Socks Away!
Before meeting Q, John Frusciante lies on his back in a darkened room listening to The Beach Boys’ Smile sessions and emerges serenely refreshed. Though musicians habitually claim that music is their life, few take that credo quite so literally. Frusciante first won his place in the band with note-perfect renditions of every Hillel Slovak guitar part and still practises from dawn till dusk.
He spends the interview with a beatific grin on his face. Although better than he once was, he still has a precarious grip on the world outside music. He doesn’t drive (in LA, the height of eccentricity) or follow the news - and it shows.
“Making art is about accepting what’s going on around you and turning it into something beautiful, no matter what it is,” he mumbles. “During this record we had the catastrophe at the Empire State Building and we just kept on writing.”
His being the only man in America who isn’t sure which building collapsed on 11 September may be alarming but, after what Frusciante’s been through, it’s perhaps enough that he’s still enough.
When he auditioned for the Chili Peppers, he was still in his teens (he’s 31 now) and his militantly punk ethic didn’t gel with life in a rock band in the first flush of global success. His reaction was to recoil.
“I was smoking pot night and day and I went through the world thinking it should be the way I believe it should be. And if it’s not like that then I’ll shut that part of the world out. I was scared I’d lose my ability to be creative. I thought being a heroin addict and making my life nothing but good feelings was the best way to maintain being a creative person. But it’s not.”
After leaving the group in ’92, Frusciante slowly faded from view. He released two minor solo albums (1995’s Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt, and ‘97’s Smile From the Streets You Hold) later admitting he cobbled together the latter purely to raise drug money. By the time an LA reporter tracked him down to the Chateau Marmont in 1997 he was all but forgotten.
“It got to the point where there was no-one looking at me the way people look at you when you’re famous, with that love even though they don’t know you,” he says. “I was getting physical pain. I felt like childhood traumas that I had never even felt existed were now coming up to get me. This life that we’re trussed into when we become rock stars acts as a kind of doctor for us and we don’t even realise that it’s happening. We just take it for granted.”
Frusciante returned to the group for the recording of Californication and is now playing better than ever, passionately in love (his girlfriend “wants to help crack babies in hospital”) and utterly convinced that he will never relapse.
“I’m not scared of going back on drugs. I don’t see it as being a possibility.”
Really? How come?
“I guess I’m just lucky. I like people smoking pot around me. I really just like the way it smells.”
When Frusciante removes his lumberjack jacket, his arms are a ruin of scars and patches. He says that when he looks at an old picture of himself – lean and boyish and still in possession of his own teeth – he doesn’t recognise that person.
“I remember it like I’m remembering somebody else’s life. I remember how spirits at that time were plaguing me and insulting me all the time. It was good. Because what I was capable of compared to what I was doing was so huge, so the spirits were giving me hell for it.”
Do you still get those spirits?
“They like me now,” he beams. “I know how to work hard to make them happy. I like the idea that I’ll never be in the position of having nothing to eat and nowhere to live again. And I love being able to buy as many records as I want to buy.
