Guided By Voices
GW: You're perceived more and more as the group's Brian Wilson - the elusive genius behind it all. Do the others feel diminished by that?
Frusciante: No, they don't. They all really believe in me. They're the ones who gave me the chance to go in all the differenct directions that I've gone. Besides, they get a certain kind of attention that I don't get, and there's no bad feelings about that either way. Their main concern is just preserving what we allfall in love with so much when we're in the rehearsal hall writing the songs. But in the end, the bottom line is that they trust me. I have no interest in taking awy from the band. I wanted harmonies, I wanted overdubs, but I only wanted to do it if the band still sounded really raw. I would look back to Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin records, or this band the Move, who really inspired me [ a late-Sixties British pop group founds by Roy Wood and featuring guitarist Jeff Lyrnne, later the leader of the Electric Light Orchestra and a noted producer.] Their records sound really raw. The bass is awesome the drums are really strong, but there's a lot of guitar overdubs and harmonies and sonic effects going on.
GW: On this album, it seems as if you've taken all you've learned in the past few years about synthesis, composition, harmonies and music theory and expressed it through the guitar, whereas on a previous album you might have expressed that on a keyboard or through vocal arrangement.
Frusciante: Yeah. Sometimes, like on "Dani California," I was putting guitars where I'd normally put backing vocals. And on this album I wasn't as interested in using chords with unusal intervals as I was on By the Way. This time, I was more interested in doing interesting inversions of very basic chords. On something like "wet Sand" for instance, I'm playing what guitar players will recognize as common shapes. But by inverting them, which just means changing whatever is the lowest-sounding note in the chord, you can make it very unfamiliar sounding. The chords in that song are G major, D major, E minor, B minor, but the bass line is G,A,B,B. So for the D chord, your playing A in the bass and for the E minor you're playng B in the bass, while being very careful not to hit the low E string.
That's been a real focus for me, lately. I've been studying what people like Beethoven were doing with that stuff. It's mind blowing how something can be so harmonically simple and have so much movement. But even when you're a musican with a trained ear, you can't hear exactly hear what's taking place until you realyl start studying it, 'cause it's playing tricks on the brain. I used to notice that with the Beatles all the time. When I was 17 years old, I used to pride myself on having a pretty good ear, but I could not figure out chords to Beatles songs. They were putting high notes in the bass, but I was used to focusing on what ever the lowest notes was, and that would automatically tell you waht the chord was. There were a lot of progressive rock band that did that, too. Right before we started writing this album I was at the end of a huge Van der Graff Generator period. Peter Hammill was a genius at doing these amazing chord progressions with all inverted chords. Boy, the emotions that can come out of those familiar triads and roots! were it not for the inverting, you wouldn't get that kind of feeling.
GW: Yet, several songs on Stadium Arcadium, like "Readymade" and "She's Only 18," feature a lot of unison riffing, where the guitar and bass are playing exactly the same thing.
Frusciante: That's something that comes naturally to us too. I wrote the riff for "Readymade" on bass. I'd been practicing bass cause I'd been listening to a lot of hip-hop music and a lot of those records use guitar samples; the only thing that's consistent throughout the song is the bass. So I'd be listening to the vocals for rhythmic ideas to use in my guitar playing, but I'd be seeing a theme in relationship to the bass. My mind would be working all the time on a polyrhythmic level, listening to what the MCs were doing, but my fingers would be in that straight bass pocket. So that's how "Readymade" ended up being written on a bass.
GW: That track could have been on Blood Sugar Sex Magik. That album has a lot of that heavy riff thing.
Frusciante: I'm glad we have an aspect of the Blood Sugar feeling on some of the new stuff, because that was a really free time. Flea and I were really getting inside each other's heads. For a long time, Blood Sugar was our main point of reference, just in terms of the energy behind it. We'd ask, "Is this new song or album standing up to what we did then?" The number-one ingredient that made Blood Sugar great is that we were really playing along as people, for the most part. Still, there was a certain amount of tension between me and Anthony then that isn't there now. To me, that's what makes this time even better than the Blood Sugar period; the whole band was united on this album. When one of us has a problem with one of the others, we always talk about it; we get it out in the open. Nobody holds a grudge against anybody. We didn't work that way at the time of Blood Sugar, and it ended up biting us in the ass. That as a big part of my reason for quitting the band. Anthony and I just couldn't see eye to eye. Back then we were both the kind of people who tend to blame anyone other than themselves for what's wrong. Luckily, all of us now are ready to see ourselves as the one who's wrong in any given situation. And that's what gives us a lot of strength to connect as friends now.
