July 2006, Total Guitar (UK)thanks to Kane Taylor, for typing it outclick the thumbnail to see scans

In the first of a special two-part interview, John Frusciante discusses Hendrix, drugs, Ricky Gervais, meditation and why he's fallen in love with guitar solos again. Words: Phil Ascott. Portraits: Ross Halfin“Congestion ahead. Delays are expected.” It’s 3.18pm on Good Friday and, from the passenger seat of our car TG is surveying the endless stream of stationary vehicles snaking their way into the distance. We’re braving the M6 motorway, heading north for Easter sojourn with the in laws. It’s a laborious process at the best of times (we’re referring of course to driving up the M6, not visiting the in laws), but this time the holiday traffic combined with a full premiership football schedule, has turned one of Britain’s longest car parks.The sound of our mobile phone ringing briefly distracts us from the tedium of tarmac. Scrabbling around, TG locates our vibrating friend and notes a mystery London number is on the line:“Hello?”“Hi it’s John Frusciante here.”“Oh, er, Hi John….”Rewind 24 hours , and we are waiting in room 105 of the world famous Claridge’s Hotel, a luxury five- star establishment right in the heart of London’s West End. The hotel room is the epitome of glamour: spacious, decked out with antique Art Deco furniture with copious bowl of fresh exotic fruits dotted around and a bathroom so long you could hold a bowls tournament in it.John Frusciante is fashionably late. Our allotted hour’s interview was due to start at 1pm but John is still upstairs wharfing down his breakfast, so we recline on an opulent chaise longe, grab a grape and wait. 10 minutes later Frusciante appears shuffles slightly awkwardly across the room and greets us warmly. His long unkempt hair, unshaven, rugged features and simple jeans, t-shirt and lumber shirt attire seems out of place in these sumptuous surroundings. With his tattoos and heavily scarred arms hidden from view, he looks unremarkable – seemingly more likely to produce a Big Issue from up his sleeve than the kind of diamond encrusted watch he could so easily afford – yet perversely, Frusciante is perhaps the most remarkable guitarist Total Guitar has ever met.His incredible life story to date has been told often, but bears repeating. A prodigious young musician, he joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers aged just 18 years old and his impact on the band was immediate. As the creative force behind 1991’s brilliant Blood Sugar Sex Magik album, Frusciante transformed the band from slightly embarrassing sex obsessed funk- metallers to global rock giants in three short years. Then at the height of their popularity he quit the band in a haze of heroin. Drugs were to rule his life for the next five years, first heroin, then crack cocaine. As Frusciante battled with the “beings of higher intelligence” or “spirits” he’d had in his head since childhood, he lost his teeth, his skin (the burns on his arms a consequence of setting fire to himself while freebasing) his house (burnt down) and by overdosing regularly almost his life.

With the Chilis floundering after and unsuccessful phase with Dave Navarro on guitar, it was bassist Flea who was instrumental in bringing Frusciante out of his addiction and back into the band. His reinstatement once again bore immediate fruits. The banks next studio album Californication, sold 15 million copies, while an astonishing one in 35 UK households own a copy of 2002’s By The Way.But its not just Frusciante’s musical Midas touch that’s remarkable. He’s a fascinating man to spend time with. Despite the scheduled one-hour slot, the enigmatic guitarist eventually spends nearly three hours in our company and rarely have we encountered a guitarist so deeply studied, progressive and passionate about his art. Every facet of his existence is channelled towards his music: whether its an in-depth study of every form of composition from classical to the electronic avant-garde, dissecting pioneering, foreign cinema and British comedy, or practising Buddhist meditation, a technique that has replaced drug intake as the guiding force in Frusciante’s life.Often his conversation has convoluted as he grapples for the ideal words to explain his complex creations and persona, yet it is clear Frusciante is deeply intelligent; a pioneering perfectionist who functions on a level most musicians aspire to yet few achieve. A perfectionism that leads him to interrupt TG’S journey to clarify some of the finer points of our previous day’s conversation, and what led him to the sonic heights that dominate the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s monster, new double album, Stadium Arcadium.

Next month John describes some of the practice techniques, chord theory, instrumentation and studio trickery that went into making one of the most anticipated guitar albums of the year.

While the first part of this in-depth interview, he discusses meditation, soloing, drugs, Jimi Hendrix and his early years in one of the world’s biggest rock bands…

Stadium Arcadium was recorded at the same studio where you recorded 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik album. What as the reasoning behind that?It just seemed like the perfect idea because I live about one minute away and Anthony and Chad live about 10 minutes away. Flea’s about an hour away in Malaga, but because of the way it’s set up he could sleep at the studio. Flea made it his home for the weekends so it was just practical in that way. Also the studio we normally use Cello Studios closed down.

Did recording in the house bring back any memories?Not really. It seems like a different place now to what it was then. I like it better now. Its cosier, a little more warm and homely. The other guys have a different impression than me, but that’s how it seemed to me. I loved it both times but before it seemed more cold and chilling

How different was the recording process to when you recorded all those years ago?Well back then I didn’t do many overdubs. Blood Sugar was naked. At the time that was the concept I wanted especially because on Mothers Milk,

Michael Beinhorn had really pushed us. He had me quadrupling guitars, so it was years before I ever doubled anything again because I had such a weird experience on Mothers Milk. I did a lot of doubling on this album and it came out really good, but I hadn’t done doubling since Mother’s Milk. The template for Stadium Arcadium was to have and album like Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality where the guitars are in stereo, hard left, hard right, and its just the simple powerchord and sounds so thick as you’d ever want it to sound.

