Universally Speaking
Shopping for guitars has proved equally difficult for Frusciante, and having lost all his previous axes in a house fire a few years back, John had to start building his collection agaon from scratch. The Jaguar he posed with for today's photo shoot was his first asquisition. "I bought that at a guitar store, I think it was Voltage Guitars on Sunset, in 1997. I didn't have a guitar and then I got some money and that was my Christmas present to myself. Then when the guys asked me rejoin the band I said that I really need a Stratocaster. So Anthony lent me some money and we went to Guitar Centre and I got one with the rosewood neck. It's a '62 and I used that one on pratically every track on By The Way."
The only notable exception was the track Tear, on which John played his big old Gretsch White Falcon. He appropriated that particular guitar with the help of his good friend, actor and musician Vincent Gallo.
"Yeah, Vincent found that one for me. It's a '57 that used to be his but he had sold it to somebody and he had to buy it back from them. He's really a wheeler and dealer, you know?" says John of his friend. "He's known as an actor and director but his real profession is a wheeler and dealer!" He smiles. "He just argued with this guy and caused an ugly situation to get it back."
Did you want it because it looked good? "No, I wanted one because Mattew Ashman, the guitarist from Bow Wow Wow, used one," claims John. "His wasn't from the fifties though, it was from the seventies, but that's why I wanted it. At that time him and Bernard Sumner from New Order were the two guitarists who I was really enamoured with."
John did use other guitars for the By The Way sessions, but the tracks they were used on didn't make the final cut. "We had some more rocking songs which didn't make the album where, for a distorted sound, I used an SG through a Marshall that's cranked with distortion," John remembers. "To me that's the ultimate kind of distortion sound. I have a really nice SG from 1960 - Vincent also found that for me - that's got P90s in it and it's really great. We also did a 15-minute track called Strumming In D On J; the title literally means Strumming in the key of D on the Jaguar. I hope that we put it out, as it's a really good funky song."
Keen observers may have been surprised to see John brandishing a Fender Toronado in the video for Can't Stop. "Yeah, the director asked me to play that, just because of the colour," clarifies John. "I don't play guitars unless they're from the sixties or earlier so I wouldn't play one, but it looked all right to me. I thought the shape was pretty cool. He just wanted it because of the colour and he was a real dictator of a director so I didn't really argue with him!" In case you hadn't already gathered, Frusciante is a rather busy man. So fans will be amazed to hear that he's been working on another two projects which could also see the light of day in the coming year. The first is for Gallo, who asked Frusciante to provide the soundtrack music to his forthcoming movie, The Brown Bunny, some time ago.
"I've been making music for this movie for around three years," John explains. "Vincent gave me the script and left me to it. I've written a mixture of songs and instrumentals and I don't know what's gonna end up in the movie. I'll probably have so much good leftover material I could probably make an album from it! There's a lot of really sad music as it's a sad movie. Vincent's in the middle of editing the film now and I'm really looking forward to seeing it."
The other project has arisen as a result of John and Flea's recent on stage jams, a feature of the current tour, and sees the pair returning to their musical roots. "Right around the time we finished By The Way I went to see The Mars Volta play, who are very influenced by King Crimson," John recounts. "Then I went through a period of listening to King Crimsom and ELP live shows. It occured to me that back then those bands would really stretch out live, doing a lot of improvising, and people loved it. They were the biggest bands in the world and they were up on stage doing instrumentals that could last for 20 minutes. I said to Flea one day, I think we should make jamming a bigger part of the show, so we did and it's going down really well. That side of Flea and mine's playing is probably going to come out even more now because we're going to make a record of instrumental music with Omar from The Mars Volta. We've been working on it on tour and we're going to be touring together a lot for the next few months, so we just have these little rehearsals after shows.
"It's really the antithesis of where Flea and I were at on By The Way. It's flashy with a lot of weird time signatures, a lot of fast playing. Omar and me do a lot of interwining guitar parts, like Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp were doing in the eighties. When Flea started playing bass he was really into Allan Holdsworth, and for me it was progressive rock stuff and also Mahavishnu Orchestra and Tony Williams Lifetime. So it's a big side of where we come from musically."
At this rate it's hard to tell how many other projects Frusciante will become involved with in the coming months. His work ethic is phenomenal and his current attitude and outlook on life something we could all learn from. "Personally, I try to understand something we could all learn from. "Personally, I try to understand something new by the end of every day," he says to conclude. "Maybe it's learning a Jimmy Page solo; or maybe it's learning a Mingus song; or understanding my synthesiser a little better; or just working really hard at mixing something and learning how to do a better job in the studio. Just make every day a learning experience rather than thinking in terms of what ca I show people or what can I prove to the world. Learning has that natural bi-product of something resulting from it, and so for me that has always been the main thing ever since I started learning guitar - to get better."
