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November 1997, Guitar Player magazine (USA)
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John Frusciante sits under a rose-colored archway in the hills above Los Angeles, clutching a pack of cigarettes and a one-hitter of pot. He’s barely recognizable at first. With a tousled mane of Jim Morrison-style hair, a huddled posture and oddly matched clothes, he looks more like a sleepless, absent-minded philosophy student than a rock star. Gone is the buff, mohawk-sporting 18-year-old who once energized arenas with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, co-wrote hits like “Under the Bridge” and “Breaking the Girl,” and stripped funk-rock guitar to its raw essentials on Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
His first two solo records, 1994’s difficult Niandra Lades [American] and the even darker Smile From the Streets You Hold [Birdman, 1409 W. Magnolia, Burbank, CA 91506], reflect even less of his former persona. Composed of splintered solo acoustic/electric 4-track bedroom demos rife with backward guitar, howling vocals, enigmatic lyrics and bare-bones guitar arrangements, they are the aural documents of an idealistic, 27-year-old who quit one of the world’s biggest bands at its creative peak, descended into heroin addiction and barely made it out alive.

It was only in the last few weeks of 1996 that Frusciante was finally able to kick the three-year habit that contributed to the loss of his Hollywood Hills home and the gradual deterioration of his body; earlier this year, John’s remaining teeth were removed and replaced by dentures in order to avoid a life-threatening infection. His right forearm appears badly burned, and his speech, though filled with interesting insights and word games, is slurred and erratic.

A voracious music listener, talented painter and devotee of tragic, fallen angels like Syd Barrett, Marc Bolan, Kurt Cobain and Sid Viscious, Frusciante is a mixture of passion, self-taught cultural erudition and snivet-particularly regarding rock and roll mythology. He constantly refers to death in the warmest possible terms. “Death is a place I’m really looking forward to being in,” he says later, strumming a vintage Gibson acoustic in a small room crammed with videos, CDs and art books on Van Gogh, Duchamp, Basquiat and Da Vinci. “I can also be very happy in this life, but it’s usually happiness that I get from other lives I’ve lived and other dimensions. This life is hardly important to me. It’s very small compared to the importance that I think the fourth and fifth dimension have. Those places are much more real to me, like when you have a dream and it’s more real to you than real life. Compared to where I’ll be going, this life seems like a dream that just feels like a dream.”

The recent release of Smile, new sessions in producer Jimmy Boyle’s L.A. studio, an interest in releasing tapes of 3 Amoebas (his improv trio with Flea and Janes Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins) and his participation in this summer’s Nuttstalk tour with members of P-Funk and Fishbone represent Frusciante’s first forays back into the land of the living. But it’s an uneasy peace he maintains with what we call reality. ” I think the reason he embraces death so much,” says his friend and former bandmate Flea, “is that he wants his spirit to be free. He really doesn’t care about being alive in the physical world.”

Listening to Smile From the Streets You Hold can be unnerving. Raw, vulnerable and stream-of-consciousness, it’s a dark ode to the demons and spirits that inhabit Frusciante’s head -the sound of an extremely talented guitarist in search of himself. “The title song was a very intense moment,” says Frusciante quietly, “because I was having verbal communication with the spirits while I was recording, and I started crying at the end of it. The spirits give you ideas for things, and what’s important to them is what’s important to me. I’m much more concerned with my fame in their world than with my fame in this one. That’s why it’s been difficult for me to adjust to being alive at all.”

John Frusciante was born in New York in 1970 to John and Gail Frusciante. John Sr. was a Juilliard-trained pianist who became a lawyer and later a judge. Gail, too , was a promising musician, a singer who became a homemaker, says her son, because her husband ruled out the possibility of a musical career, though she now sings for her church and provided the background vocals on “Under the Bridge.” The family lived in Queens, relocated to Tuscon, Arizona, and then moved to Florida for a year, during which time John’s parents separated. Moving with his mother to Santa Monica, California, John, like a million other California kids, became obsessed with skateboarding, Aerosmith and KISS.

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