Do you ever look back to the Funky Monks film that was made at the time of Blood Sugar? How do you feel about watching yourself back then?I have all the respect in the world for my guitar playing back then, especially as that was a point when I’d broken out of being in a particular place. When I was a teenager I loved Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and Steve Vai, and I was balancing out those three guitarists styles in my playing. I didn’t have my own identity and I didn’t know what my musical voice was going to be. Around the time we started writing Blood Sugar, I finally put aside those guitarists’ styles and I forgot about what’s technically good. I thought, for example, that Keith Richards makes music that connects with so many people and he plays in such a simple way, so why don’t I pick a variety of people along those lines who play simple but do something that makes a beautiful sound that affects people emotionally? For me that was a new way of thinking that to a while adjusting to. So by the time we recorded Blood Sugar, I still felt as though I was doing a balancing act and I didn’t really feel comfortable with what I was doing, which is probably a good thing. The same thing happened when we were making this record. I felt as though it could just as easily be bad as it could be good.

In what way weren’t you comfortable recording Stadium Arcadium?I felt like I was skating on thin ice or walking a tightrope. It seems that a lot of the things that are good have a quality about them. The only album I remember feeling totally and completely confident on 100 percent was By The Way, and I wasn’t actually challenging myself on that album. I knew exactly what I was doing to do in the studio, so it’s easy to feel powerful and confident when you have over-practised and you’re playing below your level of technique. On Blood Sugar I was being very careful to not think and to play from somewhere else other than my brain activity to play guitar. I would shut off my brain and let my fingers just go and listen to the bass and the drums, and not really listen to myself except the sound coming back from my own guitar.I started it with the keen feeling that there were beings of higher intelligence controlling what I was doing, and I didn’t know how to talk about it or explain it. I called them “spirits”. It was very clear to me that the music was coming from somewhere other than me. But if you shut off your brain you will notice that the music exists beyond anything that we perceive with our five senses, and we don’t really understand how it is that music exists in the air and comes through as a vehicle. But it does. And on this album, meditation for six months prior to us going into the studio had

a big effect on my ability to turn off my mind. That’s where a lot of the music came from.

Many guitarists will be interested in the facet of your work. Please explain how meditation helped your playing and how you’ve developed it?There are different kinds of meditation. There is one kind where the mind focuses on one object that could be a blue circle or someone’s face that you like or a mantra. The concept is that your brain has been able to do exactly what it wants your whole life, thinking whatever it wants to think and that it’s basically an organ in your body that’s run amok Your brain is interfering with your ability to be in the moment and the idea is to cause the brain to focus on one particular thing for an extended period of time.Then there’s another type of meditation where you’re bringing awareness to your brain. We say bringing awareness because it’s not the same as paying attention. You’re letting your brain go through whatever it needs to go through to process, but there are games you play with yourself. It’s a little beyond the scope to explain them in detail, but basically your brain gets sick of these games that you make it go through and eventually you get to sit there in silence and just bring that awareness to the silence.In both of those ways its and incredibly powerful feeling when you can just sit there and focus on the mantra, stillness or silence. When you do this for about half hour, one hour or two hours a day, what I’ve noticed for myself and for every other musician who has done this for an extensive amount of time- John McLaughlin, Robert Fripp and people like that – is that it brings this energy and focus to your musical practice and your listening to music. The only thing I can compare it to is when I first started smoking pot, where music had a much fuller body than it ever had before. I hear music so much sharper now, and when I hear a solo I learn it so much quicker. When ideas are flowing my drive to let the idea come to its complete fruition is relentless. The idea being that if you can focus on nothingness for half hour or an hour, it’s no problem to focus on something that gives you pleasure, like music.

So how does meditation affect your ability to lean solos?Have you ever learned a solo, then a year later you realised that you had figured it out wrong? You didn’t hear that little bit, and when you think back to that time there was some tiny little voice in your head that told you it wasn’t exactly right but you didn’y have the and real contact with that side of your brain so you didn’t listen to it.Well once you start meditating and you’re doing it for the right reasons, you have to be honest with yourself all the time and you have to be honest with other people. It forces you to clear through your shit. It compartmentalises things in your brain so when you set out to do a task, like learning a solo or a piece of music, your brain is 100 percent with you and unified with that one task.

Do you still learn other artists' material on a regular basis?Oh yeah, all the time. At the moment I’m excited about understanding how classical composers thought- people like Brahms and Beethoven and Back and Mozart. I’ll basically take a piece of their music and dissect it.

Maybe just a couple of minutes at a time, a section that really speaks to me where I feel, “Wow what is going on there? That is so beautiful, how are they creating these feelings? What is this change that is happening right at this second and why does this part in the song make me feel so emotional for these two seconds?” And then I’ll learn every part whether its an orchestra, string quartet or whatever.Or I’ll learn a Jimi Hendrix solo in great detail. Big solos for me when we were making this record were the long version of Voodoo Child: the three long solos from that track. When I was a kid I would figure out Jimi Hendrix solos but I was learning a skeleton or I would learn it and there would be some little detail that I wasn’t picking up. In the first few months that I was meditating, I made the first progress that I ever made. I felt like, “Jesus Christ! I’m learning exactly what he’s doing” and not only learning it but I’m learning to feel it in the same way that he was feeling it and I’m learning to hit the string in the same way and to put the same vibrato on it. It’s not enough to make a mental observation what kind of vibrato you think he was using, you’ve got to feel it the way he was feeling it. That didn’t happen to me until I started meditating. Pretty much everything on Electric Ladyland was my bible when we were making this record because, not only is his guitar playing always speeding up and slowing down, he was playing around with lots of rhythmic expression and off-time playing, which is what I wanted to do with this album. The production and sense of constant movement and motion on Electric Ladyland that Hendrix caused as a producer was what I wanted to have my own version of.

Was that aspect of Hendrix’s work difficult to replicate? How did you go about it?In his case he was playing with the pan pots a lot, putting tape phasing on a lot of things, turning the volume up and down while he’s soloing. Basically playing with the mixing part of the process. I actually did my work before that. After I recorded the guitars I’d effect them with my Doepfer A100 modular synthesizer and Moogerfooger pedals. It’s the same idea as altering the sound after you’ve played it and not letting anything be static so the sound is in a constant state of change. That idea was very important to me.

