John
Frusciante's Heroin Addiction
His upper teeth are
nearly gone now; they have been replaced by tiny slivers of
off-white that peek through rotten gums. His lower teeth,
thin and brown, appear ready to fall out if he so much as
coughs too hard. His lips are pale and dry, coated with spit
so thick it looks like paste. His hair is shorn to the skull;
his fingernails, or the Spaces where they used to be, are
blackened by blood. His feet and ankles and legs are pocked
with burns from unfiltered Camel cigarette ashes that have
fallen unnoticed. His flesh also bears bruises, scabs, and
scars. He wears an old flannel shirt, only partially buttoned,
and khaki pants. Drops of dried blood dot the pants. There
had been rumors passing through the Hollywood rock world-stories
no one denied, mostly because they didn't much care any more.
There were whisperings about how he was holed up in his Hollywood
Hills home, a place few dared to tread because of the stench;
it was the smell of death, a few people mumbled during more
overwrought moments, or more likely just the smell of feces
and urine collected over weeks and months. There were stories
of a former superstar rock star guitarist who now sees little
of the outside world, who stays in his house to read and write
and paint and play guitar. And shoot up. But they're not just
rumors. John Frusciante is living the cliche-the rock star
holed up at the Chateau Marmont, where bigger names than he
have checked in to check out.
Four years ago he was in one
of rock and roll's biggest bands, the Red Hot Chili Peppers'
guitarist just as the group was climbing up from the college
radio ranks and into the arenas. Now he's a transient in the
hideaway's hallowed hall-ways: The living room of his suite
is filled only with dozens of CDs (from Bowie to Devo to his
favorites, King Crimson and Nirvana) scattered on the floor,
bottles of mineral water, cigarettes, journals, and alcohol
sterile pads. Frusciante is holed up in the Chateau Marmont
this night because he has been kicked out of his Hollywood
Hills home for not paying rent, and he now has no permanent
address. After this interview, he was booted out of the Chateau,
then kicked out of the Mondrian. As of a few days ago, a business
acquaintance who until very recently spoke to Frusciante every
day says he hasn't heard from the man for more than a week.
when that happens, some people shrug: Well, maybe he's dead.
It is Frusciante who first
mentions his heroin use five minutes into the interview, no
less--yet at the end of an exhausting night of conversation,
he also asks that the details of his life as a junkie be veiled;
he explains that he doesn't want the cops fucking with him
and that any article describing his hobbies might bring the
heat down on him. But thats unlikely, and a quick glance at
his fragile, decaying figure reveals the sad truth his silence
could never hide anyway. He looks 20 years older than he did
during his Peppers days, and his voice is harsh and slurred
now. He doesn't eat food, instead gulping canned high calorie
formula normally consumed by the elderly and invailds. He
likes the way his body appears a skeleton covered in thin
skin-because that's how David Bowie looked in The Man Who
Fell to Earth. Frusciante says he almost died in February;
he explains his body had "a twelfth of the blood its
supposed to have, and that blood was infected. My body wasn't
making any new red blood cells." So he quit the drugs
for a few months and cleaned up, as much as he could. But
the world didn't look right to him through dead sober eyes,
didn't feel right to him through numb hands. The spirits didn't
visit, the ghosts didn't talk to him; the door heroin opened
for him had been shut, and he would again force it open even
if it killed him.
When Frusciante joined the
Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1988, he was touted as a clean young
thing, a fresh faced 17-year old Southern California kid who
would stand in direct contrast to original guitarist Hillel
Slovak, who died in June of that year of a heroin over-dose.
Frusciante joined just in time to record Mother's Milk, which
contained the minor hit "Knock Me Down," an anti-smack
song about Slovak ("If you see me gettin' high, knock
me down") that would seem hilariously ironic now if it
weren't so pathetic in retrospect After all, lead singer Anthony
Kiedis himself just got off junk after years of claiming he
was clean; bassist Flea was a user: and current guitarist
Dave Navarro is a former junkie. The needle and the damage
indeed. Frusciante quit the Peppers in 1992 after spending
a year on the road with the band-a year of watching the crowds
multiply with almost every gig. Frusciante had come to hate
the crowds who sang along with every word and danced to every
song; he couldn't understand the connection hetween artist
and audience, and he came to loathe the people who were cheering
and adoring him without knowing him. And musically he felt
stifled by the tight structures of the songs and the way audiences
expected the band to perform the hits exactly as they had
been recorded. Frusciante had been straitjacketed by expectations,
stifled as a musician, cut off from the ghosts that wanted
him to play their music.
