Red Hot Once Again!
You always seem to be able to turn your backwards guitar solos into coherent-sounding, melodic statements. Can you explain how you approach your “backwards” leads?
When I’m playing backwards, along with the chord changes, I just follow the chord changes. Every chord change that I’m following, it doesn’t matter if I stumble going into it because that’s just gonna be the end of the chord when you hear it forward. Those notes that I finally found are gonna be the first ones you hear, so it’s always gonna sound like it goes right along with the chord. You get a flow going, and you just play to where it sounds good and has a form backwards, and it’ll have another kind of form when people hear it forward.
There’s some nice slide playing on “Scar Tissue.”I just played the slide on a Telecaster into my Fender Showman amp. My favorite slide guitarist is Snake Finger. His influence isn’t evident on the song, but that’s how I practice slide: from playing along with him and Jimmy Page. “Soul to Squeeze” [Chili Peppers’ single from the Coneheads soundtrack, recorded during the BloodSugar sessions] has slide, too. That was a Gibson lap-steel, and I wasn’t playing it with a slide, I was using a spice jar.
When you’re playing slide in that style, are you playing in standard tuning?
Yes. I’m doing it in standard tuning because I’m just doing single notes. If you’re trying to learn Robert Johnson songs and stuff where it’s a lot of chords, you need a different tuning. But when you’re just soloing, I don’t see the reason for changing the tuning. It doesn’t really matter how it’s tuned. I remember when we recorded “Soul to Squeeze,” I didn’t know how it was tuned [laughs]. It was just however the lapsteel was tuned at the time. It didn’t really matter ‘cause I was just playing single notes; you’re never gonna hear the relationship between one string and the other.
You and Flea are engaged in some pretty intense counterpoint in “Parallel Universe.” How did that come together?
Flea was just playing this bass line- I forget how it happened, we were just jamming- and I guess he was practicing playing with a pick, and I figured I’d mute the strings like Ian MacKaye does in Fugazi. Then I figured it’d be cool if I played a harmony to what Flea was doing. I remember I just started ending it differently: I had the minor 3rd in it, then I had the 4th, and then, when I did the major 3rd, it inspired Flea to do that descending part to resolve it. It was just playing off of each other and just thinking it would be cool to do a harmony with him, with the rhythm and texture like that. It was an important thing to us to make every section have a new texture, like the way electronic music is- where you have each section be all different shapes and different textures. We do that on this album with our instruments.
You just described some of the parts you played using music theory terms. Did you pick up some of that stuff during your brief stint at the Guitar Institute of Technology before you joined the Peppers in 1988?
No. I was enrolled there because my dad was paying my rent because of it, but I didn’t go to the classes, and I didn’t learn anything. I got in there already knowing all the stuff that you’d learn in the year that you would go there. I was just doing cocaine all the time: punching in and going back to my friend’s house and doing cocaine and going back to school to punch out so that my dad would think I was there. They didn’t take roll in the classes, so I would just go to punch in. I already knew music theory. I think of music that way, but only insofar as it relates to the color of what I’m doing. I don’t think of “theory” and “color” as being two separate things. They fought with each other at various points in the development of my musicianship. They don’t anymore. Like, when I was focusing on new wave and punk guitar players for this album, I looked at what they were doing in a technical way. I thought of the theory behind the colors that they were doing- why they chose the notes that they chose- using music theory. I was fascinated by it. I have a theoretical perspective on it that makes it really interesting. Now, ever since we finished the record, I’ve been focusing on the “guitar hero”- type people and [sax players like] Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy. I can play all those things on the guitar. That’s how my fingers have gotten really strong since we finished the record: I’ve been focusing on the hardest music that I can play.
I’ve noticed in your past interviews you stress the importance of letting go of the technical side of playing.
I think it’s important for m to see music as the colors that I’m getting out of the instrument and not the physical aspect of it. It was a big revelation for me when I saw music clearly that way, which happened after we had finished touring for Mother’s Milk. All of a sudden, I started seeing music in a different way than I’d ever seen it. But since then, I’ve seen how there’s a way that you can totally focus on the physical aspect of it to the point where the spiritual part of it and the technical part just work together and with each other. These definitions of theory came from analyzing something that came from a spiritual place. You can play in a way where you’re focusing on the physical part of it and still have it be totally just an expression of who you are.
I don’t think that it’s the purpose of music to drive you into “displaying” anything; I don’t think it’s music when somebody’s “displaying” their talents. But at the same time, there are people who have focused on the technical aspects of what they do- trying to do something that’s technically different from everything else- and it comes out being a real powerful display of a wide range of colors. Some people nowadays think that it’s not cool to really dedicate yourself to music the way that people in the early ‘70s- like Genesis, King Crimson, and Yes- dedicated themselves to their craft and then made music that was very complex. I think what those groups did is beautiful. I think it’s cool to dedicate yourself to something, and I think being a good musician is a really important thing. I don’t think there’s anything “uncool” about it. Some people just have a fucked-up perception of it because, at some point, I guess in the ‘80s, people started to equate being a showoff with being a good musician. Steve Hackett’s playing in Genesis, he’s totally as far from being a showoff as you could be. He was a good musician; he just had a big palette of colors to draw from. So I think that learning technical things can limit people if their perspective on music is already limited in that way. Music is just a beautiful thing.
Who were some of your first guitar heroes?
When I was a real little kid- about seven or eight- I like Jimmy Page. And I had the second Van Halen record, which I liked a lot, and I like Joe Perry. But when I heard those guitarists, I didn’t understand how I could make those sounds out of a guitar. I knew I wanted to be a guitarist from as far back as I can remember, but I didn’t see how I could do it. I just knew in my head that I was gonna do it at one point. But when I was nine, I found out about punk- when I heard the Germs- and it started to make sense to me: That I would be able to play those songs. From the standpoint of being nine years old, the idea that I could play as good as Pat Smear one day was real and magical and incredible to me, but at the same time it seemed possible. So it was people like Greg Ginn, Pat Smear, Steve Jones, Joe Strummer, and Mick Jones who inspired me, at first, to start playing. Those were the songs that I learned, songs by those people. I got into Devo, the B-52s, and the Germs when I was like nine, and then when I was 10, I pulled this guitar out of the closet and started playing. And then, once I convinced my dad to buy me a Stratocaster, I started with the people who I think anybody who starts playing guitar should learn from: Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix. To me, in terms of rock guitar, that’s as far as playing has ever gone, in some ways. To me, it’s what started the vocabulary of what a “rock star” sounds like when they play a guitar solo [laughs], what a “rock guitar solo” is, what the approach is. It set the standard.
