MusicRadar interview 2008/2009
Joe Bosso: A reader by the name of “porcelain” says: I’ve been playing the guitar for a long time and I admire your style. I wanna know, in your opinion, is theory necessary to play the guitar; or, is playing guitar emotionally enough?
John Frusciante: I definitely think it’s enough to just use your emotions; I think that a lot of brilliant music has been made like that. It just depends on what you wanna do, you know? It’s, like, I don’t think somebody should learn theory just because I said it’s a good idea; but, for me, it’s been a really good idea and it makes me…it just gives me more insight into the music that I learn, and I don’t think of each note and each relationship in-in a given piece of music as just being something that came out of thin air, which I think it may seem magical when you’re a kid. Yeah, I remember how it sounded when I used to listen to KISS when I was a kid and to me it sounded like it all came out of thin air and I had no idea how any of it was being done or what the tonal and rhythmic relationships were. You know, it’s, it all just sounded like it came out of thin air and it’s a nice feeling; but I think that if I would’ve remained seeing it that way, I think a lot of people even when they learn stuff, when they’re, when their brain doesn’t find a some way of finding a mental symbol that equals the intervalic relationship or the rhythmic relationships….I think that the tendency to think of it as if it was all just coming out of thin air and all of this being kind of unrelated I think that can be limiting. And I think if a person’s really gonna be good at it, like Jimi Hendrix was, or Johnny Marr is or, you know, the guys in Fugazi or it’s-it’s like you-you, in some way you find a mental symbol, it might not, it’s one of those mental pictures like, if I tried to picture the feeling of metal in my mind or the feeling of a certain type of wood in my mind – there’s a mental symbol for it…I don’t actually see the feeling, in sense that touches are something you can see in most cases, but there is a symbol of it in my head and I think that’s the kind of a thing a person has to develop and it just takes a lot of practising and a lot of thinking about music and a lot of giving love to music. I-I think that music sound is there for everybody who puts time in their work and I think there’s many paths to get to, very similar places; but I really love learning theory, cuz I can hear a…if you put on a song, I immediatelly recognise the intervalic relationships and I’ve learnt it all already without even picking up my guitar! And, yeah, well, you know, it’s possible that somebody can do that without knowing those things; but it’s all just so clear to me, you know? (Right!) I’m really grateful for that and I-I don’t think it would be as sharp of a sense it is without knowing those things, you know? I think it’s only been a recent phenomenon in a lot of ways amongst people who really work hard at music that they’ve gone so far with it without learning things, because there’s a time where, if you really want to do something big, other than, like, folk music or something, you…you have to learn how to read and you have to learn how to write music and you have to learn harmony and learn how to orchestrate it. Those things don’t limit, you know? People like Beethoven and Mozart and Stravinsky and they-they only help, like I said, it’s only, like I said, you have to go through a period of strain for a while and you may…to really get the ideas adjucted, you may have to put your creativity on the side for a little while, you know? And if you’re not wanting to do that, then it’s not a good idea to learn it…but if you’re, if you’re 15-years-old or 16-years-old or 17-years-old, there’s just no reason not to learn that stuff, because…yeah, you might have a couple of years of not being as creative as you were before, but how much you’re able to do with it once the ideas are digested and it’s not a strain to think about them anymore…you know, it’s wonderful!
Joe Bosso: A reader by the name of “Cradle88” says: You seem to love all kinds of music: funk, dance, hip-hop et cetera. Is there any particular kind of genre that you’ve never warmed up to?
John Frusciante: Well, it’s not…I don’t really think of music in genres, like…but I like it when they play with each other and I can really hear the spirit of music more, like, the formulas that connect, you know, two people of the same style. Mainly, I just don’t like it when it sounds to me like the music is being made in order to, uh, impress people or in order to, like, please business people or in order to, like, please the masses or whatever…I just…it doesn’t sound good to me when it sounds that it was more important to somebody to do something that was gonna make them famous or make them loved by people…then that when they were doing something, that there were just harmonious relationships between them and the creative force of music, you know? And that’s a really apparent thing to me when it sounds like somebody’s making music for the wrong reason, I hear it right away, I-I think, I think that the another thing besides the personality that too much emphasis is placed on…is the style of music somebody’s doing or the actual way they dress or the-or the radio station they would be played on, or the section in the record store…like…to me, the real important element of music is the energy behind it; and a sensitive person who loves music can feel that and, you know? You just know the difference when you hear a band at the point in their career when they were doing it for the right reasons, and at the point in their career when they were doing it for the wrong reasons…it’s plainly apparent, you know? (Yeah!) And that’s the style of music I don’t like cuz when I just feel that somebody’s doing something just because they’re getting paid a lot to make that record or whatever, or because they think it’s gonna make everybody love them.
Joe Bosso: But I guess that what this person is asking is back in the day when there was Tower Records; say, would you walk in and NOT go to a certain section, cause, like: Oh, I’m just not in that kind of music!
John Frusciante: I go through PHASES of things. Like, no, I’m real open-minded about music, you know, like…I-I like all types of music and, and, like I said, I just don’t divide it up in my head that way. I like all kinds of things that would, you, know, like, there’s very few of my friend who would like…I don’t think there’s any of my friends who would like everything that I like. Like, I’ve really (Haha), I’ve just always been like that, I love a huge variety of things, you know?
