Two Sides To Every Story
January 2003, Guitar One (USA)
thanks to Caroline for typing it out
click the thumbnail for scans
It’s reader’s choice. With these companion pieces on Chili Pepper John Frusciante, you can either grab your guitar dive into our red-hot lesson or kick back and enjoy a good and yarn. Our suggestion? Both, of course.
Life, by Lindsay Parker
John Frusciante takes a short break at Hollywood’s Swinghouse Studios, where he and his fellow Peppers are rehearsing for a huge South American tour that kicks off in four days. And with time being so precious, the guitarist doesn’t want to discuss anything but music. “Oh God, I have to tell that story again?” he grumbles, when asked how he first joined, and eventually quit the Chili Peppers. “You can just look that stuff up on the Internet - I’ve told it in about a milion interviews. I’d rather talk about other things. [Yet] it’s important for me to do interviews for guitar magazines, because I used to love reading them so much when I was a kid.”
… Fair enough. But those of you without cable TV who are unfamiliar with the (at times) sordid saga of the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist, here’s a quick recap. Just three years after being blown away by a Chilis performance at L.A.’s Variety Arts Center and becoming a rabid RHCP fan, 19-year-old prodigy Frusciante (the son of a Julliard-trained pianist and an ex-pro singer) joined his favorite band, replacing original member Hillel Slovak, who’d tragically succumbed to a drug overdose. Frusciante had never been in a band before, but he adapted quickly and fit perfectly; his dazzling play added a whole new dimension to the Peppers’ caveman punk-funk and helped them break through to the MTV mainstream with the smash albums Mother’s Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik. But then, at the height of RHCP’s early- ’90s fame, Frusciante became disillusioned and abruptly left the band, less than a month before they were slated to headline Lollapalooza. While the Peppers soldiered on as best they could with a revolving-door lineup of ultimately incompatible guitarists (most notably Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction, who stuck around just long enough to play on 1995’s One Hot Minute), a depressed Frusciante retreated to his Hollywood home, where he became a recluse for the next seven years, spending his days painting, recording two fascinatingly inaccessible solo albums, writing short stories, and cultivating a heroin habit extreme enough to shock William Burroughs.
It seems Frusciante would have learned a lesson from the drug-related deaths of not only his predecessor Slovak but also his good friend River Phoenix ( who overdosed at Hollywood’s Viper Room while attending a Frusciante gig in 1993), yet he brought the same single-minded dedication to his addiction that he had once brought to his music. But after an alarming article in an L.A. weekly depicted him as a toothless, pockmarked, wrainthlike junkie literally on the verge of death, concerned friends staged what was thankfully a profoundly successful intervention, and Frusciante made a turnaround that was nothing short of miraculous. Bassist Flea, who had remained closest to the former Pepper (they occasionally played together in a side project called the Three Amoebas, with ex-Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins), convinced the cleaned-up Frusciante to rejoin RHCP, which had recently parted ways with Navarro. This restoration of the classic Chilis lineup brought about a major comeback for the once-foundering group, with 1999’s 13 million-selling Californication.
Okay, that brings us up to date. While the Peppers’ upward trajectory from the proverbial ashes continues apace with their latest massive rock opus, By the Way, Frusciante, now 32, seems better equipped to handle success this time around. Today at Swinghouse he rambles a bot (most likely trying to fit as much guitar dialogue as possible into the scnat amount of rehearsal down time allotted for this interview), but is otherwise lucid, not the alt-rock Syd Barrett/Skip Spence/Brian Wilson-like idiot savant he’s often made out to be. He looks healthy, too: Clearly the last few years of total sobriety, healthy eating (today, when ordering his organic takeout lunch, he asks for extra sea vegetables), and Ashtanga yoga practice have worked wonders for him. He come across as a fiercely focused man who is finally sure of his footing in the band he joined when he was still practically a boy.
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