John Frusciante, The Bohemian Of Red Hot Chili Peppers
I’m at the Chateau Marmont, just in Hollywood’s heart, waiting for Frusciante, the guitar genius, to get into the room. I also have my camera ready, the one his manager won’t allow me to use for remembering this moment. Loose fitting pants, lined polo neck, messed hair, and beard… He says hi, barely looking me in the eyes. His first interview is gonna be with me. I just finished listening to Stadium Arcadium, the album because of which we are here. I ask John how long has he been without listening to it.
Well, we started to record the album a year and a half ago and during that time we’ve been listening to the album for like 14 hours every day. Since we finished it, I haven’t listened to it again. I think it’s the best album we’ve done until this date, the more psychedelic, the darker, the deepest if you want, and the most eclectic. Sometimes when you pick up the best songs to be part of the album, just by chance they all sound in the same wave, let it be funky, rock, fast or slow, but in this album we’ve tried to pick up the songs from a wilder range.
Personally I wanted to do songs that sounded harder, but at the same time, that they would transmit something deeper, more transcendental. The separation between funky songs and melodic songs started with “BloodSugarSexMagik”. In Stadium Arcadium is the first time we mix this two elements in the same song, or at least is the major perfection grade we’ve achieved. On the other hand, I also wanted that every guitar solo was an event for itself. Not in the meaning of display myself or being a virtuous with the strings. I mean using the experience of all these years and just know where I should play simple but effective and where I should go straight to the rhythm and the groove of a song to raise to the maximum its potential. While we were doing the album I listened to guitar players like Clapton, Hendrix, or Jeff Beck, and on the other hand artists who are not famous by their solos, like Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Smiths. When we rehearse, we just start playing and when we come up with a melody or a solo that we like we just look at each other and by then we know we have something there.
Personally, I think that the solos on this album sound more like artists from the 70’s like Hendrix, etc…
I don’t think the way of guitar playing has evolved that much since that time. The way of playing from Jimmy Page or Hendrix it’s still unsurpassable. When I was a young kid I admired people like Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai or Randy Rhodes, but in my opinion they haven’t improved the way of playing of the old seventies’ teachers. It’s not that now I don’t like them anymore, but what I look for, further than the technique, it’s the passion and the “grimy” of the sound. That’s why I admire people like Kurt Cobain or the Siouxsie guitar player, people who might not dominate the guitar but who found the right balance between passion and the energy they could pass to the listener. To me, the guitar players who centre too much in the technique loose a big part of the essence of playing the instrument. They don’t realise that the grimy sound of a guitar constitute an essential part of the Universe. It’s White Noise.(It’s the noise produced when all the sonorous frequencies get together picked up by the human ear, in just one. The word White is because of the white light which is the abridgement of all frequencies (colour) of lights in the spectre.) I love to reproduce that kind of sounds with my keyboards. People like Page or Hendrix made “white noise”, while Randy Rhodes avoided it, and people used to imitate Rhodes because they believed that the essence of the guitar is playing it clean and fast. I also had to fight against that tendency of imitate Rhodes, because I told ya I admired him, and I had to constantly keep in my mind that I had to mistreat the guitar and never worry about getting just clean tones. In this album, I tried to go by the production of Hendrix’s albums. He’s been my biggest inspiration. I wanted to reproduce that psicodelic effect he got by manipulating the speed of the tapes (where you hear an electric mandolin that’s really a guitar taped in high speed), the manipulation of the volume, changing from one loudspeaker to another, playing faster or slower than the rest of the band, constantly changes in rhythm…
Many people think that is impossible to create anything new in terms of guitar techniques. Do you agree?
I agree with the reality that many of nowadays music it’s not in the style of today’s players. But, it’s true that there are still guitarist who manage to create sounds with the guitar that doesn’t sound like a guitar. And it’s not that they’re using any electrical machine to channel the guitar sounds but they manipulate the guitar itself and create textures and sounds that you would never expect from that instrument. People believes that by playing faster and creating new playing techniques you can progress forward, but then they realize that emotionally they don’t progress at all, they transmit nothing to the people listening and they stay at where Hendrix was three decades ago: something like that happened to Vai in the 80’s.
For this album I tried to keep the passion and the atmosphere that old teachers transferred then but using techniques they didn’t use back then. It’s not about moving forward, but it’s about moving to the sides and explore other ways. I partially agree with people who I respect, like Bjork, when they say we have to totally get rid of guitars, because I’m not satisfied neither with what it’s being done with guitars these days. But on the other hand, I’m a guitarist, I can’t help it (laughs), and it’s a challenge to me to do something unusual or new.
In the song “Animal Bar†for example, I use the pedals to create a guitar sound that sounds like a synthesizer. I don’t usually use the pedals.Most of the times, when I have recorded the guitar parts, I pass them through the synthesizer and then I pass them to tape again.
You have to break rules to keep forward and I’m afraid most of the guitarists these days just follow the rules with no risk.
Ray Manzarek (The Doors) said that one of the best ways to compose it’s being under the effects of some psychotic substance. Do you agree with that?
I don’t like walking around doing drugs eulogy, but it is true in some way. At least with me. You can take advantage of weed or mushrooms when it comes to inspiration. But you can actually generate that “mood†yourself. In the sessions for this album, I’ve been meditating a lot. I use this technique to stop my mind from spinning around and just focus on the creative process. Meditation has given me mental states that could be similar to the one’s weed gives you. I isolate from worldly stuff and my mind just gets in peace with the universe. That is the most hallucinating experience I’ve ever had.
Which guitarists would you like to collaborate with?
Omar Rodriguez from The Mars Volta is a good friend and I feel very comfortable playing with him. However, I don’t think the rest of the band would like the idea of bringing another guitarist on board even if he was just a guest. I’ve tried that before but they wanna keep with the “we are four†idea. Sometimes we have like 17 different guitar tracks in some song and sometimes that can’t sound exactly like in the album when you play that song life, even if you try hard. For example, there’s a song in the new album where I play the Mellotron (this old keyboard which reproduces symphonic sounds, very used by progressive rock bands in the ’70s) and I can’t imagine that song without the Mellotron onstage. Hendrix’ song The Burning Of The Midnight Lamp didn’t sound the same live without all that studio production sound.
