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2001, Guitar World Acoustic
more information and/or scans would be appreciated

Red Hot Chili Pepper John Frusciante Channels Spirits on His New Solo Album, To Record Only Water For Ten Days.

“Whenever somebody comes over to my house now,” says John Frusciante, “I ask them if they want to hear my new song - whatever I’ve just written. I’ll get my guitar and sing for them.” Frusciante’s recent guests are lucky. The first time I visited the guitarist’s Hollywood Hills home, for a 1991 interview, he vomited and exposed himself. But Frusciante has come a long way since the early Nineties, when he was by far the most drug-addled and out-of-control member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers - an outfit celebrated far and wide for being drug-addled and out of control. Frusciante’s problems led to his departure from the band in 1992, but good behavior led to his reinstatement in 1997. He’s now back in the saddle, drug free, and enjoying the success of the Chili Peppers’ recent album, Californication. And while his earlier solo albums - 1994’s Niandra Ladies & Usually Just a T-shirt and 1997’s Smile From the Streets You Hold - were abstract and often meandering, his newest disc, To Record Only Water for Ten Days (Warner Bros.) is a collection of focused, melodic, mostly acoustic guitar-based songs, with an overlay of analog synthesizers and drum machines that reflect Frusciante’s love of the synth-pop Eighties. The songs have the quiet, intimate feel of home recordings. Far removed from the Chili Peppers’ testosterone-drenched funk metal sound, they reflect a more contemplative side of Frusciante that will surprise many.

The guitarist’s music and manners have grown more tractable over the years, but he’s still a pretty unusual character. He claims to have spent much of the Nineties in contact with the spirit world, and that many of his best friends are visitors from the “astral plane.” He describes To Record Only Water For Ten Days as a musical expression of the feelings and ideas he’s received from the spirits.

He’s in good company. Down through the years, artists as celebrated and diverse as William Blake and Carlos Santana have described intimate collaborations with incorporeal forces. But only John Frusciante could have made To Record Only Water for Ten Days.

Guitar World Acoustic: When did your contact with the spiritual world begin?

Frusciante: Around the time the Chili Peppers were writing Blood Sugar Sex Magik. I started playing a little game with myself, where when I was playing guitar I’d say “Okay, I’m going to leave my body now.” And when I would do that, I found that the music coming out of me was much better than anything I’d ever done. It became obvious to me that these energies were possessing my body. I would just get out of the way and let the energies play my guitar for me. So I just started to have this natural sort of belief in these spiritual forces. And as my beliefs became more concrete, they started revealing themselves to me more. I always heard voices in my head as little kid, but now I had an excessive amount of voices in my head all the time. Having conversations with me. Telling me about the future. They’d say something was going to happen in two minutes - and it would. They would do these things to tell me they were in tune with and could see the future. Because the future has already happened many times. They don’t live in a dimension that has time, but they feed off the energies of people who do live in time.

So by the time I quit the Chili Peppers in 1992, I was devoting myself to nothing but magical progress. I got to the point, five years later, where I could sit in a room with a ghost or an astral body for half an hour at a time. Which takes a tremendous amount of concentration.

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