John Frusciante
John Frusciante is explaining to me the appeal of the musical notes that he decided ‘not’ to play. It is a notion made even more compelling when considering that Frusciante is describing the music that he is the most proud of creating.
“People have thought of a million ways of filing up space with guitars,” he says, “but not that many people have had interesting ideas as far as ways of using space. So I felt like I had something to say in terms of silence.”
After joining the Red Hot Chili Peppers sixteen years ago at the fledgling age of eighteen, it is ideas like this – speaking with silence – that have established Frusciante’s reputation for an ever-outside-the-box approach to music. In a field that often teeters more towards celebrity than art, he has remained firmly entrenched on the creative end of his craft. Still, I didn’t expect to be discussing the topic of silence with him. It is not just because Frusciante’s eccentric eloquence as a guitar player has provided much of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ sound over the years. And neither is it because… like you… I can still hear his Hendrix-esque reverse guitar solo from ‘Give It Away’ readily everberating in the further corners of my mind. No, the topic of silence is particularly surprising when considering John’s current string of projects: six albums in six months. In this sense, it would seem that he has quite a lot to say.
Frusciante’s current set of releases – a series of solo efforts, collaborations, and side projects – comes on the heels of a highly peroductive run with the Chili peppers, including their latest CD – By the Way, a huge world tour, a greatest hits collection, and a double live album. Whereas such effort would warrant a much-needed vacation for most, he seems thrilled to now have the time to manifest other ideas. In turn, John is beginning to prove himself prolific – in the Frank Zappa sense of the word.
“I had a stock built up of about seventy songs from the last three years,” he says by telephone from his home in Los Angeles, “not to mention lots of songs from before then.”
While John acknowledges Zappa as an appropriate model for such a high degree of productivity, he does so without considering the output level to be particularly unusual. “It doesn’t seem especially fast,” Frusciante says, “It’s not like if you saw me in the studio I’d be going like you were pressing the fast forward button on the video recorder.” In fact, when assessing the ambition of his album-a-month project, John also cites Black Sabbath’s work ethic in the seventies as a fair comparison. “Their first album was done in a day, and there was a time when that was normal. I guess if there is anything to be learned from what I’m doing it is to remind people that it can be done.” Yet more so than just the quantity, the quality of these new releases may even take Frusciante’s most commited fans by surprise. Created with major contributions from the highly versatile Josh Klinghoffer (The Bicycle Thief, PJ Harvey), the collection is as multi-faceted as it is dense. Amongst the standouts is The Will to Death, a serene and poignant effort that John describes as a “small, very personal sounding album”. In addition to the brilliant Leonard Cohen-style title track, Frusciante produces a fair amount of engaging and entirely soulful moments. In between the screetch and shimmer of his guitar on the song ‘An Exercise’, he sings, ‘Anyhow mistakes are what lead you through life/down and out is only if you think up and in is right.”
Equally compelling is the album Automatic Writing, which has Frusciante, Klinghoffer, and Fugazi’s Joe Lally constructing long and momentous soundscapes beneath John’s introspective vocals. The album’s final track, ‘Montreal’, is a hypnotic thirteenminute venture into Mazzy Star moodiness that is likely to slip by as an unnoticed masterpiece in John’s already accomplished career. Frusciante doesn’t seem too concerned with the listener’s reaction however, characterizing his detachment as the only way to really create the work that he envisions. “Sometimes when all you want is to make something perfect,” he explains, “it is almost like you are taking the listener too much into consideration. I love The Will to Death, so much that if everybody in the world hated it… I’d still feel great about it.”
Looking back, Frusciante’s first solo album – 1994’s Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt – essentially knocks on the door of music legend. Though the album had failed commercially upon its release, it has since endured to be a standout cult classic of the early nineties; a sort of Clockwork Orange of the Nirvana-era music renaissance. At a time when ‘alternative’ was the buzzword of the da, Frusciante produced twenty-five sublime tracks that had vaulted so far beyond the mark that there is little else to compare it to. The Niandra LaDes album was as exhilarating as it was abrasive, exhibiting a sound that was enigmatic, drugaddled, and entirely visceral. Ten years after its original release, Frusciante reflects on it with a mix of pride and pain. “I love that record,” he says, “that was where I found a niche for myself. My problem with that record is that I didn’t know what was happening. It felt like some ghosts were playing music through me.” In this sense, the album is often remembered as much for the exeptional circumstances of its creation as for the riveting sounds it rendered.
