Free Spirit
A song like "Ramparts," where you multitrack numerous guitars playing different things, yet they all work together, is one of your signature sounds.
Yeah. I do that thing where I sort of solo on a few guitars at once and they seem to work as one. You hear it a little with the Chili Peppers, too [e.g., "Easily" outro from Californication - Ed.]; it always seems to work. And I started doing that on Niandra. On the second half of Niandra there are 13 pieces called "Usually Just a T-shirt0" To me, the song "Ramparts" is kinda like all those 13 songs in one, in a weird way.
I remember in an interview you did around 1994 you mentionned you wanted people to think, if they happened upon a copy of Niandra, that some '50s guy recorded it.
Yeah. I was talking to Vincent [Gallo] about that last night. He's been recording this great music, and it sounds like it was recorded in the '50s - it has that vie. That's where you have vibe in the recording itself, as opposed to having the vibe coming just from the people playing, or from the energies in the room when they're playing. And when the recording itself is as much apart of the music as the music is, it's a beautiful thing. That's what you find a lot of back then - doo-wop and jazz recordings. Especially at the time I made that record I was listening a lot to music from the '20s, '30s, and '40s, and the way it sounded was really beautiful to me. And when I would listen to Robert Johnson or something, and then I would listen to this [pointing to Niandra], they were within a similar frequenct spectrum. I mean, that's why I didn't feel funny about releasing a record that was recorded just ona cassette 4-track. Because, to me, it sounded pretty similar to a lot of the recordings that they were making back then. And it had that same "romantic" sort of a feeling that it gave me - to hear my music - as it did to hear Blind Blake, Big Bill Broozy, or somebody.
And it makes me wonder: On the earth there must be a kindred spirit to somebody like Duke Ellington - somebody I feel whose music really thrived on the sound of the recordings in the '50s. If he had a kindred spirit here now who was writing music like that, to me, it would really suffer if he were to record on new, modern equipment. I mean, there are some people who do "lo-fi" things, but a lot of the time those things sound more like the people just don't care what it sounds like. The sound of the recording is as important as what he's playing.
To someone who's familiar only with your Chili peppers work and hasn't heard your solo records, what would you say to prepare them for the totally different type of aural experience that they are ? To convince somebody who's interested only in watching color TV, to look at something in black-and-white, if you will?
See, I only watch black-and-white movies. I mean, I don't only, but, for the most part, I watch movies from the '40s, and The Twilight Zone is my favorite TV show in the world. So I like black-and-white.
But I think people who listen to music because of what other people think is cool, or because of their own expectations or something, are silly. The reason I've always been able to draw so much inspiration from other people's music is because I've always listened to music with a sense of wonderment, and always listened to music with a desire to love things. Flea and I were just talking yesterday about how we often get really excited about somebody's album when it comes out, and then two months later we don't really like it anymore; we decided it's not that great. But when it came out, we were really excited about it. And we hope we're always like that, because the couple of weeks that wew ere sitting there thinking it was the greatest thing in the world shows we were able to open our hearts to things in that way. Some people, they're so closed minded to things. I seem to meet more people who like older music and don't like as much new music, and I'm sure there are people who specifically just like new music and don't like old music. To me, those people are just closing themselves off from a lot of good feelings that are available to them in the world. The feelings of any time period are all aqual to each other, in terms of the music theu have to offer. I'm not one of these people who think "The '60s was the greatest time, and it's been downhill ever since." I think every decade has had an equal amount of beautiful music, and I think it's up to the listener how much they wanna open up their mind to find that out. So have an open mind when listening to any music - not just mine, any music - and realize that it's all been created for you to listen to.
