The guitarist John Frusciante considered flawless: “He’s not something that can be improved”
The road John Frusciante took to become a guitar hero is a miraculous one. Throughout his time with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Frusciante put his body through the worst physical strain, only to return stronger when he rejoined the band in the late 1990s. Though Frusciante could still play with the best of them, one guitarist towers above everyone else.
When first quitting the Chili Peppers, Frusciante had not liked the star power that had come with the success of 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Though he had wanted to be in a huge rock band, the amount of adulation thrown at him all at once led to him turning to heroin to cope with his emotional problems.
Letting the opioids get to him, Frusciante would occasionally sabotage the Peppers’ shows before quitting the band before they were about to go onstage in Japan. By the time he got clean, though, he had found beauty in guitar again, having a firm foundation to make magic on Californication with the bare essentials.
When asked about his approach to his favourite players years later, Frusciante would single out Jimi Hendrix as his direct inspiration, recounting to Rolling Stone, “His music always sounds perfect to me. Where most people think of [music] in two dimensions, he’s thinking of it in four. I don’t think there’s a better guitar player in history. He’s not something that can be improved on.”
Even when listening to the old Chili Peppers records, Frusciante admitted to nicking a few of Hendrix’s tropes for one of their biggest hits. Discussing the recording of ‘Under The Bridge’, Frusciante took inspiration from Hendrix’s solo material, calling the song “an attempt to do something in the style of Jimi Hendrix’s prettier songs, like ‘Castles Made of Sand’ and ‘Bold as Love’.”
Although Frusciante could play with the same fury as Hendrix in the early days, the years of heroin addiction began to take its toll on his performance chops. Instead of the wild fretboard fireworks he liked to employ in the Peppers’ early work, the seven years lost to addiction cost him his rapid-fire techniques, causing him to go back to square one when writing Californication.
While most guitar players would want to throw in the towel when they find out they aren’t as good as they once were, Frusciante knew that he could follow Hendrix’s model to become a better guitar player the second time around, explaining, “Everything I learned as a person in that period, everything I had been through as a soul – that all went into the music. Even though I had way less ability, I see myself doing the best I could and coming from the right places.”
This approach to the guitar is practically the guide that Hendrix used on his best material. Even though Hendrix was the kind to play flashy solos every time he strapped on his signature Fender Stratocaster, his leads felt like an extension of his soul, as if they were being ripped out of his heart rather than coming out of his fingers. While Frusciante might admit not being able to reach the same level as Hendrix, both their styles have a heavy emphasis on soul rather than technical finesse.
