John Frusciante

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, y'all, today's the start of a month long run of episodes and celebration of the Red Hot Chili Pepper's newest release, Unlimited Love. You'll hear Rick Rubin in conversation with all four members of the band. It's a fascinating and oftentimes hilarious collection of interviews that showed just how close these guys are and all the emotional ups and downs they've been through together over the last thirty years. If you're a diehard fan, you know why this release is so exciting. Unlimited Love is their first record with guitarist John Frusciante in sixteen years. John's integal as any of the four members to unlocking the signature sound they've been building on since the release of Blood, Sugar, Sex Magic. In this episode, you'll hear John in conversation with Rick Rubin, who stepped back into the producer seat for this release. John tells Rick about his deep musical exploration as a young guitar player, how he fell in love with the Chili Peppers as a teenager, and what it was like joining the band he becomes such a fan of at just eighteen years old. Then, at the end of the talk, Rick and John are joined by a very special guest. This is broken record line of notes for the digital age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's Rick Rubin and John Drushante. Let's go back up a long ways. Tell me about the first time you remember ever seeing or hearing about the Chili Peppers, first time you ever heard the name of the band. The first time that I remember hearing the name of the band was that I had a guitar teacher named Mark nine. He's the only guitar teacher who I ever was really excited about and that I feel like I really got some good things from. At the time that I started playing guitar, I was into punk, and every guitar teacher I took a lesson from would start insalting punk right away. I'd tell them that that was my favorite music, and they'd tell me that it wasn't music, and all this kind of stuff. Then this guy, Mark nine came along, and he had played with Nina Hogan, he'd been in her band for a period of time, and Pat Smir was the other guitar player. I guess Mark was the lead guitar player and Pat was the rhythm guitar player for a period of time, and he thought Pat Smir was a great guitarist. And Pat Smir was the main reason that I started playing guitar. The first things I learned were germs, and so the fact that I'd found a guitar teacher who like thought Pat Smir was a great guitar player was really exciting to me. Plus, he was into all this psychedelic music from the sixties and so he was playing with various things. He had a band called Underworld, He played with a guy called Randall Kennedy and Reconstruction and it was like a poetry arty kind of thing. And he had a ska group called Scotch And I was really into everything he did. I had cassettes tapes of everything. And at one point he came and said that there was a band called the Red Hut Chili Peppers that he was auditioning for and that he was hoping to get in and he played guitar and bass, and it got stuck in my head that he was auditioning for bass for this band. And then, probably about anywhere from like six months to a year after this, I saw the video for Trueman Don't Kill Coyotes on on MTV, and I was like, huh, he wouldn't have been a good replacement for this bass player, like, of course this Basela. Nobody could replace this guy. But as it turned out, it was guitar that he had been auditioning for. So yeah, so that there was a period of a few weeks where I remember him talking about how he hoped he would he would get hired to be in this band, but at the time they were choosing between Jack Sherman and Mark nine, and they wound up chosing Jack Sherman. How old were you at that time? Do you remember? Yeah, it had to be when I was thirteen or fourteen that he was auditioning, because Hellell and Jack were originally in the band for only six months and then they quit and that's when Anthony and Filey looked for new guys. So the band starts in eighty three, I'm not sure what month. And then how old were you when you end up joining the band? Eighteen? So you hear about them, you already know about the band for four or five years before you are okay, so like it's not like I found out about them and then I was suddenly a fan of them, like, yeah, like I just were aware of them. Yeah, it was aware of them that I think. The next step was I had a friend named Jerry who worked for the Frank Zappa family, and I used to spend a lot of time at his house listening to listening to music, listening to a lot of Frank Zappa like live tapes and stuff like that, and at one point Jerry gave me a compilation tape. It was mostly esoteric kind of avant garde music. There was like Meredith Monk on it. I think there was even some Funkadelic on it. He was he was the first person who mentioned Funkadelic to me. And one of the things on that cassette tape was the song Hurdled the Turtle from their second Holme Freaky Styley, and I thought that was really good, like loved everything about it. The drums reminded me of like a funk version of a Captain beefheart beat, and the walla pedal thing was so clever and the way that he incorporated it into the guitar part, and