"The first couple of years
I was in the Chili Peppers, I don't consider myself a very
good guitarist by my own standards," he says now. "I
don't feel like I was 100 percent taking the feelings and
colors in my head and adequately transferring them to the
guitar and into the world where they became something concrete
instead of just a feeling that floats through outer space.
But then I became as good at that as a person could be, and
every night when I would play, I would play different solos
and different guitar parts. I just had a good relationship
with the spirits and with the ghosts and with the colors in
outer space. "A song is something spirits can get feelings
from, but its nothing a human being can be aware of, except
I am. So they give it to me as just a color and as a vibe
and as a feeling and as an aesthetic echo in my head, and
then I'm able to take it and turn it into music." When
he returned to LA, he sat on his couch for nearly a year,
depressed and alone and unable to function. He wondered whether
he had made the right decision in quitting the band, or in
joining in the first place; he was convinced he was pissing
away his talent. He had only experimented with drugs, smoked
pot "every day when I was 20," and says he first
shot heroin right after the recording of 1991's breakthrough
Blood Sugar Sex Magik and then dallied with the drug on and
off again. But he finally became a junkie as a final salvation,
and in time he again started writing in his journals, painting,
and recording. Now he can't be without his needles or his
guitars; three guitars are scattered on the floor of his Chateau
suite, and he often fondles the neck of one as he talks.
"I used to record every
day" he explains. "it's good that I do at all now.
When I quit the band, I couldn't look at art, I couldn't paint,
I couldn't read books, I couldn't play guitar, I couldn't
listen to music, I couldn't do anything but lay on the couch
depressed, and then I became a junkie and came to life again
and became happy and started playing music again. But I couldn't
exist at first. I was so depressed. I couldn't talk to people.
I was just the most hopeless, miserable person you have ever
seen. I thought I was through with music and that I was gonna
die within a couple of weeks from depression. I thought, Where
I'm at in my head is the head of a person about to die. I
thought my body was literally gonna give up. "And then
I just decided, I'm gonna become a junkie now' and the next
day I was just happy and better.. I just decided without [heroin],
I have no control over what thoughts take over my brain. See,
with this, I have control over what I want to think about,
and when something comes into my head that is useless to think
about, it won't take over, I can get rid of it. I would sit
there and think about the way things could have been if I
would have done it this way, the way I didn't do it, but those
are pointless things to think about, but that's all I could
think about, and I had to just forget it. I always had a really
good discipline as far as my head goes, but that stuff was
just too heavy. With heroin, I was able to, all of a sudden,
have the power to get rid of those things that would pop up
into my head and think about something else. like, all of
a sudden I wasn't the boss of my head any more.
In the fall of 1994, he released
his first solo album on American Recordings, the label owned
by Rick Rubin, who had produced Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Warner
Bros. Records, the Peppers' label, had rights to the album
because of a leaving-artist clause in Frusciante's chili Peppers
contract, but because he was living as a recluse who refused
to do many interviews, the label happily handed it over to
Rubin, who finally released the album at the insistance of
River Phoenix, Butthole Surfer Gibby Hayes and Johnny Depp.
In the end Frusciante's solo album Niandra LaDes and Usually
just a T-shirt sold about 15000 copies--a tiny number compared
to the six million the Peppers moved of Blood Sugar. Niandra
LaDes: Is a bizarre and complicated album, two dozen tracks
that grow increasingly fragmented and frightnening as the
album wears on; any Chili peppers fans who listened to the
record expecting more punk-funk likely thought their stereos
were broken. Still, Frusciante expects to release another
album at the beginning of the new year, and David Katznelson,
vice president of A&R at Warner Bros. Records, confirms
he plans to issue Frusciante's tentatively titled: "Smile
from the Streets You Hold" sometime in the spring. The
album will be released on Katznelson's own Burbank-based Birdman
Records label (home to such avant favourites as Three Headcoats
and Omoide Hatoba), with Warner handling some of the disrtibution.
"This stuff isn't alien to me" Katznelson says of
Frusciante's music. "Rick and John had a great relationship,
but I kept thinking about John and listening to the record,
and there were a couple of songs on there that I thought were
so insipred, and I thought that if we put out another record
on an indie label it would get more focus than if it had been
put out on American or Warners or something with so many other
records. So I called John, and and he jumped at the chance."
