Red Hot Chili Peppers: John Frusciante's Reclusive & Lost Years

A look at Red Hot Chilli Peppers guitarist John Frusciante's Lost and Reclusive Years during the mid 90's.

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John Fruscinate would be the longest serving guitarist in the band having three separate stints with the group with his first happening from 1988-1992, 1998-2009 and more recently 2019 until present. By the late 80’s the Chili Peppers already had several guitarists included Jack Sherman and Hillel Slovak. Following the death of Slovak in 1988 Frusciante would join the band. Frusciante’s musical background differed greatly from his bandmates with Flea recallingin the book , Fornication: The Red Hot Chili Peppers Story, Fruiscante was and iquote “a really talented and knowledgeable musician. He [Frusciante] knows all the shit I don’t know. I basically know nothing about music theory and he’s studied it to death, inside and out. He’s a very disciplined musician—all he cares about are his guitar and his cigarettes.”
In 1991 Red Hot Chili Peppers would release their fifth and breakthrough album Blood Sugar Sex Magik. It would establish the band as one of the biggest groups in the world, but the new success brought challenges namely insecurity, infighting and drug addiction. Frontman Anthony Kiedis would write in his 2004 autobiography Scar Tissue about Frusciante’s headspace at the time recalling “John would say, ‘We’re too popular. I don’t need to be at this level of success. I would just be proud to be playing this music in clubs like you guys were doing two years ago.” It was that attitude that also showed up during their live gigs with drummer Chad Smith telling VH1’s behind the music. John was just up there like he didnt’ give an f about anything and you can’t be in a band and not care and it’s gonna show and it did a lot of the shows were terrible.”
.Frusciante would stay with the band until May of 1992 before leaving the group following a performance in tokyo, japan. He would look back revealing in a 1994 interview "It was just impossible for me to stay in the band any longer", he said. "It had come to the point where even though they wanted me in the band, it felt like I was forced out of the band. Not by any members in particular or management in particular, but just the direction it was going.
Upon returning home Frusciante would be hold up in his hollywood hills home finding solace in drugs, ghosts, art and music. While to the public he disappeared for nearly half a decade they would get a glimpse into his mind at the time with the release of his 1995 avante garde album Niandra La Des and Usually Just a T-Shirt. Despite being written three years prior towards his tail end with the Chili Peppers it spells out Frusciante’s fragile state of mind. CMJ New Music Monthly called it "probably the most-up album ever released by someone who had once played in stadiums. It was in 1994 friend johnny depp and gibby haynes from butthole surfers filmed frusciante in his home as part of a short documentary, which would later be released to promote the guitarist’s first solo album..
According to loudersound Frusciante would tell a US Publication about the album “My recordings had gone to from these happy, optimistic things, to celebrations of the surreal, to really scattered, demonic-sounding things like the sound of someone whose mind was about to explode.”
In addition to dealing with a severe drug addiction Frusciante also claimed to hvae upwards of 400 ghosts in his head telling Classic Rock “I wasn’t spiritually protected against the spirits that meant me no good,” “Ghosts that are just there to with me and drive me crazy. I couldn’t discern between them and the ones that were helping me and I was so confused. Everything that I was learning seemed to be pulling me towards death. I saw death in everything around me. And everything that was beautiful represented everything that was sad, lost and gone.”
Despite being estranged from his former bandmates, he did maintain somewhat of a relationship with bassist Flea who would visit his old friend from time to time but as Frusciante’s drug abuse escalated it was too much for Flea.
Frusciante