that song has this great way of each element coming in one by one, and so you really fully appreciate how great the guitar part is how great the drumbeat is because you hear each thing sort of one added to the next. But at that point, they weren't that different to me than the Residents or these other things, like their drummer had played with Captain Beefheart, and I was mainly at that time, like I was really intensely into Frank Zappa and Steve I and stuff like this, Like I was really trying. I'd been through many other phases, but at that period of time, I was really trying to just get to a point where nobody could tell me I wasn't a good guitar player. I was trying to really at a certain point, I was like, whatever people think is the hardest stuff to play, I'm gonna try to play that. But the Chili Peppers were just like an interesting band and fun to watch and stuff on these videotapes that I had, and I bought their first record when I was in Florida. I have this strange memory of I bought their record and then I went up to my step mom, who I would often just go to to tell weird little things, Like one day I'd come to her and I'd say, like I decided what my favorite ending to any album is. It's the ending to Rise and Fall of Ziggy Startus by David Bowie. You know, I just say things that she didn't care about at all, you know. But I remember listening to that Chili Peppers record and saying I could never be in a band like that. I could never be in that band because there's not enough musical variety for me. Like it was a strange thing to say. She was like, oh, you would never be in that band, okay, you know, like it was it seemed like the most far fetched thing in the world. That's some record I bought at the Big Peaches record store. I'd say I couldn't be in That still sticks in my hand. But basically, I had a friend in high school who was really into the Chili Peppers and he and he'd gone to see them at least a couple of times. I remember he went and saw them at Fender's Ballroom. That was before I was going to see them with Fishbone and Faith the More on the Best of the West tour and stuff. And he was also into the that License Tale album as well. Like he got me excited about music that was sort of outside of the spectrum of what I'd been listening to lately, music that was more like about fun, you know, because I was I'd gotten into such a technical frame of mind. And so he and I went to see the Chili Peppers at the Variety Arts Center downtown. And I'd been very happy at previous shows i'd been to, like Adrian Blue and Stanley Clark and things. I felt the feeling of joy at concerts before, but there was nothing in comparison to seeing that band. It was when the original lineup was back together, but they hadn't come out with their third record yet, and everything I'd heard of them, everything that i'd seen on videotape, did not prepare me for the intensity of that show. It it was so psychedelic they all had. They had the fluorescent paint everywhere on their bodies you couldn't see them, and the black lights. It felt so otherworldly. It felt like me and the other you know, however many people it was a thousand people who were there, like it felt like we just all went into a dream together or something, you know. It did not feel like reality. That I saw two shows where they did that, where they wore the paint and never had experienced anything where the audience and the performers felt like we were all one thing. We were all in the same place together. The rest of the world didn't exist. Everybody's completely happy, everybody's out of their minds, everybody's jumping around, you know. As I say, punk was the music I started with, but I was too young. I was into punk when I was nine, ten eleven, you know, so I was too young to be going to shows. But at their show, it was like I was feeling that same energy that I remembered imagining about punk shows, you know, where people call them mosh pitt Now we called it a slam pit pick. Then it was punk roft, the first music that you embraced. Well before that, I was into the stuff that every other kid in Santa Monica was into, you know, we were We liked Aerosmith and Alice Cooper and Van Halen and Kiss and like that was just the stuff that that any kid who was into skateboards and that was what the kids in the neighborhood liked. And at one point I moved from Santa Monica to mar Vista, and at that point I discovered carol Q radio station and Rodney Bingenheimer's show. There was where I first heard punk, and so it was definitely a adual thing. I remember like being really into Devo and the B fifty twos and stuff like that for a while and then discovered the Germs and sex Pistols. There was a girl lived next stoor to me for a couple of months who used to let me go through a record collection and tape record things and stuff, so I remember I went to her apartment and recorded like never Mind the Bullocks by the sex Pistols and more songs about buildings and food by the Talking Heads, and so yeah, I was basically into like new wave and punk rock, and that gradually turned into being specifically into hardcore punk, and then from there you moved into more technical stuff was at the next step. Yeah, it was a lot of little phases it went. Punk