Guided By Voices
GW: The sessions for Stadium Arcadium brought you back to the place where you made Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the so-called "Houdini mansion" in the Hollywood Hills. What was that like?
Frusciante: It was a lot different now than it was back then. The feeling was a lot warmer, a lot cozier. A certain amount of work had been done on it: there were some nice carpets, and a parachute had been put up in the tracking room [as a ceiling hanging]. When we did Blood Sugar, it was just a big empty house when we brought in some equipment and started tracking. This time they had a couch in the tracking room. Little things like that. It didn't seem as devoid of life as it did the first time.
GW: What was your perception this time of - what shall we call them? - the inhabitants of the place who aren't of this realm?
Frusciante: That period of my life when I was writing Blood Sugar was when I first started to become aware that there were beings of higher intelligence telling me to do things with my music. They ended up being such good ideas that I knew I wasn't capable of coming up with them on my own. When I was 18 or 19 and trying to ignore all the voices in my head, my music sucked. And when I started obeying the voices in my ead, the music started getting awesome. So I was feeling those kind of things a lot during Blood Sugar. It was getting pretty intense for me. I would hear voices coming out of the speakers. I'd hear ghosts singing while we'd be listening to the playback. I'd say to the others, "Wow, do you hear those voices?" And Flea would be like, [quietly] "John, shhh! They can't hear them."
Over the next five years of my life, those kinds of things got more and more intense. I had a lot of experiences where I'd sit in a room with someone who ended up disappearing 10 minutes later, and then I'd realize that wasn't an actual human being. At this point, it's really normal to me that there are ghosts everywhere. I don't believe any one place to be haunted. At that time, my comments were about that house being haunted. Then, on tour, I realized that my hotel rooms were also haunted. And back home, my house was haunted. It's not a scary thing to me, or a freaky thing; it's really normal part of existence. There are all kinds of life around us on many levels that our fives senses just don't perceive.
GW: In all these supernatural experiences you've been describing, do you feel that you've ever received guidance from a musician who's passed on, like Beethoven or Hendrix?
Frusciante: Once you move on to another life, you change into something else. And often what you realize when you move on to another life is that you were always there to begin with. So the answer to your question is that sometimes I've been convinced that the spirits who are telling me what to do also told some of those people you mentioned what to do. The correlation between a musical idea of [baroque composer Tommaso] Albinoni's and something that I've done occurs only at the very abstract level at which they were originally presented to each of us. At that level, they were vivid as a color, shape or pattern of relationships that had no obvious resemblance to the musi they ended up inspiring. You can get the same idea to any number of artists throughout history, but because they're in a difference place in their lives, a difference place in time and have completely difference artist tastes and concepts, the outcomes will be difference. No two artists will use the same basic inspiration in the same way. But a person with enough sensitivity will see a connection. I might notice a correlation between a drawing of Leonardo da Vinci's and a Jane's Addiction song, or between Van Gogh's paintings and Captain Beefheart's music. And it's a correlation so complex that it's beyond the possibility of coincidence. So yeah, I've felt that kind of thing before. But it would be a form of self-deception to go around thinking it's Jimi Hendrix talking to me, because that's not for me to know.
---Alan diPerna
