Juice magazine interview
At that point, he was unbearably depressed, unable to contemplate the music and art (he's a painter and writer) which had previously given him purpose. The Chili Peppers' success had turned the band upon itself leading to reports that at the height of Blood Sugar Sex Magik's six million unit sales, the scene backstage with the Funky Monks (as the hand was dubbed,) suggested they'd each taken their own vow of silence - at least when it came to communicating with one another. It had also turned Frusciante's muse inside out. He'd lost his way, and as far as he was concerned, getting out of it on heroin led him back. "I couldn't do anything but lay on the couch and be depressed," he said. "Then I became a junkie and came to life again and became happy and started playing music again."
Then there was the year he turned 27,1997. "It was a year of feeling like an impostor who didn't even deserve to be called John Frusciante," he recalled. "It was the worst year of my life."
At least while on this cocktail of substances, he felt creatively active. His solo albums were harrowing. The home-made four track recordings were closer to the emotionally exploratory and surreal work of his favourite artists (Van Gogh, Duchamp, Basquait) and the acidic tangents of the fallen musical minds he admired (trippers like Syd Barret Marc Bolan, Kurt Cobain and Sid Viscious) than the RHCP's athletic funk workouts. He explained that he wasn't so much writing the music on his two solo albums, Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt and Smile From the Streets You Hold, as channelling spirits from the fourth and fifth dimensions. And it sounds like those spirits aren't so benevolent, despite his claims that, "I'm more concerned with fame in the spirit world than in this one."
Still, when RHCP fans heard Frusciante would replace ex-Jane's Addiction axe-wielder, Dave Navarro, as guitarist in 1998, they were over-joyed. Blood Sugar was an accepted rock classic, a marriage of LA punk rock and funkadelic craziness that was as idiosyncratic as it was influential on the late '90s hip rock movement. Could the reunited hand replicate that feeling? Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, has a simple explanation for the excitement. The chemistry is back.
"John's an amazing person, and I've never felt anybody that I've liked to make music with more than he," Kiedis says. "I couldn't be happier. It was actually much more than a dream come true, because I couldn't even have dreamed about that happening. It's better than my wildest dreams."
It's over three years after the New Times story, and Kiedis is talking lyrics, a rarity for him (he's more likely to dismiss these questions with a line like, "I hate to be too blunt with an explanation for a song, because the song really explains itself better than I ever could"). But there are some obvious slices of autobiography on latest album Californication, a fact made plainer by Kiedis' tendency to name names. Elsewhere on the record he rhymes John Frusciante with the line, "Python power straight from Monty," while "This Velvet Glove" is a love song for Kiedis' wife, which centres around the lines, 'John says to live above hell / My will is well."
It sounds like a plain reference to an understanding that's shared between friends who've beaten the same monkey off their backs. Kiedis says the quote is not so literal, but the John the song refers to is indeed Frusciante, and the lyric is an eavesdropped lift from one of his solo works in progress.
"He was singing about living life above hell, meaning whether from drugs or just state of mind," says Kiedis. "He'd sampled life living in hell, he thought better of it, got over it and was living in a more beautiful space. I was so deeply in love when I wrote it, and John was very much a part of my life during that time, creating good energy, I wanted to mention it."