was what was what made me pull the acoustic guitar out of the closet and start learning songs, even though it wasn't an electric guitar. I'd wanted to play electric guitar years before that, but nobody would buy me one, and I just did not like the sound of an acoustic so so I put it off. But eventually I was like, Okay, if I just learned a bunch of punks here, maybe my dad will see that I'm dedicated and he'll buy me an electric. So I learned how to play like the entire Sex Pistols album and a lot of other songs, Black Flag and the Germs, and he bought me a stratocaster. And when I got the stratocaster, I started reading Guitar Player magazine. And I had had a friend at school who really liked Jimmy Hendrix prior to that, and I was always kind of messing with him, telling him that the Sex Pistols were far more important to music than Jimi Hendrix was and all this stuff. But we would play tapes for each other and stuff, and once I actually had an electric guitar, I just became obsessed with Jimmy Hendrix and that led me to just being into Jeff Beck and Cream. And there was this violence thing about punk at that point, this stigma to it, like people would find out that I was into punk and they wouldn't be friends with me anymore, and it was like their parents told them, You're not allowed to be friends with that guy anymore, or whatever. That happened to me multiple times, and so I moved from punk being the like the main thing I was into to being really into sixties music and the whole just the peacefulness of the of the ideals of it appealed to me at the time. For whatever reason, I was trying to get out of this angry, sort of violent state of mind that I could feel going on inside me. There was definitely a minute when punk rock turned like a new group of punks joined. It's like the Dead Kennedy's wrote the song Nazi Punks Fuck Off, you know. It was about that the punk movement, which started as this beautiful, peaceful, fun, high energy movement started turning dark for a period of time when new people got involved just to fight basically. Yeah, yeah, it was really there was a lot of fighting, and I felt that violence in myself, Like I liked that about it, you know, but I think it kind of scared me that I had this other part of me inside that was that I wasn't sure what was capable of. Always had concerns about was I saying completely or not, And there was definitely lots of times in my life where I was concerned that I might be crazy, and yeah, the violence thing felt like a screwy thing for me to be dabbling around with and feeding that part of myself. So gradually it was like sixties music. And then from there I got into like more already kind of seventies music like Brian Eno and Roxy Music and David Bowie and and progressive rock like Genesis and Yes and Kim Crimson. Kim Crimson, Yeah, like they became my favorite band. I got really into Adrian blues guitar playing. I was obsessed with him, and so this is all I'm like thirteen years old at this point, twelve thirteen years old, you know, And so every all the stages went very fast. And it's not like I ever stopped liking anything that I'd like previously, but I got I would get really excited about a new thing and be focused on that at So I think when I was about fifteen was when I got obsessed with Frank Zappa. And that's any guitar player who was related to him. So Warren Coucarulo and Steve Ye and Adrian Blue also happened to be in his band for a while, but I'd already been into him for a while and then yeah, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys. That was like this fun music that I was into, largely through this kid that I knew at school. And then when I moved to Hollywood when I was seventeen, I realized I had to make a switch. I had been into all this music that I was into because I thought it was going to make me a quote unquote better guitar player. And I decided, I'm just gonna start listening to only the things that give me the best feelings. I'm going to put aside this idea of what's technically good or anything like that. I'm gonna just listen to the music that gives me the strongest feelings inside. And so at that time, that was like the New York Dolls, Susie and the Band Cheese, David Bowie, t Rex, stuff like this. If I was honest with myself, that was the music that I liked the most out of any other music. And the Red Hot Chili Peppers was also part of that. And in their case, that was somebody who I could go see live all the time. So before I was in the band, I probably saw them about six seven times or something wow, all within about a you know, a year and a half or something like that. And over that year and a half did they change at all? Did you notice, like as a fan, did you see them changing? Were they getting better, were they getting worse? Anything different? Not that I can remember. They seemed pretty consistent to me. Great. There was a couple of shows that got shut down and stuff like either after a few songs, and you know, their shows got pretty crazy at that time. But yeah, they were always great. And the other thing is that I would have necessarily known details about them because every time I ever went and saw them, after the first time, I would tell myself, Okay, this time, I'm gonna