Getting Better All The Time
It’s difficult to imagine a member of the Chili Peppers-one time poster boys for shirtless, jarhead-jock, SoCal muscle culture-harmonizing on such quintessentially geeky pop fare as “Georgy Girl.” But the quest for the perfect rock album leads down many a strange pathway. “I always felt we had a real femininity to our music,” says Flea, the Chili Peppers’ diminutive, gap toothed bassist. “But I guess it’s not heard so much when something is really loud, distorted and jammy. To me the biggest difference on By The Way-apart from the fact that it’s more layered than any of our records-is that it’s less jammy. There are more songs and less solos and jamming out. There’s definitely improvisation going on within the structure of the song. But the structure is much more, um, structured.”
Indeed, never has a Red Hot Chili Peppers album been less about funky groovin’ on the tonic. While Flea and Chad Smith definitely keep the rhythm beating, full-blown chord progressions are the order of the day. This, too, must be put down to Frusciante’s influence.
“I was thinking of writing chords that are dense-that have more to them than just root, third and fifth. These chords have 9ths and 11ths and 13ths. I tried to make the guitar pretty impossible to figure out correctly. I learned a lot throughout the making of this album from studying[modern jazz bassist and composer] Charles Mingus and learning his chord progressions. I studied a lot of music books, and learned about the way different people, like the Beatles and Burt Bacharach, construct chord progressions-just things that I would never have been able to figure out by ear. It started changing the way that I play guitar. Johnny Marr[the Smiths, Electronic] was also a big inspiration in getting me to think about the guitar differently.”
Absorption in chord progressions led Frusciante far away from rock guitar histrionics. “People like Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix have pretty much been my gods the whole time I was playing. I also like Eddie Van Halen’s early guitar playing. But I don’t feel like guitar playing went any further after that-not in that technical or flashy direction. And I don’t feel like guitar players have started coming at it from a new angle. So I began drawing inspiration from synthesizer players-programmed music, starting with Kraftwerk. It’s another way of approaching melodies that guitar players don’t really do. For the whole time we were touring for Californication, I was practicing guitar by playing along with electronic music.”
While much of the new record was written by the group, as always, Frusciante worked closely with Kiedis in developing a few of the songs. “John and I got together in his room at the Chateau Marmont[West Hollywood's vintage chic, rock star hotel], where he was living at the time,” says Kiedis, and we worked on some more obscure pieces together. Like the song ‘Cabron,’ which sounded almost like he’d written it to be a flamenco guitar instrumental. I just loved it because there was energy in there like crazy. I took home a rough copy of it from a low-tech tape recorder and started thinking of vocal lines to go with this music. John and I are both very much in love with doo-wop-vocal music from the Fifties. I was feeling that kind of energy, but with a Mexican flavor, ’cause the soul of Los Angeles is largely fueled by our Mexican population here. So I started singing kind of a doo-wop melody to this really wild acoustic guitar instrumental. I brought that into the band, and it took Chad and Flea awhile to find their places in it-because it was so different and weird for us, coming from left field.
Frusciante feels that Kiedis has “come a long way” as a songwriter in the time since Californication was recorded. All the vocal melodies on this new album are Anthony’s own. Sometimes they were suggested by the guitar, or whatever. But in the past there was more interaction between me and him as far as changing the vocal melodies around. And on this album I didn’t really do that. I would more think about what I was going to do with the harmonies.”
While By The Way is John Frusciante’s finest hour to date, the enduring core of the Red Hot Chili Peppers revolves around the ying-yang relationship between Kiedis and Flea. The two met in junior highschool and attended Hollywood’s Fairfax High together. Flea was just Michael Balzary back then.
Loading ...
