John Frusciante names one of his “guiding lights”
Red Hot Chili Peppers member John Frusciante is one of the most dextrous guitarists of all time, fusing natural technique with a broad musical palette that ranges from prog-rock to post-punk with electronic tones. A lover of music innovation, it’s indicative of his scope that Frusciante cites the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Robert Fripp and John McGeoch amongst his guitar-playing heroes.
Despite naming such pioneers as significant influences, there’s another artist that John Frusciante took much from when developing his craft in his adolescence. Ironically, this is Robert Fripp’s former King Crimson bandmate, Adrian Belew. Belew played on classic albums by the British band, such as 1981’s masterpiece Discipline, the home of ‘Thela Hun Ginjeet’ and 1982’s Beat, which produced ‘Heartbeat’. Notably, Belew also featured on Frank Zappa’s Sheik Yerbouti, David Bowie’s Lodger and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, amongst many other classics.
When appearing on This Little Light, the podcast created by the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, Frusciante was asked by his bandmate if there were any “real big guiding lights” for him as a musician that helped him develop his craft. Here, he named Adrian Belew and called him “a real big one”, who he wanted to be “exactly” like.
The guitarist explained: “For me, a real big one was Adrian Belew because I read an article about him in Guitar World magazine when I was 12, and he’d come out with his first solo album, Lone Rhino. And the article about him was so interesting because he was describing these different hand techniques and these ways of using effects, where he was making the guitar… he was into sound. So, I’d read all these interviews with different people, and he talked differently than other people talked because his primary concern was to make the guitar sound in these different ways.”
Frusciante continued: “He could imitate the sound of elephants, he could imitate the sound of seagulls, he could imitate the sound of a rhinoceros, he could make the sound of a whale, like, I’d never heard somebody talk about the guitar like this. And he was into the guitar synthesiser that Roland had out at that time, the Roland GR-300, and he had a very unorthodox approach to the instrument, and I got very excited about that, bought his solo album, and then proceeded to just learn everything there was of him, buy every record that he’d played on.”
“At that point, he’d played with David Bowie, he’d played with Talking Heads, he’d played with Frank Zappa, and King Crimson too. Yeah, they had done Discipline and maybe Beat by this time as well, and so they became my favourite band, like, he was my favourite guitarist, and it was that way for quite a while,” he said.
Frusciante concluded: “I’d had the initial period of learning about the progressive rock guitarists, and Steve Howe and the ’60s guitarists like Jeff Beck and Cream and Jimi Hendrix and all that, but, Adrian Belew was like somebody current who seemed to be taking the guitar in new directions like those people had. So, I just wanted to be exactly like him.”
Listen to the podcast below.