I'm just gonna watch the show, because every time they started playing, I just started jumping around in the audience like crazy, and I barely I would see little glimpses once in a while. I would look up at the stage, you know, or I'd somehow wind up close to the stage for a second and I'd look up at hill l or whatever you know I like, and I and this memory would be etched in my brain forever of like one of them from that angle. But like people, I would I would bring to their shows, those people would actually watch the show, so they'd have some thoughtful comments after the show about the show. For me, it was that dream state that I was talking about at their first show. That's what every show I saw of Theirs was for me, because I felt so part of the experience that I couldn't resist the temptation to just jump around the audience like a crazy person. Amazing. So yeah, I didn't have too critical of a sense of what was going on up there because I would mostly see them in between songs when they were talking in between songs, and they were so funny at that time. They would always be saying funny things in between the songs and stuff. The thing you're describing about going to a Chili Pepper show and that being taken away is the experience that I have when I watch you guys play in the studio or in rehearsals, like it feels like we're entering a different dimension and the music somehow we get to have this transcendent experience where when it's happening, it feels like nothing else in the world is happening, but the music being played in this moment, and it's different every time. It's another part of it. It's not like it's so structured. Yes, the order of the things that happen in the song might be the same order, but the energetic peaks and the trip that it takes us on musically always I feel a whole new way thing every time it happens. It's an amazing experience, jaw dropping to watch still to this day. So I understand exactly what you're talking about. It was really important to me when I joined the band to try to keep that same energy going that I that I remember feeling at their shows. And there was definitely a thing that appealed to me about them in comparison to other artists. They seemed to have more conviction than other people like they it seemed to mean more to them. And that was the original thing that made me like throw away my Kiss records and become you know, obsessed with the germs and Black Flag and stuff like that. Was I could tell that it really meant something to these people and Kiss I got. I realized when I was about nine years old that like, I felt strongly about them, but I wasn't sure that they felt strongly about as strongly about themselves or about any kind of connection they could have to a person like me, you know, whereas those other people, it felt like we were breathing the same air we were. We were seeing the music from the same angle, not two opposite angles. It wasn't the seller and the consumer. It was this thing that we're all clinging to as as like a thing that's, I don't know, saving us from all the confusion of life. And so I saw that same conviction, and you know, I just always got the sense that music really mattered to that band, you know, and so always wanted that to be the center of what we did, that we felt strongly about about the music and a better connection to each other. We'll be right back with more from John Fushante and Rick Rubin. After a quick break, We're back with more from John Fushante and Rick Rubin. How did you find out that they were looking for a guitar player before you ended up joining How did that happen? So when I was when I was seventeen, I was living on Yucca and Argyle in Hollywood, and I became friends with with a girl named Sarah Cox who was from New York, and she she introduced me to dh Calego from the Dead Kennedy's and so I started playing with him and a bass player friend of mine named Robert, and we started doing a band that was pretty Chili Peppers inspired. In fact, the song Stone Cold Bush was originally that band wrote that song Wow. And we never played any shows or anything, but but we played together a fair amount and one day DH just called me up and Flee had just gotten back from their last European tour, and he said, Fleeze. He knew I loved Flee, you know, and so he said, Fleeze here, you want to you want to come over and jam with us? And so I went over there and played with him, and we played the Funkadelic song Alice and Alice and My Fantasies, and I think we even tried to do a cover version of Higher Ground, which was what we wound up doing on Mother's Milk. But Flee had that idea already at that time, what you know, a heavy metal version of Higher Ground and Jane and stuff, and I guessfully enjoy jamming with me. He gave me his phone number and told me, you know, like you know, I'd love to play more. And a few weeks later I called him up to see if he wanted to jam again, got my nerve up to call him up, and he was crying and he just said, like, I can't talk right now. My guitar player just died. And we got off the phone real quick. Then I think he might have gotten in touch with me after that at some point and just was saying he's trying to get get back into the headspace of making music again. Not