John Frusciante
John started playing guitar around the age of 10, where over the coming years he would literally spend half the day practicing many different styles. He became a fan of RHCP seeing them play around LA. The Chili’s were his first band when he auditioned and got the guitarist slot at age 18, after their first guitarist Hillel Slovak died of a heroin overdose.
Mother’s Milk was the first record John worked on with the band but it was the second album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, that catapulted the Chili’s into the worlds limelight. John loved the band before he joined for the fact that they were just this bunch of friends having fun, playing in clubs around LA to small audiences so the notoriety the band was receiving after the released of BSSM was not something he wanted to be part of. Whilst they were in Japan touring to promote the new record, John quit the band.
He went back to LA and although releasing 2 solo albums, Niandra Lades & Usually Just a T-Shirt and Smile From The Streets You Hold, spent most of his time on heroin. He got himself clean in 1998 and after some skin grafts and work on his teeth/jaw which was ravaged by the drug use, he rejoined the Chili’s.
Although releasing 3 albums with the band, he also kept up his solo work. In total he has released 10 albums/ep’s.
As of December 2009, per his website, John has quit the Chili’s to focus full time on his solo work.
The first 2 records are mostly acoustic, with weird synthesizer sounds and the drug use is very apparent in his style of singing, sometimes just screaming or high pitched squeals (as you’ll hear in the first vid link below), and it was just recorded on a 4-track so its pretty poor in sound quality. But each of his albums has many different experimental sounds.... from Alternative, to acoustic, to electronic etc.
Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994)
Smile From The Streets You Hold (1997)
From The Sounds Inside (2001)
To Record Only Water For 10 Days (2001)
Shadows Collide With People (2004)
The Will To Death (2004)
Inside Of Emptiness (2004)
A Sphere In The Heart Of Silence (2004)
Curtains (2005)
The Empyrean (2009)
Some of his solo work I find hard to get into, only because it doesn’t really fit my musical tastes, but ill link some songs here.
From different albums, there are clips of him playing songs during his drug use times on YT but i don’t wanna post them directly, cause he just looks so messed up. You can look them up if you want.
For the most part, they're from different albums and in chronological order.
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Originally Posted by Dyllon
