Two Sides To Every Story
"I just feel more confident about molding my own position in the band into whatever I want it to be," muses Frusciante. "In the past, I wrote things that were more the kind of things that I thought the Chili Peppers should play. Now I see the band as more of a free place where I mold and shape and expand my role to be what I want it to be - whether that means using a modular synthesizer, or playing piano or a glockenspiel or the harpsichord, doing a bunch of guitar overdubs, or writing beautiful chordal things. I just do whatever I want to do now, and everybody likes it. I think more in terms of what I can do that would be interesting with this group of musicians, rather than what I can do that would be cool for the Red Hot Chili Peppers."
Frusciante has certainly come a long way from the days when he was touted as an uncanny Hillel Slovak impressionist. But he insists that aping Slovak's style was never his agenda. "I'll tell you honestly what happened: When I joined, I wanted to find my own style and be my own guitarsit, but I could not find myseklf ! So after about a year, I said, 'You know what ? I'm going to see what happens if I just try to play like Hillel.' And the second I did, I started to have a perfect kind of groove with Flea. And unintentionally, because all my musical background was behind it, I gave a different dimension to his sound and built from there. Hillel taught Flea how to play bass and basically introduced him to rock music, so playing like hillel was the only place to start, really, if I was to ever have my own style but still gel with Flea's playing. Most people only ever have one person they gel like that with in their life; Flea's had two, mostly because as a teenager I dedicated myself to copying other people's styles, and when I chose to copy Hillel's style, I did it really well. Then I was able to build that style into a new musical vocabulary for myself, and Flea's playing started changing with mine. It's been growing ever since."
An,d it's been growing by leaps and bounds. Though Frusciante humbly insists, "Me saying that I'm more responsible than anybody else just makes me look like an asshole," there's little doubt that his sense of artistic adventure is largely responsible for RHCP's on going shift away from the trademark chest-thumping, bass-slapping machismo-rawk of their freaky-styley days. This change in direction has never been so marked, or so welcome, as it is on By the Way. In a nü-metal age when their testosterock influence is more prominent than ever, the Peppers have ironically produced the least stereotypically Pepper-y album of their two decade carrer, and it is - also ironically - their finest effort yet. A mellow affair lushy layered with overdubs and Frusciante's unexpected keyboards flourishes, By the Way is sophisticated, at times downright gorgeous pop (check out "Dosed," a goosebump-inducing vocal duet between Frusciante and frontman Anthony Kiedis), proving that "Under the Bridge" and Californication high points like "Scar Tissue" were no flukes. The perennially shirtless, face-pulling, sock-donning soul like Frusciante, have officially grown up, and it's Frusciante's widescreen vision that's helped spur this evolution.
Old-school fans may grumble at By the Way's relative lack of funked-up party anthems and bad-boy bravado, but RHCP's passion for genre-straddling eclecticism hasn't diminished - they're simply finding new genres to straddle, since blending rap and rock isn't exactly fesh or revolutionary anymore. It's this knack for reincention that puts the Chilis is an elite category with Madonna, U2, and the similarly enlightened Beastie Boys as one of the few acts to emerge in the early-to mid- '80s that is still relevant in 2002. "It's always been the philosophy of the band, which they made clear to me when I joined, that the idea was to do something different and not just repeat what they'd done before," Frusciante explains. "When we're rehearsing, we play plenty of funk things and stuff, but they don't seem as exciting to us. The stuff that grabs us is the stuff that isn't like what we've done before, that sounds new to us."
During the 14 montths that the Peppers were painstakingly recording By The Way at legendary Sunset Strip hide away the Chateau Marmont; Frusciante dabbed with all sorts of new ideas, many of which stemmed from his recent fascination with keyboards, which figure prominently on the album. "I've been spending a lot of time furthering my understanding of chords on the guitar, so it got to the point where I felt that in order to truly see chords clearly, I was going to have to learn them on the piano," he reveals. "But more important for me was my modular synthesizer, which is a great way to learn about sound. For me, sound was very unimportant on Blood Sugar and Californication. But on By the Way it was a lot of fun for me to explore that side of my thinking again, because when I was a little kid, I was really into effects, and guitar players like Andy Summers, Warrren Cuccurullo, and Adrian Belew."
