John Frusciante, The Bohemian Of Red Hot Chili Peppers

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May 2006, Kerrang (Spanish edition)
thanks to Esther for translating it and typing it out
click the thumbnail to see scans

I’m at the Chateau Marmont, just in Hollywood’s heart, waiting for Frusciante, the guitar genius, to get into the room. I also have ready my camera, that one that the manager won’t allow me to use for remembering this moment. Loose fitting pants, lined polo neck, messed hair, and beard… He says hi, barely looking me in the eyes. His first interview is gonna be with me. I just finished listening to Stadium Arcadium, the album because of which we are here. I ask John how long has he been without listening to it.

Well, we started to record the album a year and a half ago and during that time we’ve been listening to the album for like 14 hours every day. Since we finished it, I haven’t listened to it again. I think it’s the best album we’ve done until this date, the more psicodelic, the darker, the deepest if you want, and the most eclectic. Sometimes when you pick up the best songs to be part of the album, just by chance they all sound in the same wave, let it be funky, rock, fast or slow, but in this album we’ve tried to pick up the songs from a wilder range.
Personally I wanted to do songs that sounded harder, but at the same time, that they would transmit something deeper, more transcendental. The separation between funky songs and melodic songs started with “Blood, sugar…”. In Stadium Arcadium is the first time we mix this two elements in the same song, or at least is the major perfection grade we’ve achieved. On the other hand, I also wanted that every guitar solo was an event for itself. Not in the meaning of display myself or being a virtuous with the strings. I mean using the experience of all these years and just know where I should play simple but effective and where I should go straight to the rhythm and the groove of a song to raise to the maximum its potential. While we were doing the album I listened to guitar players like Clapton, Hendrix, or Jeff Beck, and on the other hand artists who are not famous by their solos, like Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Smiths. When we rehearse, we just start playing and when we come up with a melody or a solo that we like we just look at each other and by then we know we have something there.

Personally, I think that the solos on this album sound more like artists from the 70’s like Hendrix, etc…
I don’t think the way of guitar playing has evolved that much since that time. The way of playing from Jimmy Page or Hendrix it’s still unsurpassable. When I was a young kid I admired people like Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai or Randy Rhodes, but in my opinion they haven’t improved the way of playing of the old seventies’ teachers. It’s not that now I don’t like them anymore, but what I look for, further than the technique, it’s the passion and the “grimy” of the sound. That’s why I admire people like Kurt Cobain or the Siouxsie guitar player, people who might not dominate the guitar but who found the right balance between passion and the energy they could pass to the listener. To me, the guitar players who centre too much in the technique loose a big part of the essence of playing the instrument. They don’t realise that the grimy sound of a guitar constitute an essential part of the Universe. It’s White Noise.(It’s the noise produced when all the sonorous frequencies get together picked up by the human ear, in just one. The word White is because of the white light which is the abridgement of all frequencies (colour) of lights in the spectre.) I love to reproduce that kind of sounds with my keyboards. People like Page or Hendrix made “white noise”, while Randy Rhodes avoided it, and people used to imitate Rhodes because they believed that the essence of the guitar is playing it clean and fast. I also had to fight against that tendency of imitate Rhodes, because I told ya I admired him, and I had to constantly keep in my mind that I had to mistreat the guitar and never worry about getting just clean tones. In this album, I tried to go by the production of Hendrix’s albums. He’s been my biggest inspiration. I wanted to reproduce that psicodelic effect he got by manipulating the speed of the tapes (where you hear an electric mandolin that’s really a guitar taped in high speed), the manipulation of the volume, changing from one loudspeaker to another, playing faster or slower than the rest of the band, constantly changes in rhythm…

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