War Ensemble
03rd May 2006, Kerrang (UK)
thanks to Skitter, for typing it out
click the thumbnail for scans
“You limey bitch!” Flea, Red Hot Chili Pepper’s bassist, is storming around a suite in London’s Claridges Hotel throwing insults at me. “C...ucker! You can suck my f***ing d*k!” He hurls a bottle of water at my head. It narrowly misses and explodes against the wall. “This is f***ing bullshit,” he shouts as I try to speak. “Shut the f**k up! F**k you!” Then he stomps out of the room, slamming the door. Outside in the corridor he’s still shouting, “F**k him, F**k him.”
I’ve just asked him if he’s hurt that people are calling Stadium Arcadium ‘John’s album’. It’s a reasonable question. The Chilis’ new double opus comes stamped with John Frusciante’s screaming guitars and, from an outsider’s perspective, it would seem that he’s taken a certain amount of control. There have also been stories that Frusciante and Flea have fallen out, that Flea wanted to leave the band and that the image of the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a band of brothers was, in fact, untrue. Prior to Flea’s tantrum, singer Anthony Kiedis had already confessed, “We’re dysfunctional. Whoever said a band was supposed to this perfectly functioning unit?” Drummer Chad Smith added, “There has always been a creative power-struggle.” While Frusciante himself said, “Even since the start, it’s been bandied about that we’re a four-man gang, that we love each other and that we’re a tight unit. It’s never been that way.” What on earth has happened to the world’s biggest rock band?
The Chilis prefer to be interviewed individually. John Frusciante is the first to walk into the room. He looks a little lost, confused almost, and his hair is long, dishevelled and still wet from the shower. He looks anywhere but in your eyes when he’s talking to you, his sentences rolling on interminably until you’re forced to interrupt him. Since joining the band as a 17-year-old in 1988, he’s had a turbulent history. He admits his childhood revolved around, “being alone and practising the guitar. When I was around people I was usually pretending, putting on a show. I would put on a mask.” He also found success hard. When the album ‘BloodSugarSexMagik’ made the Chilis superstars, they all embraced it except Frusciante. “I didn’t know how to be successful,” he says. “I had very little concern for the rest of the band’s feelings. I just cared about my own life.” So he left the band while they were on tour in Japan in 1992 and dedicated himself to painting, playing guitar and trying to be “as creative and beautiful as possible.” Mostly, though, he shot heroin. The evidence of those years is still with him today. When he rolls back his shirt sleeves, his pockmarked, burnt forearm is revealed – the result of setting himself on fire while freebasing. Surprisingly, he doesn’t regret the six years he spent doing drugs away from the band. “People think that was a dark period,” he says, “I don’t look at it like that. That was the period that I learned, when I got my mind straight about everything that I needed to know. I really value that period of time.” He’s aware that drugs still hold a strong power over his life, that there’s a chance he’ll relapse. “Yes, it’s a possibility but it’s one that I won’t succumb to. I have an addictive part of me and a disciplined part of me. I just have to make the disciplined side stronger.” It’s music that truly motivates him now. Stadium Arcadium howls with his guitar to such an extent that some are claiming he’s taken control of the band. “It was like that on By The Way” he admits, “it’s more of a band now. I don’t force my ideas on people as much as I did.” There were major problems between him and Flea during the recording of the last album. He says that the pair have always been competitive, “But in a healthy way. On By The Way that competitiveness turned into a bad vibe. I was not being honest enough with myself and I wasn’t looking at what I was doing wrong. Something comes out of music when everyone feels free and the band is a true democracy. That’s something I’d lost sight of.” This is almost an admission of guilt, that he was the problem, not Flea. This realisation seems to have sparked a new sense of unity in the Chilis. “This is the best we’ve ever gotten along,” he says. “This is the most we’ve been on the same page.”
