The Watt from Pedro show, 25th January 2009
John Frusciante: Wanna talk about Come Out?
Josh Klinghoffer laughs
John Frusciante: Umm, uh, yeah, um, Come Out, yeah it’s an experiment I guess in, in phasing that he did with tape recorders in the 60s, where he takes a loop of, uh, I think it’s an injured kid or something, uh, talking. I’m not sure who the kid is, but it’s almost like, you know, what people would do with sampling now and with, uh, with a lot of, you know, effects, and things like that. But he’s just doing it, from what I understand, just with tape recorders. It’s just some of the magic that can…and especially it shows all the incredible rich harmonics that are in the human voice, and some people have even more complex ones than others. And he pulls all kinds of incredible sounds and rhythms and melodies out of this one single phrase of a person, repeated over and over. I just…
Josh Klinghoffer: Five words.
John Frusciante: Yeah… come out to show them, and uh, Captain Beefheart also quoted that in, uh, what song is that? The last song on the first side. Mimics the drum beat of the song. Laughs. I’m forgetting the name of the song…I’m remembering the drum solo from the beginning. But um, but yeah, so I like Steve Reich.
Mike Watt: Yeah. Who would we play..lady…who came up with the Doctor Who theme song. She was working at the BBC studios in the 50s and 60s and they had to cut tape and you know, no synthesizers. Used oscillators…
John Frusciante: Yeah. A friend…
Mike Watt:…mainly a lot of tape manipulations.
John Frusciante: Totally. Yeah.
Mike Watt:…speeding up…slowing down.
John Frusciante: A friend of mine, Aaron, says that’s, like, his favourite song….I don’t know what it sounds like…I’ve read about it and stuff.
Mike Watt: What’s her name?
Josh Klinghoffer: Yeah, I know who you’re talking about, I don’t remember her name.
Mike Watt: She just died a few years ago. Pretty trip far ahead. There were no peers, no status quo. They were just pioneers.
John Frusciante: Yeah.
Mike Watt: Uh, yeah. Getting started in music. Your journey. Where’d it start?
John Frusciante: Umm, I guess it was, like, uh, first, like, hearing some music when I was four years old where I realised that, um, that it was resonating something inside me that I was connected to. It was, like, showing me something about the inside of myself that I didn’t know before that, soft of like…so there was that experience which felt important, uh, when I was, like, four, and then, uh, and then, and then uh, growing up being about seven, eight years old and hearing music in my head and thinking, ‘Wow! What is this music that’s going through my head? It sounds like..’
Mike Watt: Not from the radio?
John Frusciante: No, music I was making up, but with no effort. I was just hearing music that I would want to hear in my head and thinking, ‘Wow! If I could play an instrument I could write some cool songs.’ You know, like, but they were just there in my head, like, planted in there or something, It didn’t feel like something that I was thinking of or anything. It was just be, like, being bored, walking down the street and entertaining yourself by, like, hearing music in your head, you know. And so, uh, so that made me feel…the fact that that happened so much made me feel like I was meant to play an instrument, and…and then uh, I just always had that in my head. Even from before I knew what a guitar was, I knew that I was going to play a guitar. So the more I started to hear guitars and records and know what they were, know who Jimmy Page was, know who Eddie Van Halen was, or whatever, the more I started, like, uh, really wanting to play guitar really badly, and uh, tried when I was about eight, but nobody would buy me an electric and I didn’t like the way acoustic sounded so I, so I, uh, waited until I just had to play, it was killing me to not play so I played acoustic for awhile just to prove to my dad that I could play and I learned uh, I was just learning punk songs by ear, you know…
Mike Watt: Off records?
John Frusciante: Yeah, off records. And just, just uh, at first I don’t think I even knew how to tune it. I was just playing all the chords with one finger and tuning it to wear it sounded like what was on the records to me, you know, and uh, and then, it was good my….I…you know, convinced my dad that I was gonna, that I was gonna stick with it and stuff. So he bought me a Stratocaster, which is what I wanted. By then, I was also getting really into Jimi Hendrix and stuff, and then uh…
Mike Watt: And an amp?
John Frusciante: Yeah, so he got me a little Roland Amp and a Statocaster, and uh, and I started, uh, you know..it was good because my taste sort of, you know, my taste was always going along with my ability. I started out learning punk songs and that was what I was really into and it was also a pretty easy think to learn how to play, you know, and then I got into 60s music, and then, got into, like, progressive rock, and I was really into Frank Zappa, and, you know. It was just like, I had between the ages of 12 and 16, it was like my taste kept getting more complex and my ability was growing with my taste, so, so uh, I never tried to play things that were way beyond me. I always was playing just things that were just a little beyond my ability.
