JOHN FRUSCIANTE: SHADOWS & THINGS
(from Shadows Collide With People; Warner. Bros.)
Rock music loves heroin. Heroin loves rock music. So do the magazines. They love to print it. It sells, and there even seems to be a magic echo whenever it's uttered in the headlines: "Four years after his debut and treatment for heroin..." If Wynton Marsalis was a heroin addict, granted, I'd own all of his records, and if Miles Davis hadn't been one, he probably would be Wynton Marsalis. I mean, imagine if Lou Reed added an extra "e" to "Heroin". Suddenly, a song about dope during the great tragedy, would transform into some mellow love-dovey that the Kingston Trio might borrow on a nursing-home tour:
And the lovely city/where a boy is always free/to all the liberties in the town/and of creation all around/and I guess and I'll always know/and I guess and I'll always grow...
Ahh, I can just hear the Chariots of Fire theme now...
Point is, for some people, it's all they got. John Frusciante was a wild junkie, and has, either indirectly or not, surrounded his solo albums with it. His last two, however, To Record Only Water For Ten Days and 2004's Shadows Become People, have been his cold-turkey revivals, and his best thus far (or most accessible). Of course, I might be a heroin addict, too, if I had to be the guitarist for The Red Chili Peppers, who he joined at 19 with no driver's license, sweltering in the immediate heat-wave of Blood Sugar Sex Magik (replacing someone who had already kicked the bucket; bad move; but you're young, who cares? The mystery of that Depeche Mode poster on yr wall has been solved!). Note: I can't stand the Chili Peppers-- I followed them periodically when I was 14, only fascinated by Frusciante's anti-Hawaiin guitar work, and since, haven't really thought about 'em, and sometimes wonder if Frusciante feels the same, or, is just happy to have made it to his thirtieth birthday. They've got about four cool songs, but their punktress funk has always been directed for fourteen year olds looking at Anthony Kiedis as some Lalapalooza icon who still can't get over puberty (his dad a bad-guy in Lethal Weapon). I prefer Janes Addiction (if I had a choice), but could do without Dave Navarro, who, when Frusciante left RHCP to teeter in five years of drug-induced/freak-out solo albums, Niandra Lades And Usually Just A T-Shirt and Smile From The Streets You Hold, took his place on One Hot Minute...the single worst album in rock 'n roll...simply because my friend's dad knows the lyrics.
Come to think of it, this is actually the dad who I used to borrow his living-room stereo to listen to those same early albums by Frusciante; hearing addiction-crazed songs like "My Smile Is A Rifle" dousing through a white house on a Tuesday afternoon in rural America. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time; two kids entertaining themselves to a guy who sounded half-dead, fascinated by the entire obscurity that we only dared to provoke. Niandra Lades was a brutal album. If he was a nobody, American Recordings obviously wouldn't have backed it (rumored to have stuck Frusciante in the studio), and thus was a hurting response from an archetype of the nineties. That and Smiles From The... were impossible for the RHCP crowd to tolerate, and the very thought of something so nuts coming from a former cock-rock star, now tending to the voices in his head while painting and watching Warhol films, was too suspicious for any hip audience to channel, either. That's why I was happy to see Frusciante emerge with RHCP in '98, and can distinctly remember spending a day bumming cash from friends to afford their new album under promising chills of a review waiting on the other end (which never happened, 'cuz 'twas baaad!). A year later, Frusciante released To Record Water..., a home-recorded resurrection of spirit-synth nether-folk, and easily the strongest thing to come out in 2000. Or the only thing I ever listened to.
So when hearing he was putting out Shadows Collide With People, I immediately called up Warner Bros. and asked for a promo. (I didn't wanna pay for it.) First reaction: disappointment that he wasn't playing all the instruments anymore; now accompanied by Bicycle Thief's Josh Klinghoffer's boyish voice, various servings by NIN tech-wizard Charlie Clouser, and Peppers' Chad Smith replacing Frusciante's drum-machine that signed off To Record Water.... Whatever. Despite that Chad Smith's blocky drum rhythms are a catalyst for the record sounding more Rockish, I'm not going to single out its intentions, especially when actor Vincent Gallo's credited as the photographer, bearing hints that a lot of outcast males are involved. The album shifts between lucid keyboard drippings on "00Ghost27" and intimate & odd rock anthems in "Omission" or "Second Walk", sugared by vapor-marching keyboards, rapid acoustics, and lyrics that only Frusciante knows the meaning of; all along wisping in a secular motion that crashes in the opening harmo-boom of "Carvel" (sending a dummy to my God). "Every Person" is the track I can't get enough of-- guitar & voice & ambience-- with perfect words swerving with a crying-guitar just when you need it (always the best instrument; i.e. Buffalo Springfield's "Expecting To Fly", Radiohead's "How To Disappear Completely"). There seems to be a chemical bond in the songwriting, too-- a kinda young-man spirit-- where Frusciante might've normally written an eternal abstraction, but was guided by a hope to expose his weight and thus inviting an edge of new melodies, like "Times Goes Back, as if you're climbing up a hill with no conception for what lays on the other side, but only a feeling that you know it's right...so let's go.
Huh? You saw Flea when you rode over that hill? Couldn't he been left out? Well, that's not until "The Slaughter", which I never get to anyway because always I'm dealing with the first six, who I'd like to compare to something, but are completely original, and stem out of this whole "Frusciante world" that I've been trying to nail for the last 1,000 words. It could be suggested that Shadows Collide With People is in fact his only album. The three before were all therapeutic shafts to his inner self battling & releasing demons as if we really weren't suppose to hear them, but accept the fact that Frusciante was holed up somewhere with his hair falling out and recording half-finished ideas that were keeping him alive and us waiting. As if he already hadn't suffered from the glam of being a celebrity at 20, as he points out in "Second Walk" (about multiple fame), he's now two Rock stars: The quiet Chili Pepper who critics like to compare to Manson, standing amongst the tube-socks of his band at Woodstock '99; strumming that wicked chord in "Give It Away" to a frat-generation burning down an air-force base because a burrito was ten bucks while the owner of the stand shouts "I was at '69, you freaks!", and all Anthony Kiedis can say is, "It's like...Apocalypse Now out there"-- And-- The infamous solo artist out of exile now producing songs that redeem his grim past, and in the same instant, find substance for being stuck in a "rock band" that seems inevitable for Frusciante to ignore. Shadows Collide With People sounds like nothing I've ever heard, but a withering of rock music pointing towards the sky. If it were heroin, I'm hooked.
--Carson Arnold - March 20th, 2004
copyright 2004 Carson Arnold
H(ear) is an online music column consisting of interviews, articles, and investigations written by Carson Arnold. As a freelance writer for various magazines and liner notes, living in the woods of Vermont with his family, Carson widely encourages one to submit their art, writing or any interesting piece of material that you would like to share. H(ear) is accepting both promos and demos for review or any other valuable music-related subjects. If you wish to make a comment or would like to receive H(ear) weekly by email please contact Carson at [email protected]
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