"It was done at various times," Frusciante explains
of the forthcoming album- One song even dates back a decade,
to when he was 17 years old and just about to join the Peppers.
"These are some of the
best things I ever recorded." He wants to play some of
the new music, so he goes to the portable stereo to find the
cassette of the unmixed songs. But as he is fumbling with
the tape, forwarding and rewinding to just the right spot
he accidentally knocks the stereo off its milk-crate stand.
"Motherfucker" he howls, and he kicks a small pile
of CDs flying across the room. Then, in a second or two, he
is again calm and focused, his temper under control. This
is not the tape of my new record," he explains. "This
is a tape of the things that are on my new record, but not
all of the things are on the record. Its got a lot of things
that aren't on the record, but the things I'm gonna play you
are are on my new record." He hits play and turns up
the volume, and the room fills with a song that sounds as
though it has been lifted from an old Sergio leone spaghetti
Western; its beautiful and eerie, feedback and restrained
frenzy, lyrics slinking in between the off-kilter melody.
"Kill your mama, kill your daddy," goes one particularly
memorable phrase. The song is followed by an instrumental
that seems to turn in on itself--solo reverie filled out by
backward tracks and other ethereal effects. It's haunting
music quite literally the unexpurgated sounds of Frusciante's
demons come to life, an unedited electronic reproduction of
the sounds inside his head-and as he listens to his own music,
Frusciante seems once more tangled inside the notes. He closes
his eyes and seems to nod off, letting yet another freshly
lit cigarette burn to its end and deposit its ashes all over
him. But when the songs end, he snaps to life again. "Heroin
emphasizes whatever you are," Frusciante explains "Like,
if you want to record music, it'll help you concentrate on
that more, but if you want to lie in bed and not do anything,
it'll help you do that better. It helps you do anything better
you want to do. At least for me, not for other people. A lot
of people--close friends of mine who are clean, and I'm glad
they're clean-they know that when I'm clean I lose the sparkle
in my eye, I lose my personality, I'm not happy, I'm kinda
empty. A lot of people say they feel a wall when a person's
on drugs, but I have three girls who I love and consider my
girls, and one of them came and visited me when I was clean
in February, and she called me after-ward and said she felt
a wall. My head works differently than most people, so consequently
drugs affect me differently."
Frusciante insists he wants
to get on a stage again--the last time he performed was at
the Viper Room the night his closest friend and champion and
protector, River Phoenix, died outside its doors--and that
he wants to assemble a real band to perform his pop songs,
the ones that go verse-chorus-verse instead of just verse.
And he still would like to release tapes of the Three Amoebas
jam sessions he recorded with Flea and Porno for Pyros drummer
Stephen Perkins years ago. Katznelson says he'll try to help
Frusciante get his music out there, book a few gigs, make
him some money so he doesn't keep getting kicked out of home
and hotel. But he realizes it isn't going to be easy; there
are never any guarantees with a man who's slowly killing himself
while no one does anything to stop him. "A lot of artists
have their own demons, and he's one of them," Katznelson
says. "If I made judgments on people because of their
lifestyles, I wouldn't work with anyone. I work with a lot
of artists who have problems-illegal substanstances or personal
demons--but one is just as problematic as the other. If I
was expecting him to tour and play and there was a lot of
money involved, I would tear the hair out of my head. But
there's not a lot of money. I just want people to hear what
he's about. If he wants to play, fine; if he doesn't, fine
If he wants to do interviews, great; if he doesn't, fine.
I think he's very.. .he's very used to his own skin."
In the end, Frusciante
has become just another gifted musician who plunges a needle
into his arm every few hours between playing and painting,
between reading and writing, between preparing a new record
and finding a new home, between living and dying; these days,
record label rosters are once again stockpiled with men and
women just like Frusciante, though they have publicists to
hide their artists' habits. Since Phoenix's death, most of
Frusciante's other close friends have abandoned him, sometimes
after trying to intervene and save his life; they're too fired
of watching him decay in front of them, too sick of watching
him unapologetically kill himself. He knows they don't like
being around him, but he doesn't give a fuck. -They're afraid
of death, but I'm not," he says. "I don't care whether
I live or die."
--Los Angeles New Times / Sellanraa
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