Red Hot Soloing

He may play guitar in the world’s biggest rock band, but that’s never been enough for the maverick talent that is John Frusciante. Guitarist catches up with the Red Hot Chili Pepper as he celebrates the release of his fourth, and best, solo outing.

It’s fair to say that, as a concept, the guitarist solo album or ‘side project’ can be a fairly dubious one. If you’re Keith Richards, it involves forming a band of like-minded miscreants and affording yourself an opportunity to flex your leathery lungs for an entire set. If you’re The Edge or Johnny Greenwood, it tends to involve accepting a commission to soundtrack an obscure film with your eerie atmospherics.

But if you’re John Frusciante, it seems, it provides a key opportunity to showcase your vocal and songwriting skills, as well as let yourself off the leash in terms of musical experimentation – both being key interests that he can explore only to a limited degree in his day job with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Frusciante is, without question, a highly productive musician. Even during the fogged years of his heroin addiction in th mid-to-late nineties, he still managed to release two solo albums – the enigmatically-titled Niandra LaDes and Usually Just A T-Shirt (1994) and Smile From The Streets You Hold (1997). Perhaps tellingly, however, they were skeletal, scratchy, home-recorded affairs.

Following his return to the Chili Peppers with Californication, the guitarist released another more elaborate, slightly more polished album (recorded on digital eight-track instead of analogue four-track). 2001’s To Record Only Water For Ten Days. But it’s with his fourth and latest offering, Shadows Collide With People, that for the first time Frusciante’s extra-curricular material really matches up to the sonic quality and melodic appeal of his band work.

Written around the same time as the songs for By The Way, the material on Shadows Collide With People – a collaboration with the guitarist’s friend Josh Klinghoffer – display his knack for a winning hook, not to mention his passion for unhinged instrumental electronica.

So, when he’s writing, how does Frusciante define which a solo record idea and which is a Chili Peppers idea?

“That’s pretty easy,” he says. “If an idea comes to me and I feel like writing lyrics to it, then that’s gonna be a song for me because I don’t write lyrics in the Chili Peppers. Writing words is definitely a big part of my life, it’s one of the few things that I feel like I have some ability in. So that’s basically the difference.

When I write something for the Chili Peppers, it’s usually just a guitar part and then I leave it to Anthony to come up with his vocals and Flea to come up with his bass line, y’know? If I write some piece of music that really sounds like it needs a bashing drummer and a bass-player beating the hell out of his bass, then I’d normally think that would be one for the Chili Peppers.

In the Chili Peppers, it seems it’s either the more melodic things or heavy things. The stuff that I do for myself probably has more of an arty feeling to it.”

AS WITH MOST musicians when they’re in writing mode, John Frusciante is very much a creature of habit. He’s also something of a traditionalist, more often than not writing on acoustic guitar.

“Usually a lot of my writing takes place on tour and so I always have an acoustic guitar with me,” he explains. “Usually my Martin from the fifties. Actually I have two brown Martins from the fifties – the small-scale ones – and they’re incredible. I also have a blond one too. I picked two of them up from Norm’s Rare Guitars in the Valley and my guitar tech found me the other one somewhere because I needed to have a back-up for something or other.

People think I play Taylors, but the whole Taylor thing was something that Rick Rubin wanted me to play on the last Chili Peppers record. And since I didn’t have a mind of my own when we did By The Way, I let him tell me what fucking guitar to play, which I’ll never do again! Now he knows he’ll never ask me to play a guitar like that because I’m too opinionated, but at the time I was, Oh? Listening to them tell me that my Martin doesn’t record well. So that’s what I write on, mostly.”

That’s not to say, Frusciante is keen to point out, that he won’t just reach for whatever guitar is available if an idea suddenly strikes…

“Sometimes it’s nice writing songs on an electric guitar that’s not plugged in and just singing really softly. A lot of the time I do that too. But that ends up usually being weird because then you’ve gotta totally relearn how to sing sometimes when you wrote it really soft. Sometimes you wanna be able to sing something in full voice that’s too high for you to sing in full voice, things like that. So for me, usually, it’s a better idea just to write it on acoustic guitar and be singing it the way I’m gonna sing it in the end, as I’m writing it.”

There’s certainly a lot of acoustic guitar on Shadows Collide With People – it’s one of the primary colours of the music, even in the rockier tracks. Any reason for that?

“It was just part of my concept for the sound of the album,” explains Frusciante. “Where in a section when I could easily get a distorted electric guitar, I’d rather play an acoustic guitar and hear the drums even clearer because the acoustic doesn’t take as much space away from the drums. Just let the drums carry the power of the music rather than feel like I have to reinstate it with the guitar.”