After joining the Chili Peppers upon the untimely death of original guitarist Hillel Slovak a few years earlier, Frusciante began to grow increasingly weary of being in the public eye.
“At that time I was doing the Blood Sugar Sex Magik album and tour,” Frusciante recalls, “I didn’t like the idea of my personality being free for the public to make whatever they wanted out of it… especially my music.”
This sense of alienation culminated in the now notorious incident while the Red Hot Chili peppers were on tour in Japan. Twenty-two years old and playing guitar for a band that was exploding worldwide, Frusciante abruptly quit, even as ‘Under the Bridge’ was heading to #2 on the Billboard at the peak of the festival’s popularity. John soon retrated into an inspired delirium to finish the rest of the Niandra LaDes album. “It felt like it was happening by luck. I was hearing all sorts of crazy voices in my head while I was recording and they would be telling me what to do or what to try to do with my guitar. […] Eventually it just started fizzling out,” he says, “at the beginning it sounded like I was in a very happy state, but by the end it’s the sound of somebody falling apart.”
He released his solo album in 1994 on the advice of friends who were enamored with the results, and subsequently took a hiatus from playing any music whatsoever. From the outside, John seemed to be drifting in the direction of Syd Barret, the famed founding member of Pink Floyd who eventually crumbled under the combined weight of drugs, stardom and artistic genius.
In the ensuing years of John’s absence the Chili Peppers had some struggles of their own. Their first new album since his departure – One Hot Minute – fell far short of the success of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and marked a point at which many fans lost their taste for the Peppers. The backlash can, of course, be contrbuted to some varing factors. Perhaps it was the awkward fit of Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro as John’s replacement; or more likely, just resistance to the band’s noticeable efforts towards settling into maturity. Either way, the album lacked the live wire crash that has always characterized the Chili’s sound. Even under the ferocious funk of Flea’s bass, something was missing. More so than any particular song or guitar arrangement, Frusciante’s absence from the band had indeed been a silence that spoke volumes.
Later, when John finally re-joined the Chili Peppers in 1998, the weight of his presence quickly came back into focus with the release of Californication. Hearing the first thirty seconds of the album’s thump and holler evaporate into Frusciante’s frantic vein of notes, it was hard not to comment on his return; after all, the adjectives Red Hot, suddenly felt appropriate once again.
“I’m really proud of the way that I played guitar on Californication,” he explains, “That’s the sort of playing that is important that I’ve done. My favorite song is ‘This Velvet Glove’, I love it as a song and I love the guitar playing in it.”
Californication has endured to be the band’s most successful album to date, keeping the Chili Peppers upright as more than a few of their contempraries fall by the wayside. Even still, a backlash lingers around the Chili Peppers for departing from the rascal punk antics of ‘their early stuff’; a perspective which John acknowledges with a laugh, ‘I mean don’t you think it’s a little ridiculous for forty-one-year-old guys to run around on satge with socks on their dicks?”
That said, the topic of evolution is a perennial that has – and continues to – factor into John’s thought process. “I feel bad for people when I see that they can’t change,” he says, “The only reason I’m interested in being in a band with Flea and Anthony is because they’re more open-minded now; they’re into going to any lenghts to be different from what we’ve done in the past.” In mind then of his current slew of new material, it is certainly curious to consider what Frusciante has in store for the future. At a mere thirty-five years-old, the prolific nature of John’s past few years implies a sort of momentum which is likely to render even more quality material in the days ahead.
“In terms of my relationship to my creativity, I feel that I’m in the driver’s seat,” he says, “My hats off to every spirit that had helped me with my music. I learned a lot from them, and I’m trying to use those lessons to make new music.”
—Charles Ruso
