John Frusciante
If a Red Hot Chili Pepper falls and nobody hears, does he still make a sound? Unfortunately, yes. John Frusciante, who as a teenager held down the Chili Peppers’ notoriously unstable guitar post for their commercial breakthrough albums, Mother’s Milk and BloodSugarSexMagik, walked out on his fellow cocksockers in 1992, right in the middle of the big payoff. Reportedly unstrung by the band’s swelling popularity and then increasingly enthralled by heroin, he all but disappeared, then resurfaced with his eerie 1994 solo debut, Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-shirt (American). With lines like “I’ve got blood on my neck from success,” the collection of home recordings is clearly the work of a troubled soul.
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While on tape the guitarist makes no bones about his decrepit state, in real life he’s attempted a half-assed cover-up. In a 1996 interview with the LA New Times, which, oddly, is the sole clip in the press kit for Frusciante’s new solo record, Smile From the Streets You Hold, he requested that the writer veil the details of his drug abuse only after spending a hefty chunk of the chat extolling the virtues of smack. “I just decided, ‘I’m gonna become a junkie now,’ and the next day I was just happy and better,” a scrawny, toothless, scabby Frusciante explained in a suite at the infamous Chateau Marmont. “I decided without [heroin], I have no control over what thoughts take over my brain. See, with this, I have control over what I want to think about, and when something comes into my head that is useless to think about, it won’t take over. I can get rid of it. I would sit there and think about the way things could have been if I wouldn’t have done it this way, the way I didn’t do it.
The Chili Peppers did their share of work for the dubious muse; Frusciante’s predecessor, Hillel Slovak, died of an overdose, scaring singer Anthony Kiedis straight. Often viewed as the quintessential Los Angeles band, the Chili Peppers approached substance abuse in true Hollywood fashion: shoot up but don’t spoil the uplift mofo party plan, unless it’s for a watered-down Betty Ford hit like “Under the Bridge.” As Kiedis cleaned up, Frusciante must’ve looked like a smart recruit: a sober kid who’d honed his skills by locking himself in his bedroom for hours at a time to jam along with Red Hot Chili Peppers records.
