The artist John Frusciante said “took guitar playing further than anyone”
Part of the draw of playing guitar is about watching someone play as fast as possible over a few minutes. When the idea of the guitar hero was still being invented, players like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix drastically shaped what rock and roll was going to be like behind the fretboard, taking the fundamental sounds of the genre and infusing a certain degree of fury that no one had ever seen before. Although John Frusciante was indebted to the golden age of guitar heroes, one artist took it further than he could have imagined.
Throughout his time with Red Hot Chili Peppers and beyond, Frusciante always considered himself a connoisseur of all different flavours of rock and roll. While he had inspirations in areas like funk and hard rock, he also appreciated what the strange side of the genre had to offer, even auditioning for Frank Zappa’s band before deciding to try his hand at stardom.
When Frusciante became a part of Red Hot Chili Peppers, the rock scene was on the verge of a sea change. While the band may have been playing the same clubs that featured acts like Ratt and Poison years before, the tide of rock was slowly turning further north, with the grunge acts of Seattle becoming the biggest deal in the world when they finally blew up.
Although Frusciante had no time for the commercialised sounds of what grunge stood for, he knew that Nirvana was something special when they first came along. Brandishing a lack of respect for traditional scales, Kurt Cobain was known to turn his guitar into an emotional translator, crafting songs that were an extension of his personality on tracks like ‘In Bloom’ and ‘Come As You Are’.
Frusciante would later say that Cobain’s approach to rock music was more important than any other rock guitarist at the time, telling Rolling Stone, “I have nothing against flash, but I grew up in a time when heroism and flashiness were overtaking the desire to make beautiful music. Kurt Cobain took guitar playing further than anyone with way more technique had done in a while”.
First becoming aware of the band through the album Bleach, Frusciante was paying close attention to how Cobain used his instrument. Rather than have the traditional blues scales that artists had played hundreds of times, Cobain’s way of expressing involved going outside traditional harmony, making the sounds of his guitar reverberate and create the sound of rage whenever he performed.
As Red Hot Chili Peppers were set to make their landmark record Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Frusciante would even take a few cues from what Cobain did. Throughout songs like ‘Suck My Kiss’ and ‘Give It Away’, Frusciante was more interested in thinking outside the box, writing guitar parts that had various open strings and throwing out the rules of what a guitar hero was supposed to be. Frusciante may have a certain degree of chops in his arsenal, but Cobain was the one who taught him the importance of having a voice on the instrument rather than flash.
