The Lost Boy
“The music I thought I was supposed to be listening to didn’t really give me the same feeling as David Bowie, the New York Dolls and T Rex,” shrugs Frusciante as he tucks his il-disciplined, gangling legs beneath his perpetually fidgeting buttocks in the accepted yogic-flying style. “So listening to those bands and getting experience through jamming was pretty much where I was at when I joined the Chili Peppers.”
Frusciante’s fairytale recruitment into the raanks of his all-time favourite band was to be fraught with sundry problems. Learning to relate on a personal level to three infinitely more experienced musicians who were not only eight years his senior, but also fully-fledged stars in his eyes, was a problem in itself. Add to this the demands of overnight celebrity and a debilitating work rate and you’re left with something of a recipe for Sid Vicious-style disaster.
“I expected them to be perfect and when they weren’t I got mad at them,” sighs John before resuming his sibilant, drawling narrative. “I’d get angry at Anthony (Kiedis, vocalist) and fight a lot with Flea (bassist). We’d say rude things back and forth to each other. I never really got over that feeling for the first four years I was in the band. Of course we were friends and loved each other, but when you start out with such an artificial image of somebody, it’s hard to balance that out with seeing them as they truly are.”
John roughly pulls at his woolen ski hat in frustrated hindsight before resuming.
“When I joined the band I wanted nothing more in life than to be a rock star. It was what I was working for and everything I wanted. So for the first couple of years I very superficially dedicated myself to that: getting drunk, getting together with girls, and not being true to myself. Then at a certain point I completely changed, I started dedicating myself to being the best musician I knew how, and it completely threw me off balance. I started to hate being a rock star. The last couple of years I was in the band I really hated interviews, photo sessions and fans asking for autographs.”
When you split from the Peppers was it because you couldn’t function within the band anymore?
“There were things taking place inside of me that were very confusing to me,” John remembers ominously.” I had all these voices in my head all the time, which I still do, but at that time I wasn’t spiritually protected against the spirits that meant me no good. Ghosts that are just there to f**k with me and drive me crazy. I couldn’t discern between them and the ones that were helping me and I was so confused. Everything that I was learning seemed to be pulling me more towards death.”
So what was it that finally pushed you over the brink?
“The voicies had been telling me to quit the band ever since we finished ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik’. But at that time there seemed that there was no reason to quit the band - other than I had a funny feeling about what going on tour was going to do to me as a creative person. At that point I was still growing creatively but, once we went on tour, I stopped growing and started coming apart. You can hear it on my first solo record (’Niandra Lades And Usually Just A T-shirt’ released in ‘94). The last thing on it was recorded right before I quit the band and it’s the sound of somebody falling apart. I had to do a shift of reality. I had to figure out what was going on inside of me and go on an adventure to find out what I was looking for, because I was very sad by that time.”
Loading ...