You’re soling more on this record, was that a conscious decision?I’m a person that likes to contradict himself and go against what he was doing before, and on By The Way I was completely against soloing. I didn’t enjoy listening to solos and I didn’t enjoy soloing. My perception of guitar playing at the time was influenced by John McGeoch from Siouxsie and the Banshees and Magazine, Johnny Marr from The Smiths and Bernard Sumner of New Order and Joy Divison. If I was going to play lead guitar I wanted it to be something you could sing. But as one would expect I got sick of that at a certain point and by the time we were going to start writing this record I was really into soloing. I started getting particularly excited about anybody who was doing off-time stuff. A lot of musicians play within a 16th note grid: on any one of those 16th notes. That was the last thing I wanted to do. At first It wasn’t so much that I was listening to Jimi Hendrix or Cream, I was listening to singers like Beyonce, Alliyah and Brandy and rappers like Wu-Tang Clan, Eminem and Eric B and Ramkin. I

would translate the rhythmic phrasing and bluesy kind of things that they do to the guitar and it would come out sounding like Jimi Hendrix. I was playing a Strat through a Marshall with a wah-wah pedal and Fuzz Tone, and it quickly became apparent that the result of trying to do this off-time stuff led to n unexpected parallel to what a lot of blues influenced people were doing back in the 1960s.

The solos appear to be improvised more in the main this time…Almost every solo was improvised. Even those that sound like they have been written were improvised. The solo in Wet Sand for example, is one of those ones you can sing along with but it was totally improvised. What’s the key to improvisation? In polyrhythmic playing, when your finding your own groove inside the music, you can’t plan out what you’re going to do. Take the guitar solo to Hey: I could only plan it out in the sense that I knew I was going to be constantly speeding up and slowing down. If you try to plan the subtlest difference in the groove of drums and bass is going to change what you are doing. During the rehearsal we were playing stuff much faster than we ended up playing in the studio, so the same solos weren’t really working. So I really had no choice but to wing it in the studio. For me, this really gave the album a live quality and an exiting spontaneity that I haven’t had in the studio before. There is no more relaxing part of making a record than improvising solos. That’s just fun for me.

While you use theory to your advantage many top guitarists claim they don’t know much about theory and play be “feel” instead…Good luck to them. I have nothing against that way of thinking. In fact I have more in common with that way of thinking than with people who normally get associated with theory. The people who inspire me when they talk about theory are Jazz musicians like Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Charlie Parker. These people didn’t play by feel and were thinking completely in terms of theory. We are all playing by feel, but not in the definition of these ignorant guitar players who don’t want to spend time learning theory. People pretend there’s an advantage to not learning theory, but I think they’re just lazy.

Yet your solos were still improvised…As I told you, the most important thin for me is to shut off my mind. I don’t need to think that something is in a minor 3rd, but I know it’s a minor 3rd.The feeling of a minor 3rd is equivalent to a symbol I have in my head that means minor 3rd. It’s not very complicated, it just sounds complicated because people don’t use that language when they talk. It would be like somebody saying, “I don’t want to use words to talk, I want to just go by feel, I want to rub my penis all over them. I don’t want to talk” To me that’s a useless limited way of being. I like to talk and rub all over them. I think theory gets a bad name because a lot of people use theory instead of feel. But Flea and I are both fans of those jazz musicians I mentioned, who seemed to grow throughout their whole life as musicians. But a lot of rock musicians who don’t think on that level often go through a decline within a few years. I’m not saying that’s the only reason, as quite often they overdo it with drugs and sex and dishonesty. If

you’re a person that thinks theory is going to limit you then don’t learn it, but make sure you are being honest with yourself and you don’t want to learn it just because you’re lazy and telling yourself, ”Yeah man, I play by feel” because that’s just being a pussy. Theory doesn’t block people’s creativity, only the ego blocks creativity. Excessive drug use or drinking can block it, not theory.

It’s interesting when you say drugs and alcohol prevent creativity, yet many musicians throughout history have used drugs to aid creativity.Oh you can do that. I said excessive drug use. Marijuana, mushrooms or acid have the ability to really open somebody up, but they actually do it from one time of taking the drug. If you have one good experience with those drugs you’ve altered your brain permanently for the better. If you have a bad experience with them you’ve permanently altered your brain in a bad way that might take years to correct. I believe in that very strongly. When it comes to a drug like cocaine , I believe it takes a very special environment during a very special period of time for this to be of any value, and I don’t count the present time as being one of those times.

You're drug free now [John raises his eyebrows]. Well if not drug-free you certainly seem to have your drug use under control…For me that’s the important thing. Since I’ve been meditating I feel very strongly that the highest peaks in a person can reach are from resisting that impulse to just take something all the time. When you take drugs you you’re essentially allowing your brain to do whatever it wants. The most important thing you need is to have some kind of contact with the person you are inside and to be honest with yourself. If you have, you don’t need drugs. I feel strongly that there is no drug or drink that makes anybody better than they really are. Meditation can bring a person around. It’s hard as fuck and I had to go through some terrible shit at first. When I went into the studio to make this album my stomach was very painful and I felt that I hated myself all the time. The part of myself I had been running away from was the Mother’s Milk time because I felt as though I hated that person, hated his approach and hated the way he lived his life. I was looking at myself as a stranger who had invaded my own life. During a meditation about three weeks into the studio time I finally realised that I loved that part of myself and from then on my knotting stomach went away and I kicked ass in the studio! I needed that part of myself to make this album.

It’s a controversial step to release such a large volume of music in one go? Do you have any reservations?No. To me it’s stupid to that it’s controversial. If a painter decides to paint 40 paintings nobody says, “How can you paint 40 paintings?” When it’s a song all of a sudden everybody says “How did you think you could get away with this?” But it’s what we did. I’ll say the same thing The Clash said with Sandinista, the same thing The Beatles said with The White Album, the same thing Jimi Hendrix said when he wanted to make his fourth album a triple record: its what we recorded: It’s the music that came through us. We don’t just make music just for our own pleasure; we

make music for our audience. If we write 28 songs that we think are top notch, that’s what we want to give to the public. That’s for mankind. Making music is my gift to mankind and it’s what I have to offer.

