Red Hot Once Again!
Are you looking forward to performing at Woodstock this summer?
I’m looking forward to all our shows; I’m looking forward to every show we’re gonna play. I’m not looking forward to Woodstock any more than I am the Hollywood Palladium. I’m just looking forward to playing. I’m looking forward to us getting along and getting off on each other’s performance the way that we’ve always gotten off writing music with each other. I hope we’re constantly growing together as we’re on tour in the same way that we grew while we were making BloodSugar and while we were making this record. With my guitar playing, I’m just trying to get better all the time.
Did you ever imagine for a second that you’d find yourself back in the Chili Peppers again?
No. It’s the best thing in the world to have nothing but your creativity to think about every day. When you’re making music with people who care about your creativity and who are responsive to it the way Anthony, Flea, and Chad are responsive to mine, it’s just the best feeling in the world. It’s such a good thing to play onstage with people when you’re all looking at each other and you’re all listening to each other. When you’re a band that has chemistry, and you do that, it’s such a powerful thing. It’s so fun when you have four people with four distinct styles that, when you play together, it creates this thing bigger than the sum of the individuals. I’m so proud to be in a group like that. And we all know that we all appreciate each other now. When I quit the band, we didn’t appreciate each other at all- all the way around. I didn’t appreciate them, and they didn’t appreciate me. And now we all appreciate each other a great deal. We have a lot of fun playing music with each other. It’s been so fun for the last year to have that to do every day.
Play Like A Pepper: Selected riffs from Mother’s Milk and BloodSugarSexMagik
“Good Time Boys”
“God, I’m not a fan of my guitar playing on Mother’s Milk…I just came up with that ‘Good Time Boys’ riff in the studio while we were doing the overdubs for the song. And the producer for that record, Michael Beinhorn, had me play it over and over 30 times to multitrack it because he wanted to get a beefy sound. It was a real drag recording that album- nothing like anything we did later. It was a real struggle.”
“Breaking the Girl”
“Around the time we did ‘Breaking the Girl,’ I was listening to Led Zeppelin III- I really like that song ‘Friends’- and I was playing 12-string a lot. The chords for the chorus came from a Duke Ellington book. I was trying to learn one of the songs, and I learned like three chords of a song that probably has 50 chords in it, and I took those three chords somewhere else. When I played those three chords, I heard where the fourth and fifth chords would go, and then did a cycle that ended with a different chord each time. It starts on Am7, and then the rest of the chords, they each only have three notes in them. Sometimes if you’re learning songs out of books like that-especially since, in that case, it was a book of piano voicings- you end up taking things somewhere else.”
“Give It Away”
“I got the idea for the verse riff in ‘Give It Away’- the idea of spacing the notes out that way, going: root-4th-major 3rd-from the Black Sabbath song, ‘Sweet Leaf.’ And I actually kind of play the ‘Sweet Leaf’ riff for a second at the end of the song, on an overdubbed track. Because the song’s called ‘Give It Away,” I figured I’d ‘give away’ the origin of the song- because we’re always ripping stuff off, but you don’t normally end the song with the thing that you actually ripped off [laughs]. But that’s what I did on there.”
What’s Between the Lines: Scar Tissue
In September 1991, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ BloodSugarSexMagik hit the record racks and raced up the charts, remaining in the Billboard Top 10 for more than a year on the strength of breakthrough singles like “Give it Away,” “Under the Bridge,” and “Breaking the Girl,” and the funky yet melodic guitar talents of a young John Frusciante. After a seven-year absence from the band, Frusciante is back. And “Scar Tissue,” the first single released off 1999’s Californication, is for many fans the first taste of the guitarist’s diverse playing style since his work on BloodSugar. The new track, which shares many of the same subtleties as the aforementioned Chili Peppers smash “Under the Bridge,” features guitaristic gems ranging from Frusciante’s sparse intervallic textures to his soulful slide playing.
The Intro and Verses
Frusciante sets “Scar Tissue” in motion with a riff based on an intervallic concept he developed during the making of the Chili Peppers’ BloodSugar. “The style that I’m doing in the intro and the verses on ‘Scar Tissue’ is something I started doing when we were recording that album,” explains Frusciante. “I had an acoustic guitar in my bedroom at the house we recorded at, but I had no pick because I wanted to make up a finger-picking style. So I started doing that thing where I play a note on one of the low strings and a 3rd above it on a higher string- just notes that are far away from each other- and alternate between them using my right-hand fingers. I do that a lot on my solo albums, and I’m doing a very simplistic version of it on ‘Scar Tissue.’ I probably wouldn’t have come up with that style if not for listening so much to Eric Avery’s [of Jane’s Addiction] bass lines- especially the way he plays on ‘Summertime Rolls.’”
For the most part, Frusciante alternates between three chord shapes in the intro and verse sections, playing the lowest and highest notes in an F-C-Dm chord sequence [Fig.1] in the manner described above. As the song progresses, Frusciante punctuates every four measures of his riff (over the Dm chord) with a melodic fill derived from the D Dorian mode [Fig.2].
The Chorus
During each chorus, the sparse intervallic texture Frusciante established in the intro and verse sections is temporarily abandoned for a strummed arrangement of F, C, and Dm chords [Fig.3]. Notice that the song’s chorus section occurs in varying lengths: a four-bar sequence (1st and 3rd choruses) and a six-bar arrangement (2nd, 4th, and 5th choruses).
The Slide Work
At various point is “Scar Tissue,” John Frusciante interjects a series of soulful slide phrases over the accompaniment of his bandmates, soloing primarily along the 2nd string of his Fender Telecaster. [Refer to this issue’s installment of Lesson Lab for the basics of “slide technique” –Ed.] When playing slide licks, Frusciante favors standard tuning because he feels it gives him maximum melodic control- particularly if he’s only playing single-note passages. Before you slap a slide on and start slithering along your guitar’s fretboard, your accuracy and intonation will benefit greatly if you first familiarize yourself with the different pitches in D Dorian as they occur along you 2nd string [Fig.4].
--- Dale Turner
