“More than anything in the world”: John Frusciante’s disastrous audition for Frank Zappa
John Frusciante has forgotten more about guitar playing than most people will ever learn. When he was a kid, he would stroll into guitar shops and give the owners an aneurysm by rattling off Jimi Hendrix riffs with an almost eerie ease. But he was never satisfied with his skills. Sure, he had nailed technical proficiency, but he knew from watching his hero that there was more to guitar playing than merely hitting the notes.
“His life, and his lifestyle, and the women in his life, affected his music more so than other musicians did because that’s how free his playing sounds,” he once explained. “When you hear Jimi Hendrix play, it’s a pure expression of him as a person.”
In Hendrix, he saw the guitarist he wanted to be. “You see him on stage and there’s absolutely no separation between him and his guitar,” he mused. The ‘Purple Haze’ singer had moved beyond technicality; he was venturing towards deeper artistic merits, pouring his groovy life and all the trials and tribulations therein into his art. To Frusciante, this seemed like a great thing to do.
It wasn’t that he necessarily saw it as the role of an artist, but it made for an artist with a more interesting life. So, when he was 17 and he set off to audition for Frank Zappa, something already felt unaligned. He was a huge fan of the moustachioed musician and had learned every solo that the former Mothers of Invention man had ever written in the years prior, but within an instant of being in the same room as him, he felt the magnetic pull of fate, tugging him towards the exit.
He might have loved Zappa’s music and wit, but he didn’t dote over the details of his life the way he did with Hendrix before him. In part, that’s because the details were seemingly less flashy. Zappa remained teetotal throughout his life, and although he certainly valued the supremacy of artistic expression, he still ran his enterprise like a business. Zappa may well have loathed commercialism, but he saw that as mutually exclusive from his desire to ensure that his music was a smooth-running and profitable operation.
Frusciante wasn’t quite on that same page, especially as a teenager, and alarm bells were ringing from the off. “He was very grumpy,” the guitarist recalled in Mojo. As Steve Vai, another teenager who (successfully) tried out for Zappa, can attest, he was a tough taskmaster, and any tenderness had to be hard-earned.
Fruscainte wasn’t prepared to wait for it. “I watched the way that he was dealing with people, ignoring people. At that point, I was doing cocaine – it was a part of my life I really liked – and I knew about his attitude to that. So I was sitting there thinking, do you want to be a rock star and write your own songs and draw all the girls and things like that, or do you want to be not allowed to take drugs, and it’s kind of a square band so there’s not going to be a lot of girls at the shows? And I thought, nah, and I walked out.”
Without playing a note, the prodigious guitarist left his old hero in the lurch. Some shoes simply don’t fit, and although in retrospect, Zappa might have offered a healthier path into the arts, Frusciante seemed steadfast in forgoing that in favour of some Hendrix-adjacent highwire thrills. Without employment in a band, this was a risky move, but he knew he had the skills to attract more suitable attention, and he soon found that in the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Almost a year on from storming out of Zappa’s audition room, in 1988, he found himself performing before Flea and his friends. He received a phone call a matter of hours later. “They asked me if I wanted the job and I said, yes, more than anything in the world.”
In his view, their more ramshackle operation allowed him to wrestle towards a creative calmness that, ironically, the rather more sterile world of Zappa wouldn’t have allowed. As Johnny Marr recalled of witnessing Frusciante find oneness with his instrument amid a tide of distractions, “There’s an almost zen-like stillness about his focus when he’s writing. There’s this underlying honour in what he’s doing. John has an approach to music which is almost sacred.”