You don’t put out 14 songs because that’s what the critics would accept with a smile. We’re putting out what we believe is worthy. I can’t say that if somebody puts the album down it won’t hurt my feelings, because it will. But I can deal with it. What’s important to me is that some kid somewhere, three years from now, could possibly hear one of these songs and decide not to kill himself. I’ve heard that plenty of times from people. People write to me to telling me they fell in love to my music. How do I know that it’s not going to be the 27th song on the album that’s going to do that? Why, just because we’re in the music business, should I have to shorten things to be like everyone else, Fuck that! Business considerations don’t matter as much to us as it does to have the right artistic reasons for doing something. Luckily our managers supported us. When we said we wanted a double record they said, “You know what, why not?” Fuck statistics, we’ve made a good album so let's put it out.

December 2008/January 2009, MusicRadar (UK)Transcribed by Slobodan Marković (pt1), Sabrina Samwald (pt2) and Iva Tanacković (pt3 / yours truly)You can listen to all three parts of the podcast on MusicRadar.

Joe Bosso: John, how you doing?John Frusciante: Good, how are you?Joe Bosso: I'm very good. So, you have a new solo album coming out in January, called The Empyrean...John Frusciante: Mm, hm.Joe Bosso:...which is quite an experience, I've been listening to it all week, now The Empyrean, if I understand it right, means THE PLACE OF THE HIGHEST HEAVEN, is that correct?John Frusciante: I understand it means THE HIGHEST POINT IN HEAVEN.Joe Bosso: OK. Are you particularly religious, why did you come up with this term for this record?John Frusciante: My religious point of view is something that I can't really talk about, it goes against my belief system to publicly talk about my own spiritual beliefs. In the case of the record I think I was more using the highest point in heaven as a symbol for the things in life that we're all reaching for and those things that are sort of out of our ???, but yet there's some spark inside us that ??????? us to wanna reach for them and to wanna bring ourselves to greater heights, whether it's on an instrument, whether it's... whatever it is, as human beings we just have this need to reach and... to reach new heights and often they're totally out of our ??? but that doesn't make it less reasonable to reach for it, there is always a quote the writer William B???? used to always quote, which was that there's... there's no goal more worth fighting to ??? and... I'm paraphrasing, but it's that there's no goal more worthy of fighting to obtain immortality, you know, and... and, it's just, well I don't think it is good to... to always be sort of believing that the grass is greener on the other side, I... I really believe in pushing yourselves to... to reach heights that may seem far off, but... but to just push yourself to get there. And, in my case, that's all with music, you know, it's... it's, umm... I just... I've just always tried to reach new heights and it's also one of the things of the record that sometimes in your journey giving up, sometimes can be giving up for a period of time or can actually be a way of regenerating enough energy to keep pushing higher, you know, and musically ????????? the lyrics, the… the music on my record repeatedly keeps sort of going from a murky kind of low to a… to a peek, and then down form the peek and then to another low, and then keeps reaching up again and going higher and higher, and then going down again, and it’s, for me that’s like a form of breathing, you know, there’s been times in my life where I just painted and stopped even playing music, you know, and there’s been times in my life where I stopped thinking so creatively on my instrument and started thinking purely technically, and I think that all those things had a value even though it’s not something I’d wanna… you know, they’re not things you desire to do, but I think in the process of trying to go up and up and up, I don’t think just solidly to do nothing but going up and up and constantly reaching and pushing yourself, I think eventually that produces

a kind of ??? where you won’t be able to go up any higher, where you can actually in the long run gain more momentum if you listen to you clock inside and you may have to occasionally give up or, in a symbolic sense, you might have to die in order to be reborn.Joe Bosso: What I can definitely hear on this record is you’re constantly changing your style, constantly ???, actually disregarding one style after you’ve done it both as an instrumentalist and as a vocalist. How do you go about that process? John Frusciante: Well, I don’t think it is disregarding obviously, ‘cause I really love the whole record from beginning to end, but it… it’s more just… yeah, just switching it up, and changing, and trying to approach each song differently and trying to sort of… like in singing, like try to… try to sort of find a different character for each song, I think it really helped me to… nobody was around when I recorded my vocals, so being by myself I found myself, it was much easier to sort of have fun with it and do a lot of takes until I really was having more and more fun each time as opposed to when you do it with an engineer a lot of times you can’t deal with humiliation of having to do more than a couple of takes or whatever, and it gets frustrating if you have to do any more after that, whereas… but when you’re by yourself sometimes you do fifteen takes and the fifteenth on is like YEAH, you know, so I found myself having more and more fun with it every time that I did it, messing around more every time and stuff. As far as soloing, you know, I usually try to have some sort of a concept in my head of an approach or a sound or… you know, I think music should be something alive and free and I don’t think people should just sort of rest on their ??? or at least I don’t like for myself to rest on my ??? and to repeat myself.

Joe Bosso: Did you record the record at home?

John Frusciante: Aha.

Joe Bosso: It’s a ??? it has a very intimate feel of course, but there’s this huge live drum set on that one would get from like a big time studio album?

John Frusciante: Well, it’s big time studio, you know, I mean it’s not, you know… I think it’s a miss that you need like a fifteen foot ceiling to get a good drum sound, our drum room is pretty small and oddly shaped and it’s got a really live sound and we’ve got amazing drum sound just from the dining room, I don’t think studios are all that, I think it was a really poor misconception that I had for a long time that for something to be a real record you had to do it in a recording studio, ‘cause anybody at home, just by collecting gear piece by piece, you can make things as good sounding as what they do in the studio and especially if you… if you’re doing all the engineering yourself as a musician, the more, the more you play a part in, whatever, the mixing, the ‘micing’, the twiddling of the knobs and stuff, it’s your opportunity to put more and more of your own expression of the music, you know, another words if you play a guitar solo if you’re also pushing the phasers and EQing it and putting different kinds of reverbs on it at different points, it can be an extension of the same feeling that you

play it with, whereas when somebody else is doing it in these ??? big studios with highly paid engineers, they don’t know what you’re trying to express, they’re not on the inside of the music, they’re on the outside of it and… so to me the final thing ends up ??? in cases like that. Yeah, I think you can get a good sound anywhere for drums, you know, like MOTOWN where they record all that shit in a tiny little room, you know, it’s… it just doesn’t matter…

Joe Bosso: Well I was particularly impressed by what you do with your voice of some of the tracks, it reminded me of John Lennon who was constantly changing the sound of his voice.

