Red Hot Soloing
April 2004, Guitarist magazine, UK
thanks to Nella for typing it out
click the thumbnail to see the scans
He may play guitar in the world’s biggest rock band, but that’s never been enough for the maverick talent that is John Frusciante. Guitarist catches up with the Red Hot Chili Pepper as he celebrates the release of his fourth, and best, solo outing.
It’s fair to say that, as a concept, the guitarist solo album or ‘side project’ can be a fairly dubious one. If you’re Keith Richards, it involves forming a band of like-minded miscreants and affording yourself an opportunity to flex your leathery lungs for an entire set. If you’re The Edge or Jonny Greenwood, it tends to involve accepting a commision to soundtrack an obscure film with your eerie atmospherics.
But if you’re John Frusciante, it seems, it provides a key opportunity to showcase your vocal and songwriting skills, as well as let yourself off the leash in terms of musical experimentation – both being key interests that he can explore only to a limited degree in his day job with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Frusciante is, without question, a highly productive musician. Even during the fogged years of his heroin addiction in th mid-to-late nineties, he still managed to release two solo albums – the enigmatically-titled Niandra LaDes and Usually Just A T-Shirt (1994) and Smile From The Streets You Hold (1997). Perhaps tellingly, however, they were skeletal, scratchy, home-recorded affairs.
Following his return to the Chili Peppers with Californication, the guitarist released another more elaborate, slightly more polished album (recorded on digital eight-track instead of analogue four-track). 2001’s To Record Only Water For Ten Days. But it’s with his fourth and latest offering, Shadows Collide With People, that for the first time Frusciante’s extra-curricular material really matches up to the sonic quality and melodic appeal of his band work.
Written around the same time as the songs for By The Way, the material on Shadows Collide With People – a collaboration with the guitarist’s friend Josh Klinghoffer – display his knack for a winning hook, not to mention his passion for unhinged instrumental electronica.
So, when he’s writing, how does Frusciante define which a solo record idea and which is a Chili Peppers idea?
“That’s pretty easy,” he says. “If an idea comes to me and I feel like writing lyrics to it, then that’s gonna be a song for me because I don’t write lyrics in the Chili Peppers. Writing words is definitely a big part of my life, it’s one of the few things that I feel like I have some ability in. So that’s basically the difference.
When I write something for the Chili Peppers, it’s usually just a guitar part and then I leave it to Anthony to come up with his vocals and Flea to come up with his bass line, y’know? If I write some piece of music that really sounds like it needs a bashing drummer and a bass-player beating the hell out of his bass, then I’d normally thik that would be one for the Chili Peppers.
In the Chili Peppers, it seems it’s either the more melodic things or heavy things. The stuff that I do for myself probably has more of an arty feeling to it.”
AS WITH MOST musicians when they’re in writing mode, John Frusciante is very much a creature of habit. He’s also something of a traditionalist, more often than not writing on acoustic guitar.
“Usually a lot of my writing takes place on tour and so I always have an acoustic guitar with me,” he explains. “Usually my Martin from the fifties. Actually I have two brown Martins from the fifties – the small-scale ones – and they’re incredible. I also have a blond one too. I picked two of them up from Norm’s Rare Guitars in the Valley and my guitar tech found me the other one somewhere because I needed to have a back-up for something or other.
People think I play Taylors, but the whole Taylor thing was something that Rick Rubin wanted me to play on the last Chili Peppers record. And since I didn’t have a mind of my own when we did By The Way, I let him tell me what fucking guitar to play, which I’ll never do again! Now he knows he’ll never ask me to play a guitar like that because I’m too opinionated, but at the time I was, Oh? Listening to them tell me that my Martin doesn’t record well. So that’s what I write on, mostly.”
That’s not to say, Frusciante is keen to point out, that he won’t just reach for whatever guitar is availible if an idea suddenly strikes…
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