One of the most important factors that appears to drive Frusciante as a musician in his constant quest for self-improvement. “In that period of time, the period of writing By The Way, I was really into learning about chords, developing my understanding of chord theory. I was getting a clearer idea of how to use chords that had more than just a root, a third and a fifth – y‘know, getting into using ninths and 11ths and 13ths and things like that. The acoustic guitar was a much better way to study this than electric guitar because there are so many more harmonics on an acoustic guitar.

“When I practice electric, I don’t plug it in or anything, so when you practice chords on an electric that’s not plugged in, you don’t really hear that much. Whereas on acoustic, its like playing piano or something, you hear the richness of the tone. That’s important for really understanding the power of what it is to add a ninth or to add a seventh or to add an 11th.”

On Shadows Collide With People, Frusciante also plays a lot of keyboards, something he says actually helped him with his guitar-playing.

“In particular, I was practising a lot,” he says. “I recommend to any guitar player that to see the way chords work on piano is really good for your head. Because on the guitar, things are arranged in a funny way and on piano it’s laid out much more simply. To be able to visualise what’s taking place when you just play a root, then a third, then a fifth, then a seventh, then an 11th, it’s good. On guitar you can’t do anything like that. That’s a chord you just can’t play, because you don’t have enough fingers and the guitar just isn’t laid out that way.”

Additionally, in the course of his continual search for new and interesting variations, Frusciante began bulk-buying chord book by the likes of Burt Bacharach, Elton John and The Beatles, alongside some other, let’s say, more unusual choices – such as the musical scores for Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Fiddler On The Roof.

“All these things had really interesting chords,” the guitarist stresses, “and I would see the way that people were stringing them together. Especially in pop music back in the sixties and seventies, those songs that Burt Bacharach or The Carpenters wrote, they were always putting the unusual notes in the bass and stuff. That was what I was really into at the time I was writing all these songs.”

AS IT TURNS out, Frusciante’s almost insatiable thirst for new musical knowledge doesn’t stop there either. Carrying on from his interest in British electronic music of a certain heavily-rouged vintage – he famously listened to The Human League’s Travelogue and Reproduction albums every day when driving to the studios during the By The Way sessions – the influence of sequenced music on the guitarist’s playing continued when recording Shadows Collide With People.

“Yeah, it’s weird,” Frusciante notes, “but for the last year or so, a lot of music that I’ve been the most inspired by is stuff that there’s no way to learn on guitar. I like this very abstract sort of electronic music by a guy named Pita Rehberg and another guy called Ekkehard Ehlers. These people play computer and the sounds they make, they’re not melodic and they’re also not rhythmic. There’s really no way of interpreting them on the guitar, but in a way that makes it soothing for me because any other kind of music, I automatically can take it apart in my head in relation to the guitar. Whereas with that music I have no way of interpreting it like that, so I only hear it as music, the same way I heard guitar-playing when I was six years old or whatever.”

Perhaps the most direct link to Frusciante’s playing on this latest solo record can be traced back through a lineage of British guitarists. He admits that, in musical terms, he is something of an Anglophile.

“Yeah, it seems like most of the stuff that i get really excited about these days is English usually. I guess on Shadows Collide With People, the guitar-playing that I was excited about was the same stuff that i was excited about for By The Way. That was John McGeogh’s playing in Magazine and Siouxsie & The Banshees, Johnny Marr’s playing in The Smiths, Bernard Sumner’s playing in Joy Division and New Order and George Harrison’s guitar-playing in The Beatles. That’s the guitar-playing that influenced the way I play on the record.”

As far as his electric guitar parts on the album are concerned, Frusciante says his setup remained pretty much the same as it had been for By The Way – playing his Telecaster or SG through his Marshall Major 200W with various speaker combinations. To further ease its progress, Shadows Collide With People was recorded at Cello Studios in LA, scene of the sessions for the last two Chili Peppers albums. The only major difference in the control room was the absence of producer Rick Rubin, since Frusciante was directing the recording process himself this time.

“It was all a big learning experience for me, this record,” he admits. “I’d never been the one responsible for paying attention to how much things cost and having everything in control, to be able to be the one who’s checking what kind of compressor they’re using or what kind of microphone they were using.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the love/hate relationship that Frusciante seems to enjoy with Rubin, his approach to mixing was markedly different to that of the Chili Peppers’ producer. “Yeah, the main things that I featured are all the little incidental sounds that appear throughout it. Rick is more about basing a mix around the vocal, bringing the vocal up really loud. For me, I like the idea of when this interesting sound comes along, you base the mix around that, and then the next interesting sound comes along and you base the mix around that. I base the mix around the overdubs. So that’s definitely a big difference between us, but y’know, I like the vocal approach too.”

