John Frusciante Shares His Favorites
Sitting in a rented blue Toyota Corolla on Sunset Boulevard with the engine running and the air conditioner on high, John Frusciante, legendary guitarist for the Red hot Chili Peppers, is into some fucking music. He quite literally can’t control his enthusiasm, bouncing his knees on the floorboard (shimmery brown/orange cut-off slacks-covered knees), and swaying back and forth in time. People stare as they walk by (one of them now power-walking backwards), but nothing can sway him from the task at hand, which – at the moment – is playing some his favorite songs for us. As the parking meter runs down and the summer sun slips down toward the Pacific Ocean, Frusciante takes us through what has got to be the most diverse eight-song playlist ever created (and, thanks to notable showings by the long-winded genres of prog-rock and Afrobeat, possibly the lengthiest).
Known for his varied taste in music, Frusciante has nurtured a healthy solo career apart from RHCP. H’s currently pursuing a project in which he will release one album a month for an entire year (some as a solo artist and some with his project Ataxia, which includes Fugazi’s Joe Lally and Bicycle Thief’s Josh Klinghoffer).
From enlightening us on post-punk ditties, African melodies and hip-hop of all things, to mouthing his own faux-duet with Brandy (yes, that Brandy), Frusciante shows us that he is a man who is serious about his music.
Listen up.
Empire
“Turn it Round,” Explosive Sound
PPP Records
This is music done in the spirit of punk, and directly aflter the initial punk stuff, but not sticking to any kind of fomula. These guys are just doing their own thing and being influenced by all different sorts of music. Their work ended up being a big influence on the D.C. scene – bands like Righteous Scene, Fugazi. They would find a band like this who nobody had ever picked up, because in England this band was a total failure, very short-lived.
The fact that this CD at all is amazing. Some punk guy from D.C. took it upon himself to re-release it. People don’t know who this group is, but they should. And the guitar playing is just tremendous on this whole album.
Autechre
“Drone,” Peel Sessions
Warp/Nothing
I hear real energy in this music. I saw them live a couple of years ago, and it’s just them staring into their computer screens and smoking weed in the dark. It was so exciting; they’re definitely creating music onstage in front of the audience. And every album they make is completely different from the next; they’re always going in adventurous directions. On this particular song, John has this ethereal sound going – you’re starting to hear it now – I love that sound. [A strange buzzing – you might even call it Drone – begins to emerge from the speakers, growing louder and louder.] It’s incredible. It almost takes the place of a choir or a mellotron, but it’s completely computer generated. I like sounds that feel like one thing, but are another thing completely.
Oren Ambarchi
“Corkscrew,” Grapes From the Estate
Touch Records
This is this guy Oren Ambarchi. This is his brand new album on Touch Records. Just about everything on Touch is good – it’s one of the few labels that you can trust for its music to always be of a certain quality. Oren’s a guitar player; when Josh [Klinghoffer] met him, that’s when we started listening to all the abstract electronic records from Touch. People like Autechre and Squarepushe are like pop-stars compared to them. Because of the fact that these guys don’t make money from their music, it’s truly experimental… truly avant-garde. And the abstractness of it means they aren’t trying to cater to any of those parts of our human brain that need there to be a “2” and a “4,” or any of the stupid requirements that we make. This album is unusual in that there are some drums on it, but in general his albums are beautiful and peaceful – you can go off in a dream state while you’re listening to it. In terms of guitar players, it’s people like him who excite me – it doesn’t sound anything like a guitar. They take it in a new direction. I like it when it’s the ideas that are important and physical instruments aren’t.
