Lost And Found
Let's change topic. How do you keep fit?
I do gymnastics. I run almost everyday, I follow a sane diet, I eat only organic foods. No potted food, bread and sugar. I eat lots of green stuff, eggs, fish, meat. It's the best diet I've ever tried and it lets me eat a lot. The aim is to have an efficient body. If you're disciplined, you wish only things that are good for you.
Today you seem very Zen. Is there anything that makes you angry?
It's hard to answer, because I don't get angry often. I don't like the ones who run ahead of you, but I can't tell it really bothers me. I just look at them shocked. If you asked me that when I was 22, then I would have made you a long list. One of the things I learned is that if someone is made a certain way, it means that he must be that way. You can't do anything to change him. You should change the past, but that's impossible. So if someone behaves in an irrational, ambitious or selfish way - if he acts unpleasant to me - it means that something has happened in his childhood that pushes him to act in that way because it makes him feel good, even if he's hurting someone else or deleting a whole race from this Earth. It's destiny that makes him act that way because of what he endured when he was 4 maybe. So it's hard for me to get angry with someone because I know he endured something bad from people maltreated themselves. It's a cycle. I like how the world is made. As many bad examples there could be about that kind of thing, I would've never recorded any of my records if we haven't endured something bad when we were kids, if we didn't have hard problems that we can't fix, if we didn't feel feelings which we don't understand the source of. Everything becomes beautiful music, so I love it.
Is good music born from pain's elaboration?
Yeah, even if sometimes it is born from the temporary liberation from it. Sometimes you try a drug that is all right for you and in that case it's wonderful. I feel in Heaven even if I'm only making music with a friend of mine. But you can't try an experience like that, to feel free and independent from the corporeal weight without having experienced what physical pain really means.
Lots of your lyrics talk about this. It's like you needed positive and negative together. It's one of the themes of the album.
I tried to use contradictions to put together opposite ideas, divergent energy's forces and segments of reality that I could never conciliate. I used lots of lies to demonstrate the truth through music: everything that appears to us as a single thing actually is also its opposite. I believe that every event that happens has its exact opposite somewhere else that compensates for it.
You were working at your solo record everyday after the RHCP sessions, except on Wednesday because you went to dance. Do you still go there, and which kind of music do you dance to?
Then, it was especially drum'n'bass and jungle. Very fast, energetic, exaggerated and intense techno music. I quit going there because the club I went to has closed down. Actually it moved and began to play even hip-hop beyond drum'n'bass. But I don't like hip-hop. The way to dance it it's completely different, there are those who do breakdance. I like losing myself instead, jumping everywhere.
Usually drummers like to dance, not solo guitarists.
I like dancing very much. I started to find myself again thanks to dance. When I quit drugs, the hardest thing was to act as a normal person without drugs. The body and the mind are used to them and when you quit you feel boring, meaningless, useless. For nine months I felt like I wasn't worthy to be called John Frusciante. When I began to feel like myself again, I found myself in a better perspective, because now I feel the responsibility of being who I am. But at that time if someone told me "I like your record", it didn't seem to me I was the John Frusciante who made it and didn't take credit for something that wasn't due me. My past life seemed to be lived by another guy.This means that I was spiritually empty. I didn't even let anyone help me, because I couldn't do anything.
So you were proud of the first part of your life when you were John Frusciante, while when you were a junkie you were not proud anymore?
It's when I quit drugs that I didn't feel I was John Frusciante. Towards the end of the drug-addiction era, I felt I didn't express anything of what John Frusciante's life should've been. In that moment the only form of expression that I had was dancing. I used to have a rather big living-room and I didn't do anything but dance all day long with the music I liked - Black Sabbath, Cure and others, but not dance music. I interpreted music through dance, I translated music or lyrics in a visual way. Not in a banal way, but in a way that made sense to me. Still now my reactions are not what one would expect, but kind of the opposite: for example, what makes others sad makes me happy. For three months I didn't do anything but dance and at the end I felt myself again, I rallied the spirits and I felt taken from something.
