Wonderland
“HEY YOU WANNA STEAK?” John Frusciante answers the door to his Laurel Canyon house in his socks. He’s hungry and says I must be too. Teo door-sized organic slabs of meat are brought from the fridge and he sets his wiry frame to work over a George Foreman grill. The place looks like it was mothballed in 1972. Film posters, 70’s furniture, old school recording equipment clog the hallway. A Post-It note reminding him to get the latest Ricky Gervais podcast looks like a reminder sent back from the future.
Stick-thin and pale, Frusciante favours student chic; emerald-green polyester trousers, a loudly checked shirt. He presents the meal and last night’s cold vegetables with a child-like eagerness. “I cook for the studio crew,” he enthuses. “In a band it’s easy to give in to a party lifestyle, eating shitty food, screwing this girl and that girl, being rude to people, taking advantage. Being an asshole is easy. I’ve noticed people who resist have that extra strength. Cooking for someone kinda connects you to them.”
So we connect. In terms of meatiness the steaks are more substantial than him. His teeth have an incongruous gleam of L.A. health. But they’re false. His original set rotted away and he had them replaced at a cost he has previously estimated at $70,000. On his arms, patches of shiny, bubbled skin are visible: the burn scars after he set himself on fire while freebasing. “I have a lot of great memories from that time,” he will say later. “The problem is, your problems stay on hold. You still have to face your shit. But I had 4 months of supernatural experiences on drugs. I became convinced there are other life forms. I have enough proof of that to last a lifetime. There are higher levels of being than what we know. Things were revealed to me.”
He’s a compulsive talker, theories and connections emanating from the slightest conversational prompt. I ask him about the cute little emerald ring on his right hand. “Emerald connects me to the plant Mercury. Mercury governs decision-making. I need a stronger connection with Mercury because my decisions haven’t always been very good,” he says. And yet is his hobo glory, Frusciante is the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ creative hub. He wrote more than half of Stadium Arcadium here in the snug where we relax after lunch. As Kiedis neatly puts it: “He’s totally on some higher uber-Beethoven-meets-Hendrix-type shit.”
Famously whatever Frusciante has been listening to becomes subtly mutated into the Chili Peppers’ music. While recording BTW, it was Fugazi. This time? It’s hard to stop yourself spraying the 70’s décor with veg when he says: “Well, Wu-Tang, Roy Wood and Wizzard…ELO…Brandy…” Only in his fantastical visionary mind does it make sense. “You take the backing vocals of Brandy – the way they sit off the rhythm – and transpose those lines into your guitar, which in turn leads you back to Hendrix but only the era 1968 onward when his polyrhythmic phrasing really came to the fore…”
He goes on. It’s like being witness to Einstein slashing at the blackboard with chalk, enthusiastically ranting his mathematical extrapolations. “I think the band got a bit tense that I was Brian Wilson recording Smile,” he says finally. A lot of frothy spit has built up in the right-hand corner of his mouth.
Frusciante’s journey with the Red Hot Chili Peppers has been darkly fantastic. Younger by around 7 years, he was at first simply a fan but was recruited in the aftermath of guitarist Hillel Slovak’s death by drug overdose in 1988. Slovak’s death devastated the band. Drummer Jack Irons departed. They drafted in Parliament guitarist Dwayne “Blackbird” McKnight and former Dead Kennedys drummer DH Peligro. But they were fired when Frusciante, an 18-year old guitar prodigy and Chili Peppers fan came along.
Frusciante added a new creative dimension. But he struggled with the relentless touring and also from bullying. “It bugged me that they called me Green Man because I had no band experience,” says Frusciante. “And then for the first couple of years, Anthony would go between being a really cool friend to being a total fucking asshole. He’d just turn on me. He’d pick on some little thing I did or said, which reminded him too much of himself, and he’d be an asshole.”