John Frusciante: Yeah, yeah… I’m uh… ooh… you… with anything like, I need to hear, with… with music… the music that I like the way it sounds is where there’s constant sonic variation going on where all the sounds are… where there’s movement going on, I think… even just in the nature of playing a series of notes on a guitar or a series of chords it’s, it’s the change that affects us, it’s that sense of regularity and at the same time a change and variation, that… that magical quality in music that just makes it constantly mean new things to us and as a song goes onwards the emotional response is constantly going in unexpected places and… so I, I feel like the sound with all this, you know, technology that’s come about in the last, you know, 100 years of being able to record stuff, that’s the thing I like to take advantage of just to be able to go from one atmosphere to another atmosphere and to go from one type of vocal sound to another and to make it seem far away, to make it seem close, to make it seem small, to make it seem big, and to create ??? effects, you know flipping the tape backwards and doing weird things with reverbs and delays and stuff, I like to hear music changing all the time, you know, so it’s, it’s like, when I hear records that are just mixed in a straight-ahead way where everything is just balanced with each other, nothing’s too soft, nothing’s too loud, this is boring to me, it’s not what I want to hear, when we were mixing this record my main thing was just to have something that I could blast on the stereo system late at night and, you know, and trip out to, you know, just have something where you’re just like “Whoa, how did that happen, how’s that possible?!”, you know just like, I don’t at all record to like impress people or to try to do something good or something, it’s more just like I wanna make something that I like, that I would wanna hear, you know, and in rock music my favorite mixed records are always these ones that like… you know, that, where the artist had some say whether, you know someone like John Lennon, who was real ??? about having different vocal sounds in The Beatles or whatever, or Jimi Hendrix, you know, on electric ladyland or George Clinton on the first few Funkadelic records, I like it when they just take their same musical sense that makes them sing or play in a way that they do and they apply it to the mixing console, you know, so that… that was totally my approach for this is just to trip it out as much as possible.

Joe Bosso: Now, I’m a big fan of Johnny Marr but I must say I could not tell at all which track he is playing on, so…can you tell me which track he’s on?

John Frusciante: He’s on two tracks.

Joe Bosso: Okay.

John Frusciante: He’s on “Heaven” and he’s on “Central”.

Joe Bosso: Okay, okay.

John Frusciante: Ya, I guess in “Heaven” none of the guitars are me until the second verse, like; he’s basically doing the first verse and the first chorus…

Joe Bosso: Alrighty.

John Frusciante: …the first chorus is like a breakdown kinda chorus, if I’m remembering correctly. He basically does the first verse and the first chorus and I do the second verse and the second chorus and the rest of it’s all me. So he’s playing multiple guitars there, you know, he messed around a lot, he basically, you know, we just had one night so…while he was here, touring with Modest Mouse, so we just like, he just heard the songs once and distilled around for a few hours and when we mixed we figured out how to make it, like, working in the structure of the song. That was our approach for all the songs: To kinda record a lot of tracks and figure out in the mix how we were gonna, I mean, I say we, but it was me. But figuring out in the mix like which instruments are gonna be used in which section and doing a lot of tape edit and stuff like that and then…and in the other one, “Central”, he did an acoustic guitar, like, strumming…oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait: Did I say “Heaven”? I meant “Enough Of Me”.

Joe Bosso: Okay…

John Frusciante: Yeah, yeah. “Enough Of Me” is the one where he plays on the first verse and the first chorus. He played on “Heaven” but we didn’t use it in the end…just like that.

Joe Bosso: Okay.

John Frusciante: But “Enough Of Me”, he’s on the first verse and on the first chorus and on “Central” he plays acoustic, rhythm guitar and he played…

Joe Bosso: Ya.

John Frusciante: He did this really neat harmonic thing, a really interesting hand technique, and he had some echo on it and stuff. There might be one other part on “Central” that he plays but I can’t remember…haven’t heard it in a while.

Joe Bosso: Now, did you give him any kind of direction or did you just…?

John Frusciante: No, I…that’s the thing…I’ve kinda learned from making records for a long time that if you really wanna capture a good energy on a record it’s best to just…first of all to add only people playing with you who already would have a sense of what you’re doing and are already… sort of, have a soul connection to what you’re doing, you know…

Joe Bosso: Right.

John Frusciante: You don’t wanna have somebody just ‘cause they can technically play but, you know, you wanna have somebody who understands your point of view that you write music from, you know, and if you have that, like, the best thing to do is to just let them do whatever they do, you know, like, you know, there’s a little, like, when Josh and I are doing stuff we have a little verbal communication about it but basically, like, he understands my music and knows where it’s coming from so…I like to just let him do whatever he does and then I just figure out during the mix. It’s so easy in the mix. Sometimes when people are too quick to sort of judge something like, “Oh, that doesn’t work right for this section.” or “That’s more…taking over too much.” They’re not using their heads and thinking ahead with how much you can do when you’re mixing, you know, like, with EQ and effects and treatments and stuff you just wrangle it in there, you know…

Joe Bosso: Yeah.