sure if the band's going to continue or anything like that, but did I want to come jam with him and his friend Dick's garage, And so we just played the two of us without a drummer or anything, and he told me, you know, if I'm not sure if we're going to keep, if the band's just going to stop at this point, but but if we are, you'll definitely get an audition, you know. And then at one point he called me up and told me, hey, I know there's this guy Blackbird who he'd been in the band for like a week at one point and when hellel had quit and then we'd fired him when Helle decided he wanted to rejoin, and we felt kind of guilty about it. So we feel like we've got to we've got to give him this chance. We kind of owe it to him. So Blackbird was in the band for several months. But I had a feeling that I would wind up being in the band, and that was what eventually happened. Tell me what you remember about the first two jams. Let's start with the first one, you Pellegro and Flee. What do you remember about that experience? How long was the jam? It was in a garage at a house that DH and Walt from Fishbone lived in, and it was in the garage. I passed that garage many times, but yeah, we jammed for a couple of hours. It seemed like, you know, sat in the car. He fully played us Alice in my fantasies and I think higher Ground. I remember definitely like talking about it, but yeah, I don't. I don't have much memory about it. I was so nervous, and again that that very fast state of mind just went through, just like Yeah. My memories are inconsequential things like like Flee going up to DH while we were playing and whispering something to him, and me wondering, I wonder if he's saying something good about me? Is he think you know? Do you think something negative about you? Know who knows. I mean, I felt like he was probably thinking something good about me, but it could have been something totally unrelated. But I remember that moment of wondering what he was whispering in DH's ear. Do you remember thinking he was playing great? Like, were you impressed with him? Oh? Yeah, he was my favorite bass player, you know, so it was incredible to be Yeah, to'd be playing and you were not disappointed in the experience. It was all that you imagined it would be. Yeah, amazing, Yeah, it felt really good. Amazing. And then the second time when it was just you and him, what do you remember about that one? It was just kind of it was low energy, you know, we were we were both sitting like the first time, we're wearing straps and we're like rocking out, you know. Like the second time we were just kind of sitting there, and the mood was definitely somber, and I remember feeling a little like disconnected, Like I think, you know, as good of a guitar player as I thought I was at the time, Like, I think I had a long way to go in terms of really understanding how to how to gel with him, because in a lot of ways I was afraid to play simple. There was so much kind of eighties disease in people's heads at the time, and I was definitely a victim of that, Like like, if I'm not playing something fancy, I'm I'm not giving enough or something, or I'm not or people aren't going to like what I'm playing or something. And what I realized once I'd been in the band for a bit was just like the way to compliment someone like Flees bass playing it really has nothing to do with showing off because he sounds like he's showing off when he's not. Yeah, people who are impressed by fanciness naturally hear his bass playing and go like, wow, he's really good. But from Fleece perspective, coming from playing jazz and trumpet and all that, and jazz kind of being the main kind of music that his brain formed being into, his playing is a simplification, a big simplification of his natural taste, you know. So in his own way, his whole style on bass is a simplification of his basic mental concept of music. And for me to simplify to that same amount meant playing way less than I had imagined myself. So yeah, so I think probably I might have been playing too much on that somber day and afterwards feeling like I could have been more supportive of him or something. What was the first time he played with the whole band? Or tell me about that experience. Showing up for an audition. I imagine that was the next step. Well, we'll see. Well, that's why I was saying when Fleet called me up to tell me they were hiring Blackbird, I had an auditioned. He told me I could audition, and then he went back. It never happened. It never happened. Then what happened next, Well, there was an audition, but I didn't know it was an audition when it was happening. Fleet had cooked up this idea. So one day I get a call from him. You know, we're friendly around this time. We see each other at a party. You'd come over to my girlfriend's birthday or whatever. So just friendly with each other. And one day he just calls me up and he says, hey, man, I'm making these four track recordings. I have a drum machine here in this cassette four track, and do you feel like coming over and playing some guitar on the stuff. And so, of course I said yes, and I went over to his apartment. So we had like three songs of him playing bass to a drum machine, and I made up guitar parts on the spot, plugged