Getting Better All The Time
While Flea maintained a compassionate friendship with Frusciante during his time out of the band, the Chili Peppers soldiered on with a succession of guitarists: Jesse Tobias, Arik Marshall and former Jane's Addiction axman Dave Navarro, with whom they cut 1995's One Hot Minute. But shortly thereafter, it was mutually decided that Navarro would part company with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
"It just wasn't working with Dave," says Flea. "It was evident to all of us. So there were no hard feelings."
Chad Smith recalls a conversation he had with Navarro shortly before the guitarist left the group. " Dave said to me, 'The Only guy you should get back is John. He's the guy for your band."
It was Flea who spearheaded Frusciante's reentry into the group, shortly after the guitarist got out of a rehab hospital in early '98. Flea took a big chance, but the bassist had great faith in his friend. "I always knew that I wanted to play with John," he says, "and that I shared a very intimate musical relationship with him."
When Flea popped the question, Frusciante didn't hesitate. "I knew right away that I wanted to rejoin the band. Although at the time, I wasn't sure about Anthony."
Kiedis had felt betrayed by Frusciante's departure from the band, and had severed all relations with the guitarist. "We both had grudges against one another for a few years," says Frusciante. "We wouldn't talk to each other."
But by 1998 when Frusciante was asked to rejoin the Chili Peppers, a lot had changed. Kiedis had come through his own hard fight with heroin addiction. Both men had had time to cool down and get over their anger. Says Frusciante: "Once Anthony and I actually saw one another again, and we each saw how much the other had changed, we were completely loving each other again."
Frusciante's bond with the band was recemented during the making of the Grammy winning Californication. The success of that album clinched a major shift in the public's perception of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Where they'd once been regarded as lovable, laughable, punk funk cutups, they had now become something like a classic rock band.
"I think the seeds of that shift were sown with Blood Sugar," says Flea. "And by the time Californication came out, we'd strung together some good records. It became obvious that the early records we'd made had influenced a lot of bands that came up. So I guess people's perception of us was no longer as these lunatics with socks on their dicks but as guys who were really taking care with writing music and playing the best they could.
"With bands that have been around for 20 or 25 years, you get a kind of musical telepathy," says Smith. "You can't manufacture that. It can only happen from just doing it-being connected and wanting to be connected. That's why I love going to see a band like Cheap Trick or Aerosmith-they're just regular rock bands, where it's been the same guys in the band all along. Muscians who have been playing together for 20 years or more have definitely got their own thing."
The Chili Peppers were in top form when they entered the venerable Cello Studios on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood to begin work on the album that would become By The Way. Frusciante had a clear vision of how the guitars should sound-layers and layers of principally clean tones.
"I used reverb on a lot of this album, which I've never really done before," he says. "That's one of the main differences in the guitar sound. I was really influenced by all the surf music I've been listening to. I had an old Fender spring reverb. Toward the end of the project, for a couple of overdubs, I started using the Holy Grail [digital reverb] pedal by Electro-Harmonix."
The guitarist mainly relied on a '62 Fender Stratocaster with a rosewood neck for the album sessions. Clean tones were important, Frusciante explains, "because I was playing a lot bigger, denser chords than just your standard triads or whatever, and I wanted all those intervals to come through clearly. I'm not really into distortion except for solos, feedback and stuff. There were a couple of times when I used a [Gibson] SG straight into a Marshall, which is the best kind of distortion. My favorite guitarist is Bernard Sumner of Joy Division [later with New order and Electronica-GW ED.], and that's what he uses."
