Revisit John Frusciante’s cover of Bad Brains
Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt is one of the most fascinating and difficult albums ever made by a world-famous musician. Created in the wake of his departure from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Frusciante was completely absorbed in his heroin addiction at the time, rarely leaving his dilapidated Los Angeles home.
Frusciante’s horrid living conditions were captured by his friends Johnny Depp and Butthole Surfer’s lead singer Gibby Haynes in their documentary short Stuff. The walls had holes punched in them and were riddled with graffiti. Frusciante had clothes, food, drug paraphernalia, and random objects strewn across the floor. Incongruously scattered throughout the house were several vintage guitars.
Frusciante’s recording process for Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt was simple: just Frusciante with a four-track tape recorder, recording live in his house and putting down music whenever it came to him. The results were lo-fi, stark, and occasionally putrid and terrifying. Frusciante’s instability was clear, but there was still room for beauty, like when Frusciante covered legendary D.C. punk band the Bad Brains‘ ‘Big Takeover’.
“It was just something I had been walking around thinking of in my head,” Frusciante explained around the time of the album’s release. “Sometimes I’ll walk around singing punk rock songs to myself, but as if they were regular songs instead of punk rock songs, you know, slow it down and make a melody instead of just yelling them out. And then the idea occurred to me to record it like a Led Zeppelin ballad with mandolins and stuff.”
Stripping the song of its manic tempo and fleshing out the pummelling power chords with acoustic instruments, Frusciante finds the zen centre of Bad Brains through his cover of ‘Big Takeover’. While it’s as raw as the rest of the album, Frusciante at least sounds cognisant and put together on ‘Big Takeover’, something that can’t be said for most of the record.
Frusciante released an even more chaotic album, 1997’s Smile From the Streets You Hold, before nearly dying from his addictions. His rotting teeth needed to be removed, and skin grafts were applied to his arms after nearly endless intravenous drug use. By 1998, he was clean for the first time in a decade and soon left the dark corners of the 1990s behind when he rejoined the Chili Peppers. If you need to revisit the nadir of his lowest period, Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt is always there.
Check out Frusciante’s cover of ‘Big Takeover’ down below.