GZA/Genius
any song from Liquid Swords
Geffen
“Labels” is a great song. I’m so impressed with the things that people like GZA and RZA do; the lyrics are abstract, the music is completely abstract, and they do it out of complete innocence. They’re not trying to be artsy (that I know) but the end results is art at the highest level. It’s just the expression of who they are, how they feel inside. Sometimes I get kind of sick of the arrogance that people have in my community, people who accept some of the more avant-garde artists that I like – they think that everything that’s popular is below and everything that’s obscure automatically has merit, even if it’s crap. It’s so refreshing to me that people like GZA and RZA are creating art that’s just as different and revolutionary; only they’re just doing their thing, versus some white guy who uses really smart samples or something. It’s too smart; I like it when the art and the abstract are happening without the person knowing it. I think most of the good people in the avant-garde world are like that. To me, that album ensures that there’s all this polyrhythmic activity going on in rap. Usually with rap – especially when it started – everything could fit into a 16-note grid. A lot of it uses the same basic rhyme scheme, and GZA really opened things up, not always ending up in the same place, complicated rhythms never repeating, crazy subdivisons of polyrhythm that were as complicated as anything Frank Zappa was doing… You hear more of it in rap these days, but I think this is where it started.
Van der Graaf Generator
“The Sleepwalkers,” Godbluff
Caroline
Van der Graaf Generator are normally put in the progressive rock category, and to me, prog-rock gets a bad reputation of being fancy, but that’s not what it was at all. It was people using jazz and classical and avant-garde to create rock. It’s every bit as anarchic as punk rock, and a lot of the most interesting punk rock people like Keith Levine or Pat Smear or Johnny Lydon – they were into this stuff. These people were the ones doing something different, and taking music in a different direction than it was going before. Peter Hammill is the Jimi Hendrix of lyric writing, doing what Jimi did with his guitar. This album is a bit cleaner, but in terms of the music, it’s just as fucked up. There was period of time when I listened to Van Graaf Generator, like, 90 percent of the time.
Fela Kuti
“Upside Down,” Upside Down/Music of Many colors
MCA
This is my favorite Fela song. Before he started making the politically charged music – Black Power and things like that – he visited America and met this woman Sandra Oconche who gave him Malcom X’s book, and that’s when his style of music changed. He began to believe strongly in all of these things. He asked Sandra to come to Nigeria to sing it with a Nigerian accent, in Pidgin. She spent two months there with Fela’s wives, who taught her how to sing with a perfect Nigerian accent. You know when fela would record, it’s all in one take – one take for everybody – so she had to get it just right. The music goes on for about 10 minutes or so before her part comes, and when her voice comes on, you can hear Fela really soft, whispering. “Sing.” and that’s her moment to shine. It’s my favorite vocal performance of anybody on anythhing, ever.
Sparks
“The Rhyme Thief,” Lil’Beethoven
Universal/Artful
This album’s fairly new; I’m a big fan of backing vocals, I love when people do something new with backing vocals. Spark’s best albums were in the ’70s, but they made this album just over a year ago, and it’s still as different as anybody else now and back then. They use the backing vocals as the rhythmic center of their music, and all their orchestra sounds, I can’t believe when I listen to it – they’re actually all just synthesizers from the ’80s: it’s actually him playing each part. He’s harmonizing with himself, using spoken-word-type melodies, adding rich harmonies to them. It’s very intense, ya know ? Very inspiring too, I guess they listeb to nothing but classical music and hip-hop. I wouldn’t have known that they listen to hip-hop, but now I understand that they get their cues, their freedom from kind of music.
Brandy
“Focus,” Afrodisiac
Atlantic
I just love the songs that Timbaland did on this album. Again, being such a student of backing vocals… she’s doing something different; she’s doing so many vocals that there’s never a space. Whenever one voice stops, another one does something in it’s place – there’s very little space and there are so many vocal parts that are breathy, you don’t know what you’re listening to. Ther’s so much going on, you can’t hear them with your conscious: you have to hear her voice with your subconscious. Even as a backup vocalist with a keen ear, I can’t hear where one part’s starting and one’s ending because they’re all overplaying all over the place. Some of them have a watery sound, then metallic; she really creates a lot of dimension with her vocals, and Timbaland’s production does stuff that’s very avant-garde, very abstract and yet, in this context of pop music, I’m impressed with that. Noise in a pop context is sucha beautiful thing to see.
–Jack McGrue
