How Perry Farrell helped John Frusciante get off drugs
The 1990s featured some of the lowest points of John Frusciante’s life sandwiched in between some of his highest peaks. Throughout most of the decade, Frusciante was a reclusive drug addict who was making experimental records while just barely surviving. It was a long way down from the global success he would achieve with the Red Hot Chili Peppers both before and after.
Frusciante largely remained unrepentant of his days shooting heroin, but there was an important moment when he decided to stop. We know that the Chili Peppers (Flea in particular) picked up the thread for Frusciante soon after he emerged from rehabilitation. The question is: how did he get there in the first place?
Evidently, Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell had something to do with it. “Perry completely convinced me to stop,” Frusciante explained in Brendan Mullen’s oral history of Jane’s Addiction, Whores, “and then he said, ‘Okay, let’s get you to the hospital right now.’ I had this bag of about an ounce of Persian heroin and about an ounce of cocaine, and I was just doing as much as I could in the hospital parking lot. Finally, we go in, and Perry was like… saying to the nurses, ‘Listen, I’m going to be really honest with you, he’s really on a lot of drugs right now, so why don’t you wait on giving him any medication.'”
“I couldn’t get any enjoyment about being alive anymore,” Frusciante admitted. “Being on heroin and cocaine all the time, I felt like myself again.” Farrell became an important lifeline to the outside world, someone who both supported his friend during his drug addiction and gently edged him toward recovery. As it happened, Farrell helped Frusciante get through a particularly drug-fuelled experience.
“I once called Perry at like seven in the morning and said, ‘How do you get snakes out of your eyes?” Frusciante added. “He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘There are snakes in my eyes. How do I get rid of them?’ I’d be looking in my bathroom mirror at these little snakes in my eyes. I’d even hear them talk, they’d make weird little noises and stuff. A snake would poke his head out, and I’d try to grab it. I’d be reaching in my eyes trying to pull ’em out. I fucked with my eyes so much doing this. I’d sit in the bathroom doing it for hours at a time. My eyes were just shutting on their own, and I’d struggle to pull ’em open. No use.”
“I called Perry and told him, ‘The snakes have shut my eyes,'” Farrell’s advice was more spiritual than anything else. “Perry told me I was off balance, something about too much yin and not enough yang. Perry gave me goggles after that. That was my outfit when I would go up on the roof to wage war against the ghosts. I would have my goggles on and my ski mask, and every part of my body covered. No holes… You couldn’t get into me on any level anywhere.”
Luckily, Frusciante survived both his battles with snakes/ghosts and was able to kick his drug addiction in time to rejoin the Chili Peppers for 1999’s Californication. The connection between Jane’s Addiction and the Chili Peppers didn’t end there: when former RHCP and founding Jane’s guitarist Dave Navarro continued to struggle with long covid in early 2023, it was announced that fellow former RCHP guitarist Josh Klinghoffer would be playing with the band on tour. Farrell’s ability to communicate with Chili Peppers guitarists remains unmatched.
