The Watt from Pedro show, 25th January 2009
Mike Watt: Yeah. What about at school? Did you know other people playing? Play with them?
John Frusciante: Yeah, I didn’t…not really, like, I didn’t, uh, I didn’t play with a lot of people. I mostly just sat in my bedroom and practiced all the time. I was, I was, you know, it would be anywhere between…it was pretty much all did besides eat and maybe, you know…
Mike Watt: Piss and shit.
John Frusciante: Yeah. Just sitting at somebody’s…maybe go over to somebody’s house and watch some, watch, you know, watch some videos or something like that. But usually it was just like, practice every second that I could. Sleep in school sometimes. Like, go to school and fall asleep on the couch and wake up when it was time to go home, you know.
Laughing.
John Frusciante: They let you do that at my school, so I took advantage. I would stay up practicing all night, and drink tons of coffee and then go to school and sleep.
Mike Watt: So it was a lot of listening to records and playing to ‘em.
John Frusciante: Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s, everything I…I feel like everything that I’ve done has had a lot..Josh is also really big on that. We both know how to…have such a backlog of song that we know how to play to…like off of records, where it’s a nice kind of shared knowledge because we have….it gives you a good sort of idea why things…you gradual start to put together why things make you feel what they make you feel, you know, like, when sometimes if I don’t know how to play something it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s a colour that I don’t know how to express, or something.’
Mike Watt: Yeah.
John Frusciante: And then you learn how to play and you develop a sort of vocabulary of knowing which feelings can be produced by which combination of notes and which rhythms which um, uh, you know, uh, one instrument offsetting another instrument and balance it out…
Mike Watt: Interaction.
John Frusciante: Yeah, I, you know, I’m big on learning, like, as many of the parts as I can. I don’t just learn guitar things, I’ve spent a lot of time learning, like, you know, John Coltrane’s songs..heads, and Ornette Coleman heads, and, you know, Eric Dolphy. I go through periods of just learning things on other instruments. Or I’ve spent a lot of time learning things that were made on sequencers, learning parts off electronic music, records of all types and learning, you know, starting to see the guitar not just, uh, as a guitar, but just picking up the logic of other instruments, because it’s a completely different logic on piano. Piano is a real difficult one to play on guitar but you try to learn somebody’s chord progressions on piano and play them on guitar, it teaches you a lot. Or learn, like, classical music and try to understand the relationship of all the parts. So yeah, for me that’s been..it seems like the styles that I’ve developed have been just various way of combining, uh, combining uh, you know, put…crossing together and combining feelings of various things, aspects of things that I like and putting them all together. Kinda like somebody makes a hip-hop track or something, where you just, like, you take a beat from one thing, and a guitar from another thing…
Mike Watt: Pile it on.
John Frusciante:…and you just sort of blend together a lot of things and that’s kind of how my music has been. I…I get inspired by learning things off records and I don’t, uh, it makes me happy to do, you know. As a kid, I dunno. I think I always had my own voice, but I remember a kid who didn’t really seem to care that much about music telling me, ‘Hey, you should be original! You’re better than this person or that person that you look up to so much.’ I would be like, ‘No I’m not..and, I love learning their stuff, like, there’s no reason I would not do this.’ And gradually I developed, uh….
Mike Watt: Yeah, when did you write your first songs?
John Frusciante: Oh, right away.
Mike Watt: Right away.
John Frusciante: It was actually the first thing I did, but it made me take it more seriously when I started learning other people’s songs, you know. But emotionally, I had to do it right from the beginning so…That was the day I started playing guitar. I was mad at a kid, and I just, I just went into my house and wrote all these songs about, ‘I wanna kill him.’ You know, I must’ve written, I filled up like a whole tape and wrote the name of every song that I wrote on the cassette tape and it was just one…I think…I don’t have the tape anymore, but it was, like, I think it was just one angry song after another of just these punk songs about this kid and about stuff that I was mad about. But it made me feel better. I became…I had been going through sort of a rough period where I was sort of imbalanced, uh, and uh, lost, and uh, I got that initial aggression out playing music and I very quickly went into a period of being a real peaceful person who, you know, loved the ideals of the 60s and things like that, you know, and just wanted to, uh, just wanted to make music that felt good and went into a very arty period after that, (???) things like Eno and Talking Heads. So my first 4-track recordings were all real kind of arty, experimental things uh….
Mike Watt: Did you make a band when you were young?
John Frusciante: No. I had conceptual bands in my recordings and stuff, uh.
Mike Watt: But, like, no gigs?
John Frusciante: No, no. I played a show with my guitar teacher, uh, that was my first live experience was playing a bunch of feedback on a cover of a 60s song that they were covering..he had kind of a psychedelic, a modern psychedelic band and uh, and it was kind of a feature for the guitar, I did all the soloing, long solos and feedback and stuff on this one song, “Love You To Sing†(?) and uh, that was a lot of fun. But yeah, other than that, I mean, there wasn’t really, uh…I didn’t really know kids I could see eye to eye with. There wasn’t a lot of kids that wanted to do the same kind of thing. People seemed to be very concerned with what other people would think of what we would do, uh, and they weren’t thinking in terms of following interests, they were thinking in terms of, like, ‘I want girls to like me at parties,’ and stuff like that. And somebody like me who was thinking totally in musical terms of wanting to do something weird or wanting to do something different, they didn’t see any place for that.
