” and between the Chili Peppers’ Californication and By The Way tours. That would be somewhere in between May 1999 to June 2002 to you and me, but Frusciante does not reason like the rest of us.
At 18 years old, in 1988, Frusciante clinched the lead-guitar slot in his favorite band, local L.A. scenesters the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He helped propel them into rock history with his songwriting — though he shared co-writing credits with bandmates Flea, Anthony Keidis and Chad Smith on virtually every Blood Sugar Sex Magik tune, his guitar-playing was the driving force on brilliant hits like “Under The Bridge” and “Breaking The Girl.” Then, in the middle of their world tour for that album, he quit, dropping out of the Hollywood limelight almost completely. Rumors swirled of madness, death and suicide, and the truth was not far off.
Frusciante famously holed himself up in the Hollywood Hills for three years, bent on heroin addiction. His self-abuse became so legendary that friends like Johnny Depp and the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers, Gibby Haynes, made a short film, Stuff, about a day in Frusciante’s life — a harrowing testament to the demise of the tortured creative mind. Never released, the movie is available on the internet at jftab.com
During this dark time, Frusciante released two solo albums, Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt in 1995 and Smile From the Streets You Hold in 1997 (the first for drug money, he later claimed). Both are difficult and occasionally unlistenable, but they each have moments of genius. In 1998, after rehab, Frusciante surfaced and re-joined the Chili Peppers, helping pull them out of their post-Blood Sugar Sex Magik lull on the sublime Californication. Following the years of chemical abuse and rehabilitation, Frusciante’s physical appearance had changed drastically — he had gained weight and his skin was shot, like Jim Morrison did toward the end — but he received skin grafts to remove needle scars and a new set of teeth and soon he was back to normal. Two years later, he released the compact, beautiful solo album To Record Only Water For Ten Days.
Frusciante’s fourth solo record, Shadows Collide With People (Warner Bros.), is his most accomplished yet. Alternative recording techniques and electronic sounds are pitted against his masterful guitar playing and fully-formed vocals. It is an extraordinarily open and revealing work. Melancholy lyrics indicate that he still has demons, but it seems that his prodigious talent has become less of a burden. In “Carvel”, the opening track, he sings, “Heaven receives you and sends you back/ Sending a dummy to my God” and then hints at acceptance: “Up and down that’s how energy stays alive/ And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Like his other solo work, Shadows is strikingly different from that of the Chili Peppers. “There are definitely people who like my solo stuff and not the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My songs are written down and that’s what they are. They get recorded in an hour. I don’t change anything,” he says, pointing out that this is a contrast to the perfected pop of the Chili Peppers.
His raw and passionate style of “capturing” music in its most simple form has attracted collaborations, notably with the late Johnny Cash. Uber-producer Rick Rubin asked the Man in Black to cover Depeche Mode’s song “Personal Jesus” before he passed away last year. Upon hearing it, Cash needed help translating the electronic original into an acoustic track. Rubin contacted Frusciante, who took on the task with ease. “I recorded it in the amount of time it takes to play the song, and I sent it to Rick,” Frusciante explains. “And Johnny sang along with the scratch vocal. I never met him!” The track is now available on Cash’s American IV: The Man Comes Around (Universal).
Frusciante has many celebrity admirers. Past lovers include model-actress Milla Jovovich and art kid Stella Schnabel, and Vincent Gallo asked Frusciante him to score his controversial movie The Brown Bunny before the script was even written. “Every time I wrote something really sad I put it aside for [Gallo],” says Frusciante, insisting that despite the controversy film caused at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie is a misunderstood and beautiful masterpiece that will be appreciated in due course. None of the music he wrote made it into the actual film, but the soundtrack album (available via Tower Records… in Japan! Click here to purchase!) that accompanies The Brown Bunny will feature four of Frusciante songs. In the album’s liner notes, Gallo writes: “Every day [during filming] I would listen to John’s music… How and why when the film was done it did not include John Frusciante’s music is difficult to explain. In a sense it is unexplainable. I did, however, make a film to John’s music and John did make the music to my film.”
This kind of worship and involvement in the pop-culture underground only enhances Frusciante’s cult status. In keeping with this outsider mentality, he recoils at the current, corporate-influenced state of mainstream arts. “The incredible thing is that the industry of music and film are really suffering,” he says. “It doesn’t make any sense.” Thankfully for him, he belongs to one of the most lauded bands in the world, so he needn’t feel too guilty. In any case, he has the hundreds of songs in his head that he promises to record eventually. Until then, let’s hope he can keep this perfect balance.
Visit www.drowninginbrown.com for more information about all things Brown Bunny, including Vincent’s liner notes.
