John Frusciante
"I don't need to take drugs. I feel so much more high all the time right now because of the type of momentum that a person can get going when you really dedicate yourself to something that you really love. I don't even consider doing them, they're completely silly. Between my dedication to trying to constantly be a better musician and eating my health foods and doing yoga, I feel so much more high than I did for the last few years of doing drugs"
"At this point I'm the happiest person in the world. These things do not fuck with me at all, and I'm so proud of that—you don't know how proud I am. It's such a beautiful thing to be able to face life, to face yourself, without hiding behind drugs; without having to have anger towards people who love you. There are people who are scared of losing stuff, but you don't lose anything for any other reason than if you just give up on yourself."
John Anthony Frusciante (born March 5, 1970) is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, record and film producer. He is best known as the longtime guitarist of the rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers, with whom he had been for a number of years and recorded five studio albums from 1988 until 1992 and again from 1998 until 2009. Frusciante also has an active solo career, having released eleven albums under his own name, two with Josh Klinghoffer and Joe Lally as Ataxia, and was a studio member of The Mars Volta, as performing guitarist and occasional live member from 2002-2008. His solo recordings include elements ranging from experimental rock and ambient music to New Wave and electronica.
Frusciante joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers at eighteen years old, first appearing on the band's 1989 album, Mother's Milk. The group's follow-up album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991), was a breakthrough success. However, he was overwhelmed by the band's new popularity and quit in 1992. He became a recluse and entered a long period of drug addiction, during which he released his first solo recordings: Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994) and Smile from the Streets You Hold (1997). In 1998, he successfully completed drug rehabilitation and rejoined the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their next album, Californication (1999) would eventually go on to sell 16 million copies.[1] His album To Record Only Water for Ten Days was made in 2001. A fourth album with the Chili Peppers, By the Way was released in 2002. On a creative spree, Frusciante released six solo albums in 2004; each album explored different recording techniques and genres. In 2006, Stadium Arcadium, Frusciante's fifth and final album with the Chili Peppers was released. In 2009, Frusciante released The Empyrean, which features Flea and Josh Klinghoffer, but announced he had again parted ways with the Chili Peppers during their hiatus. Frusciante has produced and/or recorded with the Wu-Tang Clan, The Mars Volta and Omar Rodriguez Lopez, Swahili Blonde, The Bicycle Thief, Glenn Hughes, Ziggy Marley, Johnny Cash, George Clinton, and others.
Frusciante has received critical recognition for his guitar playing, ranking at number 18 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" in 2003; and again in a second list penned in 2011, where he ranked at number He was ranked as number 42 in Gibson's list of the "50 Best Guitarists of All Time". He was voted "The Best Guitarist of the Last 30 Years" in a 2010 BBC poll called "The Axe Factor". Frusciante was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame as a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on April 14, 2012 although he did not attend the ceremony.
Frusciante's musical style has evolved over the course of his career. Although he received moderate recognition for his early guitar work, it was not until later in his career that music critics and guitarists alike began to fully recognize it: in October 2003, he was ranked eighteenth in Rolling Stone's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Frusciante attributes this recent recognition to his shift in focus, stating that he chose an approach based on rhythmic patterns inspired by the complexity of material Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen produced. On earlier records, however, much of his output was influenced by various underground punk and New Wave musicians. In general, his sound is also defined by an affinity for vintage guitars. All the guitars that he owns, records, and tours with were made before 1970. Frusciante will use the specific guitar that he finds appropriate for a certain song. All of the guitars he owned before quitting the band were destroyed when his house burned down in 1996. The first guitar he bought after rejoining the Chili Peppers was a 1962 red Fender Jaguar. His most-often used guitar, however, is a 1962 Sunburst Fender Stratocaster that was given to him as a gift from Anthony Kiedis after Frusciante rejoined the Chili Peppers in 1998. He has played this guitar on every album since rejoining the Chili Peppers, and their ensuing tours. He also owns a 1955 Fender Stratocaster, his only Strat with the maple neck. Frusciante's most prized instrument is a 1955 Gretsch White Falcon, which he used twice per show during the By the Way tour. He has since stopped using it, saying there was "no room for it". Virtually all of Frusciante's acoustic work is played with a 1950s Martin.
Frusciante uses a variety of vocal styles on his solo albums, ranging from the distressed screeches on Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt and Smile from the Streets You Hold to more conventional styles on later records. With the Chili Peppers, Frusciante provided backing vocals in a falsetto tenor, a style he started on Blood Sugar Sex Magik. He thoroughly enjoyed his role in the Chili Peppers as backup singer, and said that backing vocals are a "real art form". Despite his commitment to the Chili Peppers, he felt that his work with the band should remain separate from his solo projects. When he returned to the Chili Peppers in 1998, Kiedis wanted the band to record "Living in Hell", a song Frusciante had written several years before. Frusciante refused, feeling that the creative freedom he needs for his solo projects would conflict with his role in the band.
Frusciante's guitar playing employs emphasis on phrasing rather than virtuosity. Although virtuoso influences can be heard throughout his career, he has said that he often minimizes this. He feels that in general, guitar mastery has not evolved much since the 1960s and considers the greatest players of that decade unsurpassed. When he was growing up in the 1980s, many mainstream guitarists focused on speed. Because of this, he thinks that the skills of many defiant New Wave and punk guitarists were largely overlooked. Therefore he accentuates the melodically-driven technique of players such as Matthew Ashman of Bow Wow Wow and Bernard Sumner of Joy Division as much as possible because he thinks that their style has been overlooked and consequently underexplored. Despite this, he considers himself a fan of technique-driven guitarists like Randy Rhoads and Steve Vai, but represses an urge to emulate their style: "People believe that by playing faster and creating new playing techniques you can progress forward, but then they realize that emotionally they don't progress at all. They transmit nothing to the people listening and they stay at where Hendrix was three decades ago. Something like that happened to Vai in the 80s." Believing that focusing only on "clean tones" is negative, Frusciante developed an interest in playing with what he calls a "grimy" sound. As a result, he considers it beneficial to "mistreat" his guitar and employ various forms of distortion when soloing. He also tries to break as many "stylistic boundaries" as he can to expand his musical horizons. He thinks that much of the output from today's guitarists is unoriginal, and that many of his contemporaries "follow the rules with no risk".
Frusciante's approach to album composition has changed. On his early recordings, he welcomed sonic imperfections, noting that "even on [To Record Only Water for Ten Days] there are off-pitch vocals and out-of-tune guitars."However, on later albums such as Shadows Collide With People, he pursued the opposite: "I just wanted everything to be perfect—I didn't want anything off pitch, or off time, or any unintentional this or that."Frusciante views songwriting as taking time, and does not force it: "If a song wants to come to me, I'm always ready to receive it, but I don't work at it." Much of his solo material is first written on an acoustic or unamplified electric guitar. He also prefers to record his albums on analog tapes and other relatively primitive equipment.This preference stems from his belief that older equipment can actually speed up the recording process, and that modern computerized recording technology gives only an illusion of efficiency.Frusciante tries to streamline the recording process as much as possible, because he thinks "music comes alive when [you] are creating it fast". He also enjoys the challenge of having to record something in very few takes, and believes that when musicians are unable to handle the pressure of having to record something quickly they often get frustrated or bogged down by perfectionism.
"In Chilli Peppers I'm a part of the world in a pretty big world and that's just the way it is"