John Frusciante: You just, sort of, form it, like, I think, when I was first making records I was too quick to judge things just based on the first listen and I’ve learned over the years that if you got a good energy in the room the spirits of music or, you know, the gods of music do their thing with it, you know, like there’s a plan that’s much more belabored and much more complex and wonderful than anything that you could plan out in your head, you know. If you just let the energies flow, you know…

Joe Bosso: Now…

John Frusciante: I don’t change anything with Johnny. I was just watching him come up with stuff, was really educationally, you know, ‘cause I’ve learnt so much from his playing to see that he wasn’t…’cause I come with playing from a…, you know, the theoretical symbols for things are real prominent in my mind and all the time when I make music, even if I’m totally breaking all the rules in playing, atonal notes and all that, I know what intervals they are, you know, when I’m building chord upon chord I know what the intervallic relationship is, you know, and with him…he doesn’t have that…I think he just learnt to play music from doing it and from playing along with old records and stuff…so to see the way that…in his own mind he’s created his own mental symbols for the same things that I use the theoretical symbols for, but, you know, in so many ways I learn how to use things like thirteenths and elevenths and ninths in a musical context from starting from plain to this real complex chord progressions in, like, Smiths songs and stuff like that to find out that he’s

always been going by his instinct and going by his own mental pitchers and stuff…it was really neat to watch it just fall into place, you know.

Joe Bosso: Now, I’m fascinated. Is it possible for a player as yourself to turn that off though?

John Frusciante: No reason to, like, I think there’s a period of time when a person first learns those things it produces a kind of mental strain where the instinctual part of the brain isn’t escapable anymore of dominating the brain and the technical part ends up being overemphasized and taking up all the brain space you have room for. You use up all the brain power you have available to compensate all these technical relationships and things like that but once it becomes the same thing as talking or something, you know, once it becomes the same thing as you know what the word “man” means and it’s not a strain to think of a man and have the word “man” in your head, you know, there’s just…eventually they just become one thing, the symbol of the thing and the thing itself just become one thing. The word majors heard and the sound of it and the look of it on the guitar it just all becomes one thing in your brain, you know…

Joe Bosso: You might be using a bunch of different guitars on the album but if I had to pick a predominant sound it does sound like a Strat most of the time…

John Frusciante: Yeah, that’s all I’m using. I don’t think I played any other guitars. It’s hard to remember. I might have used an SG on the solo of “Central” but I think I might have just made the Strat sound like an SG with and English Muffin Electro Harmonix Effect. I basically used all the same gear I use in the Chili Peppers, you know, just Marshall Major and Jubilee and my 62 Strat and my 67 Strat…

Joe Bosso: Right. There’s so many cool sounds on this record but if I had pick one it’s the solo in the song “Enough Of Me”. What…?

John Frusciante: I think that’s my favorite one too.

Joe Bosso: There you go. What kind of overdrive are you using on that?

John Frusciante: I think it’s an English Muffin and I didn’t play that through the Marshalls I played it through a Fender Bassman.

Joe Bosso: Okay.

John Frusciante: ‘Cause I wanted to get real low frequency…

Joe Bosso: Yeah.

John Frusciante: …and I wanted to be standing next to the amp and not be too far away from the control room, so…when I was on tour I was just messing around in my hotel room I started to think of that style of playing of…I was just messing around a lot with…instead of thinking of one note

as one note that leads to the next note that leads to the next note to sort of divide the guitar into pieces. So you’re playing low notes alternately with high notes that have, you know, a stretch of, you know, a couple of octaves at least and it forces you brain to have to, sort of, thinking two directions at once even though the notes aren’t happening at the same time which…I remember on my first solo album I did a lot of that work. I was playing acoustic guitar parts where they kind of had a bass note and a high note that were at least, like, an octave and a third away from each other or whatever but in this case it’s a single note guitar line but your brain is, sort of, thinking in…up the whole neck…you start to, once you do it for a while, you start to just think of the whole neck as one thing and you don’t stay in those boxy patterns the guitar players can think…

Joe Bosso: Right.

John Frusciante: …staying, you know. It was just a fun, like, at first it was just like a fun mental challenge to think that way and then by the time I played it on the album I had been doing a lot in my room. I did a little on stage but it’s so different from the way I normally play…

Joe Bosso: Oh.

John Frusciante: …it was…I wasn’t really enjoying doing it in the band.

Joe Bosso: Well, it’s an amazing solo. Just totally mind-blowing.

John Frusciante: Thanks, man.

Joe Bosso: In the time we have remaining, we have so many reader questions, so we'll try to get to as many as we can. A reader named "johnfranco888" wants to know: Chad from Chili Peppers, is doing his group, Chickenfoot. Would you ever consider doing a counter-court supergroup of this nature?

John Frusciante: Nooo...I like making music by myself. I-I want to I play oo...If I play...and personally, I have never heard the Chickenfoot. I-I-didn't know Chad was doing that, I don't know who that is and why he's doing that. I don't know. I'm not comp...I'm not comparing myself to him, I'm just saying that for me like I, if I played with ? at hundred percent because of the musical relationship and I have no interest in sort of ah...ah, yeah, I don't want something comparing myself to him, as I don't know what he's doing. It's just I want aaa...I won't play with people because they're, like, also stars and we go up on stage and be stars together or something , you know or just...just that's not me, you know, and I, and I find I usually don't relate to people who think that way because of...it's less about music and it's more about who they are or something and I'm really like...I just don't think...I think-I think in general the personality has been overemphasised in music, has been underemphasised...it's definitely my intent to do everything I can for the rest of my life to, to think of music as a living being and to think what I can do for music and not to think what music can do for me, you know? And I hope that, in my own small way, I can spread

that philosophy around a little bit, because I really think there is, I really think too much emphasis has been placed on a star and I think music is very complete without all the crap that comes along, like I was just saying ? go on and on and stuff...photos and videos and all that stuff. I just...I just think music is sufficient to itself, for nothing could be more complete and all those things are just invented to sell by business people, you know, and I just don't think that music needs it, you know? And I think, in a lot of ways, people experiment less when they have their fame to protect, their income to protect, their way of life to protect, you know...

Joe Bosso: Yeah.

John Frusciante: ...and so much emphasis ends up and I-I feel like they do less experimentation with music when they think that way and I know...I know I did...I'm one hundred percent just about thinking in terms of what can be done, what new approaches can be made and be taken to making music and where are some possibilities that people haven't explored yet, humm. Not like WHAT CAN I DO TO KNOCK PEOPLE'S SOCKS OFF! And you know what I mean, like, this is where I'm at, you know. And I mean, it's like, you know, I love Blind Face (?), there are definitely supergroups that I think are awesome, you know. But, at this point in time, I think it's just...I think it's just necessary to really emphasise where the possibilites are in music and not anything about like THIS BAND WILL BE HUGE. (John giggles.)

