The Lost Boy
March 2001, Kerrang (UK)
thanks to Caroline for typing it out
click the thumbnail to see the scans
John Frusciante joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers at 18, left at 23, spent the next five years slowly killing himself with heroin and finally cleaned up for good. But he’s still hearing voices in his head…
When fresh-faced 18-year-old John Frusciante was recruited as guitarist by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, following the heroin-related death of original band member Hillel Slovak in June 1988, it seemed like nothing less than a dream come true. But following four years with the band, during which they recorded both ’89’s ‘Mother’s Milk’ and 91’s multi-platinium ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik’ albums, Frusciante’s life had steadily metamorphosed into a living, breathing nightmare.
“I saw death in everything around me,” admits the guitarist as he fidgets endlessly on the sofa of his seventh floor Park Lane hotel suite. “And everything that was beautiful represented everything that was sad, lost and gone. I couldn’t listen to music, read books or watch movies anymore. I couldn’t do anything and I didn’t want to think. Everything made me miserable and all I could do was lie on the couch and stare vacantly into space.”
John abruptly left the Chili Peppers in the midst of a four-date Japanese mini-tour of May’92 and studiously set about destroying himself in a six-year haze of potentially lethal narcotics. Yet astonishingly, his indomitable spirit ultimately prevailed. He eventually cleaned up, rejoined the Peppers in April ‘98 and is about to release his third solo album, ‘To Record Only Water For Ten Days.’
This, then, is the full and unexpurgated story of his incredible fall and rise; a harrowing saga which could so easily have finally seen the light of day as part and parcel of a tragic obituary.
John Frusciante was born in New York on March 5, 1970. Music was in his blood from the start: his father was a concert pianist, his mother a singer, his grandfather a renowned mandolin player.
“I knew that I was gonna be a guitarist ever since I can remember,” says John as he sips from a steaming cup of Egyptian liquorice tea. “There were voices in my head that were telling me so.”
You’ll find that we’ll be hearing a great deal more from these voices as the interview progresses, as they seem to be the spiritual and psychological echoes upon which Frusciante has based every major move and decision of his life.
After initially picking up an acoustic guitar at the age of seven, John soon became disillusioned with the fact that he couldn’t hope to emulate the sounds that he heard on records by Led Zeppelin and Van Halen (”It just seemed so far away,” he recalls, “so I gave up.”)
Two years later, an interest in the new wave sounds of Devo and the B-52’s led on to John’s forthbright embrace of punk rock bands: Black Flag, The Clash, Sex Pistols and, most tellingly, The Germs.
“The Germs’ first shows made me realise that being good at the guitar wasn’t something you had to work at,” babbles Frusciante with an infectious, child-like enthusiasm. “As long as you put the right kind of energy and feeling into your playing, that was what mattered. Then one day I was feeling a lot of rage - I was angry at two kids that I didn’t like and didn’t like me - so I went home and wrote 30 short punk songs in a row on my acoustic guitar. That was the first day that I really started playing.”
John’s early teens found him utterly immersed in rock ‘n’ roll, voraciously devouring music” that I thought was good for me as a musician” and slavishly practising guitar licks in his bedroom. Then, at 17, he moved to Hollywood, began playing with a like-minded bass player and finally rejected technique-based rock stylings for something a little more visceral.
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