The Watt from Pedro show, 25th January 2009
Mike Watt: Made me think a little bit of Syd Barrett.
John Frusciante: Yeah. I was really into Syd Barrett at that time.
Mike Watt: Oh really?
John Frusciante: Yeah.
Mike Watt: That Piper, but then the other two, the Madcap and Barrett.
John Frusciante: Barrett, yeah.
Mike Watt: Trippy records.
John Frusciante: They kind of…like, the whole time I was playing guitar as a teenager I wasn’t into playing acoustic guitar, it was kind of forced on me. I had to play acoustic guitar because my parents wouldn’t buy me an electric and I had to prove myself on acoustic, you know.
Mike Watt: Yeah.
John Frusciante: And so, so uh, I think I didn’t do anything with acoustic guitar for, like, the first nine years that I was playing guitar, but when I was 21 and I, uh, I’d had those Syd Barrett albums for awhile, but I got obsessed with them when I was, I had ‘em since I was, like, 15 but I got obsessed with them when I was, like, 21 and it, uh, made me become really into writing songs on acoustic guitar and recording. It just made me see acoustic guitar, um, as something that it’s a privilege to play instead of it’s something that you have to play.
Mike Watt: The burden. Wow. So when you were coming up with the songs to show Josh, Flea and those guys, jamming ‘em out, or in your mind you had…like, the rhythm guitar as a tool to show them, but, I have an idea…
John Frusciante: Uh, you know I write the music, the lyrics, you know, chords and lyrics and melody all at once. It’s always been one process with me, so, so uh…
Mike Watt: Did you ever think, I’ll show the guys the guitar and we’ll have that guide track, then I’ll lose it?
John Frusciante: That was the idea because I was really at that time, at that time I was really enjoying records like the first couple of Roxy Music records and The Doors in the 60s where the guitar unlike in most rock music it’s not playing a prominent role it’s more playing embellishments on top. Josh got really good on the organs and electric pianos and stuff like that in the last few years he was uh, playing that in a couple of bands that he was on tour with where he was just… I was just really liking that. I was never really using those instruments on my solo records and then it started to just seem like a good idea to make music that was more, uh, where the keyboards are more the thing that’s playing the chords, and if there’s a guitar it’s more something on top of it. And then it takes the song away from its original conception. A lot of these songs when they started they sounded, like, kind of, uh, just very different than they do now. Like, now, the chords are all kind of difficult to place, whereas I was, I used to be really into making complicated chord progressions and stuff in my songs, and this was like going back to, like, major and minor chords and stuff like that, but if I would’ve used guitars as the main thing it might’ve even sounded kind of stuck or something like that. But with the keyboards you don’t even hear what the original conception of the song was. You just hear the textures that are, that it’s being pulled out of and all…
Josh Klinghoffer: And you…
John Frusciante: Huh?
Josh Klinghoffer: You don’t often hear the original form of the keyboard either.
John Frusciante: Yeah, we would do electronic treatments to the keyboards, so every, the it, the actual end thing is so far from the original, from the original idea.
Mike Watt: It grew.
John Frusciante: Huh?
Mike Watt: It, like, grew. The process.
John Frusciante: Yeah, yeah.
Mike Watt: So it couldn’t be, like, the same.