Joe Bosso: Aaah...a reader named "telefaster" wants to know: When you pick up the guitar, do you ever have the times when nothing seems to be coming out right? If so, what do you do?

John Frusciante: That doesn't really happen to me 'cause I kinda care more about studying music and exploring posibilities than I do about doing anything right. If there's no idea there when I pick up a guitar, I'm just going to be learning stuff off records or studying a chord book or, or, you know, learning a classical piece out of a book or...you know, mostly, since I was twelve, I just learn stuff off records and-and I don't put the pressure on my relationship to the instrumental walkover to it and figuring I'm going to play something brilliant, you know? I practice so much and-and listen so much that, eventually, somebody-somebody, like, does something on a record that strikes you...you-you realise some that some sort of a combination of intervals or some certain kind of a rhytmic phrase, it like...strikes a chord in you. Ideas come forth from there, you know, you, it's really, it's-it's, you know, the whole principle of how they put music together in hip-hop and stuff...you just take little pieces from different things and put them in a new context and reorganise them and bend them and, you know, slice 'em up. And then there's your ideas, you know? I think, I think, I think that kind of stuff only happens when people like have too much of an emphasis in their approach to ? a result, have those kind of goals and those kind of that resultoriary thinking. It's really limiting what you can do and really limiting how much fun you can have when you're doing it, you know? It's important to remember that there's an endless supply of creativity available in the universe, that-that creative force that

all the music has come from...it's plenty full and it's never gonna run out. And as long as you don't psyche yourself out by putting pressure on yourself by judging everything that you do, if you, if you just listen to music and explore the possibilities of your instrument, it's just always going to be there! You don't have to worry about it, you know? It only happens when you make too much of an agenda of trying to do something that's gonna blow people away or something. Like, if you, if you just remember that you just're always gonna just be an important person (The interviewer laughs), no matter how much people are going to tell you that you're important, it's never the person that's important. And nobody should be intimidated by stars like Jimi Hendrix or Eddie van Halen or whoever. It's just, like, those people, they're all just little guys who love music, you know? And what they do has been great only as much as they love music, and as much as they practiced their instruments a lot, and gave a lot love to it, you know? (Yeah, yeah...) As long as you do that stuff, you don't need to worry about the result, you know? You'll get there when you're meant to, and you'll come up with things when you're meant to and you'll have a good time the whole time, as long as you're studying all the brilliant stuff. We're so lucky we have the CDs and records to study and it's an opportunity to think the way somebody else was thinking. When you play along with something, you're actually...like-like, it's almost like experiencing the same moment they experienced then (Sure!), feeling what they felt and doing what they were doing. It's like a mirror to, to...it's like a mirror through, like, forty years of time or whatever, if you're learning something that happened before years ago. You know, it was a little moment in a studio and then you're recreating that moment with your instrument because you're playing the same instrument as them...it's amazing! You know, it's all like an incredible gift and nobody should put that burden on music to feed their ego in the way that they want it when they expect that everything that comes out of them should be something, like, fantastic, you know?

Joe Bosso: A reader by the name of "porcelain" says: I've been playing the guitar for a long time and I admire your style. I wanna know, in your opinion, is theory necessary to play the guitar; or, is playing guitar emotionally enough?

John Frusciante: I definitely think it's enough to just use your emotions; I think that a lot of brilliant music has been made like that. It just depends on what you wanna do, you know? It's, like, I don't think somebody should learn theory just because I said it's a good idea; but, for me, it's been a really good idea and it makes me...it just gives me more insight into the music that I learn, and I don't think of each note and each relationship in-in a given piece of music as just being something that came out of thin air, which I think it may seem magical when you're a kid. Yeah, I remember how it sounded when I used to listen to KISS when I was a kid and to me it sounded like it all came out of thin air and I had no idea how any of it was being done or what the tonal and rhythmic relationships were. You know, it's, it all just sounded like it came out of thin air and it's a nice feeling; but I think that if I would've remained seeing it that way, I think a lot of people even when they learn stuff, when they're, when their brain doesn't find a

some way of finding a mental symbol that equals the intervalic relationship or the rhythmic relationships....I think that the tendency to think of it as if it was all just coming out of thin air and all of this being kind of unrelated I think that can be limiting. And I think if a person's really gonna be good at it, like Jimi Hendrix was, or Johnny Marr is or, you know, the guys in Fugazi or it's-it's like you-you, in some way you find a mental symbol, it might not, it's one of those mental pictures like, if I tried to picture the feeling of metal in my mind or the feeling of a certain type of wood in my mind - there's a mental symbol for it...I don't actually see the feeling, in sense that touches are something you can see in most cases, but there is a symbol of it in my head and I think that's the kind of a thing a person has to develop and it just takes a lot of practising and a lot of thinking about music and a lot of giving love to music. I-I think that music sound is there for everybody who puts time in their work and I think there's many paths to get to, very similar places; but I really love learning theory, cuz I can hear a...if you put on a song, I immediatelly recognise the intervalic relationships and I've learnt it all already without even picking up my guitar! And, yeah, well, you know, it's possible that somebody can do that without knowing those things; but it's all just so clear to me, you know? (Right!) I'm really grateful for that and I-I don't think it would be as sharp of a sense it is without knowing those things, you know? I think it's only been a recent phenomenon in a lot of ways amongst people who really work hard at music that they've gone so far with it without learning things, because there's a time where, if you really want to do something big, other than, like, folk music or something, you...you have to learn how to read and you have to learn how to write music and you have to learn harmony and learn how to orchestrate it. Those things don't limit, you know? People like Beethoven and Mozart and Stravinsky and they-they only help, like I said, it's only, like I said, you have to go through a period of strain for a while and you may...to really get the ideas adjucted, you may have to put your creativity on the side for a little while, you know? And if you're not wanting to do that, then it's not a good idea to learn it...but if you're, if you're 15-years-old or 16-years-old or 17-years-old, there's just no reason not to learn that stuff, because...yeah, you might have a couple of years of not being as creative as you were before, but how much you're able to do with it once the ideas are digested and it's not a strain to think about them anymore...you know, it's wonderful!

