Guided By Voices
Throughout it all, he's maintained a vigorous solo career on the side, courting his more experimental muses and winning underground recognition with discs like Shadows Collide with People, To Record Only Water for Ten Days and the marathon six-CD series he recorded in 2004. Needless to say, the tonal discoveries made on these records often find their way into the Chili Peppers' work.
"I feel like we've made a good pop record with Stadium Arcadium," says Frusciante. "But the experience and freedom of doing my solo records gave me the ability to approach this one with an experimental outlook. I feel I can play it for my friends in the underground world and stand behind it."
These days, Frusciante exudes a kind of healthful luminosity, a mature and more wholesome version of the playful impishness that made him such a perfect addition to the Chili Peppers when he first joined the group at the time of 1989's Mothers Milk. John recently began studying Vipassana, a form of Buddhist meditation. It seems to have sharpened the mindfullness with which he approaches every aspect of his current life - from the food he eats to the wildly diverse and adventurous range of music he listens to. From occult guitar secrets to just plain occult - John Frusciante covers a range of topics that shape his world in the exclusive Guitar World interview.
GW: Stadium Arcadium has a more classic rock-lead guitar sound that By the Way. You're back to playing riffs and solos. How did that happen?
Frusciante: Strangely enough, it came out of preoccupation with rhythm. I'd been listening to a lot of hip-hop and R&B, where people are doing a lot of free rhythmic expression over the music, ignoring the strict 16th-note grid that musicians tend to play within all the time. I started noticing that singers and rappers like Andre 3000, Eminem and the people in Wu-Tang Clan were fiding their own polyrhythmic relationship to the groove. Plus, I grew up studying Frank Zappa's music and the polyrhythms that he used. So I started getting into this idea of things being off time and yet in time. I was also listening to a lot of music that had a blues vibe to it, and when I started putting all of this together at rehearsal, the result was a lot like Jimi Hendrix, because he was playing with that same off-time rhythm thing a lot. That led me to study his playing, which I hadn't done in a few years. I started seeing it in a completely different way once I began specifically analyzing his rhythmic approach.
GW: Speaking of Hendrix, are you deliberately quoting the "Purple Haze" riff in your guitar solo for the album's first single, "Dani California"?
Frusciante: Yes, I am, although it's in a different key and the fourth note is different. Since most of my solos on the album are improvised, I thought there should be at least one that was planned ahead like that. And since I'd begun studying Hendrix again, I was playing along with his hits. I'd learned them as a teenager, but now I had a new approach to them.