BETWEEN HIS SOLO efforts and his work with the Chili Peppers, you’d be forgiven for thinking that John Frusciante might be far too busy to even entertain the notion of any other projects. Not so. Last year, he contributed five tracks to the soundtrack of his actor/musician friend Vincent Gallo’s yet-to-be-released art-house movie, The Brown Bunny (which was famously booed at the Cannes Film Festival). But there are to important things to note about the guitartist’s friendship with Gallo and his music for the film: 1) during his downtime, the actor acts as John’s unofficial “guitar pimp” (see boxout), and 2) even though it appears on the soundtrack album for The Brown Bunny (currently only available on Japanese Import), Frusciante’s music was actually dumped from the movie. Did that piss Frusciante off?

“Well, y’know, I don’t really understand completely,” he concedes. “But I know that he loves my music and I know that he loves me as a person, so I have to accept his reason which is that the film didn’t take the music. I know that he listened to that music constantly while he was making the film and he always listened to my music for years even before I met him. So it’s not like he doesn’t like the music. I guess I’m a little confused about it because to me I can’t imagine two things that have more in common, that fit more perfectly together. There’s actually some really interesting guitar-playing on it – it’s very stripped down, it’s just acoustic guitar and an overdub of an electric guitar and a vocal or whatever.

“There’s a lot of really good guitar-playing in it, more so than Shadows,” he laughs.

“But he says that the film rejected the music and that’s something I can relate to. I know that if Josh comes in with a certain drum beat, for instance, for one of my songs and I say, No that’s not the right drum beat, it’s not that I don’t like the drum beat, it’s just that the song is rejecting the drum beat. It comes up a lot when I’m producing music that somebody will play something, and it’s not that I don’t like what they’re playing, but it just doesn’t fit in with my image of the song. Or the song isn’t accepting it – the two things are fighting with each other. So I can relate. I definitely don’t hold it against him or anything. I know he’s on my side.”

In fact, to further underline the fact that there’s no rift between Frusciante and his friend – Klinghoffer and the guitarist plan to back Gallo when he performs at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival at Camber Sands in April (“We’re just gonna improvise”). On top of this, John has also just played on Omar Rodriguez of The Mars Volta’s solo album (“I do some interesting synthesizer and guitar on that”), as well as contributing to the new Sean Lennon record.

“I played guitar and synthesizer on that too. I guess my approach these days on the synthesizer has a lot to do with using it in a way that’s feminine – I don’t really use the oscillators much, I use it more for changing the sound of other things or to shape noise in different ways. I’m not as interested n using it as the sound source, I’m trying to use it in other ways. More often than not I use it like an effects pedal. Sean’s got this producer who’s doing a pretty slick job of it, so I guess what I try to do is just put some weirdness into it…”

COME LATE SUMMER, the Chili Peppers will get down to the serious business of recording the follow-up to By The Way, which – as it turns out – they’ve already managed to get something of a head-start on.

“When we were supposed to record two new songs for that Greatest Hits, we ended up recording, like, 15 musical tracks,” Frusciante explains. “Anthony did vocals for probably nine of them. We come to England to tour in June and when we get back we’re just gonna start writing, for maybe like a month, and then go in the studio and figure out which ones we like the best.”

So, of course, the big question is: any particular stylistic shift?
“Yeah, it’s much more raw and much more oriented around the sound of the band. I limit myself to never singing more than three harmony parts at once, and with this I’m trying to only sing one at a time. I’ve been really appreciating the balance of the band when we just sound like a band rather than overdoing it with a lot of overdubs and things. Also, I’ve been more likely to let Flea come up with some sort of overdub idea, like putting flute and clarinet on a song, rather than me jumping in with my synthesizers!”

Pepper’s pedals (boxout; interview scan; page 03)

John on the pedals used on Shadows Collide With People
“Well, there’s the Fuzz Factory. That guy (Zachary Vex) makes really interesting effects and he handpaints them himself. The song Water has that cazy guitar sound at the end of it and that’s me just playing right-handed finger harmonics and that’s the sound that came out of the thing! We also used an Obi-Wah to create sample and hold filter effects. Josh used that on the song Cut-Out for the guitar at the end that you hear wobbling. I love that sound. Frank Zappa was the first person who I ever heard use that sound on his Black Napkins song. Also, my friend Omar Rodriguez from The Mars Volta played through a Space Echo for the slide guitar that’s on Chances and 23 Go Into End.”

Gallo the guitar scout (boxout; interview scan; page 05)

On top of his parallel careers as musician, director, actor and major mouthpiece, Vincent Gallo has acted as “hustler” for John when he’s buying guitars.
“He’s found me a lot of things. At this point he’s found me pretty much a whole recording studio! As far as guitars go, he’s found me my 1955 Gretsch White Falcon, which is the nicest guitar I have, I think. I have a Rickenbacker that he got me from 1961 that used to be owned by James Burton. I have a Gibson 175 like Steve Home played on Close To The Edge. And I guess that the Telecasters he found for me, and my SG Custom from 1961 he found me. I really don’t have that much that he didn’t find for me…”