Lost And Found
March 2004, from Mucchio Selvagio (Italy)
translated by Federica, the same translation is used on John's official site
click the thumbnail for scans
You left the band in 1992 because of a premonition. Can you explain to us what it was about and if it was the same kind of premonition that made you come back?
While we were finishing the BSSM sessions I started to hear some voices in my head that told me "You won't make it during the tour, you have to go now. Don't defy the destiny forcing your life to take a direction you don't have the need to go to." Often the most important choices in life regard things you don't need to do, but that contain a certain sensation pertaining to the future. These are choices which require courage, because everything - from an economic point of view or because that's what you always wanted to do in your life - pushes you towards these decisions.
In your opinion, what would have happened if you didn't hear those voices?
Actually I ignored them for a long time and it was the biggest mistake of my life. I waited a lot of time before I left the band. I went on tour even if I didn't know what being a musician on tour with a rock band meant. At home I had developed a very creative lifestyle. My world was made of Captain Beefheart, colors, paintbrushes, crayons, and no books. I used to relax, smoke weed and drink wine. My life was this semi-imaginary world that I had built for myself. When you're on tour you have to face a brutal reality and you must accept it. You can be creative, but not 24/7, like at home. Most of the time you have to relax and listen to music. On tour I write lots of songs, but it takes me only a couple of hours a week. If you write two or three songs a week it's a lot, but it takes only a few hours, you get me?
Has there ever been a time with the RHCP, at least at the beginning, when you liked to go on tour? Has there ever been a day when you felt good?
When I was 18/19 I was fine. I've grown up reading artists' interviews stating that they hated to go on tour. For example, Frank Zappa didn't like to travel. So I wasn't expecting a bloomed garden, it was absolutely easier than what I thought. But during the BSSM era, apart from the fact that I was in a band which was starting to have a good success, what I needed the most was the chance to change what I have been and what I'd just discovered almost at random: I was a songwriter and a guitarist. I needed to take a direction, but when I left the band at the end, I felt like my life was over, even though I was only 22. It may seem very stupid now, but then I felt like I couldn't write music or play guitar anymore. I would have never thought to do that again in the future.
During those years of pause, when you took drugs, you released interesting truths. Not everybody has that kind of insight in times like that, and not everybody can use it in real life when they're sober and clean again. In that time you learnt important things that influenced your current life.
That's true. I didn't forget anything of what I experienced in that time. After all, when I left the band and decided to become a drug addict, I believe I made the right choice. It was what I needed then. Inside me I was completely there and I needed to isolate myself from that frenetic rhythm of the world.
From being an ordinary man you played in huge venues. When you joined the RHCP did you feel like you were sacrificing your inner life?
Yeah. At that time I had a good inner life that brought me to see and understand lots of things better. Now I can easily accept that things go like they go. Before that experience I would have never said a thing like that.
What would you have changed? What provoked those voices in your head? A block you could get over only with heroin?
When a person hears some voices in his/her head, it means that his/her personal sphere is broken.
Do you mean his/her landmarks?
Yeah, the sphere that everyone has around him/herself. I'm glad it happened in that time, but it was a confusing time. What was the question?
