IN THIS CANDID CONVERSATION,
JOHN FRUSCIANTE
EXPOUNDS ON THE BENEFITS OF KICKING YOUR EGO TO THE CURB, TRUSTING YOURSELF AS A PLAYER, RELIGIOUSLY MEMORISING CHARLIE CHRISTIAN’S GUITAR SOLOS, AND HOW THE PIECES FELL INTO PLACE FOR HIS RETURN TO THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
“I think that at the beginning of my time in the band, I had my mind too much on trying to impress people, and I wasn’t trusting myself enough”
JOHN
FRUSCIANTE WAS JUST 18 WHEN HE WAS OFFERED THE GUITAR slot in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. By that time, he had spent years honing his skills on the instrument, immersing himself in the playing of Hendrix, Beck and Page; Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads; Steve Howe, Steve Hackett and Steve Vai; Frank Zappa and Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew. He listened to the Germs and the B-52’s and Siouxsie and the Banshees, to Sly Stone and James Brown and Parliament, to funk and punk and rock and prog and shred and new wave and goth. “I went through many phases, ” Frusciante says. “Every year I was kind of a different person when I was growing up playing guitar, because as I kept getting better, my tastes kept changing toward something that was a little more difficult to play.”
But for all the music he loved – and he loved a lot of music – Frusciante loved the Red Hot Chili Peppers the most. “They were my favorite band, ” he tells us one afternoon over Zoom. Living in L.A. at the time, he says, “I saw them as often as I could. You went to one of their shows, and there was this magic energy that was happening. It was like being in a dream.”
It would stand to reason, then, that being tapped to become a full-fledged participant in that magic energy would be, well, a guitar player’s dream. And to be sure, when Frusciante officially became a Pepper in 1988, he brought with him, as might be expected, the unbridled energy and enthusiasm of a kid who had just won the rock guitar lottery. Another thing he brought? Sheer chops, with a high level of technical facility on his instrument, which were performed by a then up-and-coming six-stringer named Steve Vai) that enabled the predominantly punk-funk-based act to venture into previously unexplored musical realms.