Joe Bosso: A reader by the name of "Cradle88" says: You seem to love all kinds of music: funk, dance, hip-hop et cetera. Is there any particular kind of genre that you've never warmed up to?

John Frusciante: Well, it's not...I don't really think of music in genres, like...but I like it when they play with each other and I can really hear the spirit of music more, like, the formulas that connect, you know, two people of the same style. Mainly, I just don't like it when it sounds to me like the music is being made in order to, uh, impress people or in order to, like, please business people or in order to, like, please the masses or whatever...I just...it doesn't sound good to me when it sounds that it was more important to somebody to do something that was gonna make them famous or make them loved by people...then that when they were doing

something, that there were just harmonious relationships between them and the creative force of music, you know? And that's a really apparent thing to me when it sounds like somebody's making music for the wrong reason, I hear it right away, I-I think, I think that the another thing besides the personality that too much emphasis is placed on...is the style of music somebody's doing or the actual way they dress or the-or the radio station they would be played on, or the section in the record store...like...to me, the real important element of music is the energy behind it; and a sensitive person who loves music can feel that and, you know? You just know the difference when you hear a band at the point in their career when they were doing it for the right reasons, and at the point in their career when they were doing it for the wrong reasons...it's plainly apparent, you know? (Yeah!) And that's the style of music I don't like cuz when I just feel that somebody's doing something just because they're getting paid a lot to make that record or whatever, or because they think it's gonna make everybody love them.

Joe Bosso: But I guess that what this person is asking is back in the day when there was Tower Records; say, would you walk in and NOT go to a certain section, cause, like: Oh, I'm just not in that kind of music!

John Frusciante: I go through PHASES of things. Like, no, I'm real open-minded about music, you know, like...I-I like all types of music and, and, like I said, I just don't divide it up in my head that way. I like all kinds of things that would, you, know, like, there's very few of my friend who would like...I don't think there's any of my friends who would like everything that I like. Like, I've really (Haha), I've just always been like that, I love a huge variety of things, you know?

Joe Bosso: A reader by the name of "Vivi" says: Four years ago you said that your lyrics were a big joke. Do you still feel the same way?

John Frusciante: I think that's being taken out of a context like, like, um...I like to play games with my lyrics and make things that are sort of amusing to me...umm...to offset ideas with other ideas in ways that you never would in a normal everyday speech, you know? Ever since I started really having fun writing lyrics, it's always been in a way to sort of put ideas together that seem in contrary to one another or to do things with words, like I said, that you'd never, there would be ways that you'd never be able to put them together in a everyday speech, but somehow the ideas are informed by the the quality of music that-that they're joining with and just like in poetry where the meter sort of gives a meaning to the words, I think that even, it happens in a more powerful way when you're writing lyrics, you know? And I think you should always be having fun when you're doing things, so it's like...they're not ideas that make me LAUGH or that I think they're silly or something (Mhm...). They're just ideas that I find amusing and they trigger some sort of a echo in my, in my head that makes me feel good, you know? Ummm...

Joe Bosso: "dalgard" asks: How much you play in a particular day? Do you have any kind of a set process for your playing?

John Frusciante: You know, it's always different. I mean, sometimes I'll spend a lot of time with another instrument, besides the guitar; and that'll have just as much dramatic of an effect on my guitar as if - as if, as if I was playing guitar. I remember the time we were doing that By The Way album, I was playing piano a lot and it really helped the way I saw chords on the neck of the guitar, just because chords make more sense with the sound of piano and you can get a bigger picture of 'em than on the guitar and then you can push yourself with doing certain types of stretches to incorporate the same types of intervals that are really easy to grab on a piano...you can apply those to the guitar, you know? It's always different, but and-and also, sometimes it's just good to be thinking about music is to be actually doing it, you know? Sometimes just sitting there, listening to music a lot, you can learn just as much as from playing. But, um, when I was a kid, I used to practice somewhere between, like, eight and fifteen hours a day... (Mhmm) and...and I'm not really any different now; whether it's one instrument or the other, or whether it's mixing, or whether it's, like, messing around with the synth or something, it's...I'm doing music - all day long, every day. And-and in the Chili Peppers I was always just...it would be an all-day thing for me, you know. It would be, like, waking up...if we were writing a record, I'd just wake up, you know, practice, go to the rehearsal, play for four hours, come back, eat dinner, play all night, listen to record. It's just...it's just all I do, I'm not, I'm not really too interested in doing just anything else, you know? (Hahaha).

Joe Bosso: I did an interview recently with Chad Smith who basically said that there was about a year or so before the Chili Peppers were going to be active again. Is that basically the plan?

John Frusciante: No, there's no plan!

Joe Bosso: Okay.

John Frusciante: Yeah, there's no plan.

Joe Bosso: So, you guys havin'...

John Frusciante: YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO STOP THE TAPE RECORDER!

Joe Bosso: Okay.

John Frusciante: The official...or...or you can leave it on and I can just say, the official, the official news is just that there's no plans to do anything and we're on a hiatus of an undefinite...of an indefinite length. (Mhm...) Yeah, there's, there's just absolutely no plans to do anything and, and uh, yeah, that's it. Yeah, we worked really hard for ten years and, um, you know, there's other things in life.

Joe Bosso: Well, I think your new record is fantastic, it's really a great experience.

John Frusciante: Cool, man! Thanks so much for your support!

Joe Bosso: Absolutely! This is Joe Bosso, with MusicRadar, the place for music makers, and I've been speaking with John Frusciante. John, thank you very much for spending all the time with me here.

John Frusciante: Cool, man.

Joe Bosso: Alrighty, you take care?

John Frusciante: Cool, yeah, have a good night!