directly into the four track and played the parts I made up, and we had fun doing that for a while, and then we sat around I think we watched some Funkadelic videos for a bit, and we're hanging out with his wife, Louisia. And it turns out I knew the only way after the fact that what Flee had done was he recorded Blackbird playing making up his guitar parts and recording them on that same four track tape, and then he erased those parts and recorded me on the same tape, so he had mixes of both and he could compare whose guitar parts are better. Little did I know. After I left that night, Loisha said to Flee, she said, that's the guitar player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He has to be your guitar player. For Flee, he was feeling definitely a lot of guilt about the idea of getting rid of Blackbirds. So I guess, even though I guess I won that contest or whatever. A couple of weeks went by and nothing more happened, and then one day Flee gives me a call and he tells me Bob Forrest from Felonious Monster is looking for guitar players and things aren't going super well with Blackbird. But he's like, I'm not sure where that's going with Blackbird or if it's working out, And so I told Bobby could have your number, But I also told him that I have first DIBs on this guy if if if we decide we want him in the Chili Peppers, like like, I've got first dibbs, and you can't be angry if I take him from you, you know. So I talked to Bob. I go down to the Felonious Monster rehearsal and I had auditioned for them, and they hired me right away. But the thing about that rehearsal was Anthony Jetis was there at the rehearsals, so I don't know him, and Flee must have talked. Flee was like, you should, you should go check this guy out, and so Anthony was watching the whole time. So I auditioned, they hired me, then Anthony left there and went to Flee and then They both called me up at like six o'clock in the evening and they were they were like, we've been talking a lot about it, and we've decided we'd like you to be the guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Is this what you want? And I said, yeah, I want this more and anything in the world. And they had to figure out the ordeal of telling Blackbird about it and stuff, so they wanted to be sure that this was definitely what I wanted to do. Yeah, and I called I called Bob and told him, you know, I'm happy to play whatever gigs you have scheduled right now, keep playing with you now. But but they asked me to join the Red Hot Chili Peppers. So that's what I'm doing. And he said, yeah, I figured that was going to happen, and yeah, so I kept I kept playing shows with them, but started rehearsing with the Chili Peppers a few weeks later. And at this point I don't know if I mentioned Dh Polgro who I'd been playing with who introduced me to Flee. He was the drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers at this time, so he'd stop playing with me as a result of being in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you know as well. So you were in the Chili Peppers before Chad was in the Peppers. Yeah, I didn't know that. For some reason, I thought I thought you were last to come, but maybe just because you're younger, so that was probably what I thought. Yeah, so you were in the band and what happened. So me and DH and Anthony and Fleet we were the band, and you know, we did some small tours. We did a tour called the Turdtown Tour which was through the Midwest, and and that didn't go so well. But but yeah, there it was very inconsistent. DH was great, like energy wise, he was a great drummer, is a great drummer, but he wasn't as devoted to the concept of the band as the rest of us were. For me, it just felt like this is my whole life. If I fail at this, like my whole life is over. Like I've got you know. For Dh, he had an arms distance relationship to it in some ways. And it was a strange tour. Sometimes shows would have a lot of people, but there was like there was a show at a cowboy bar for instance that I remember somewhere that it's like only people there were, the people that go there every night to drink. Like Anthony was so mad that our manager had even scheduled us to be playing at this place, and we had such a bad show and we had to restart songs, like because we got so messed up time wise from each other that we had just hopefully had to stop the song and start over. There was low points like that, but we were also really great friends sometimes. You know, recently I saw a picture of the four of us together, and we really you can see that we're all friends, you know, you can see like that we all come from. Like Chad came into the band. He was like a foreigner, you know. He was like from Detroit. He was more from a hard rock He probably expected to come to la and be in a band like Guns n' Roses or something like that, and so he we were definitely a mismatch thing with Chad, whereas with DH, you could see that we were all sort of from the same walk of life or whatever. You know. Well, we fired DH and we auditioned a ton of drummers and Chad came along. The story of that is Denise Zoom, who had been married to Billy Zoom from X She she walked up to me at a show of Fishbone and Public Enemy at the at the Santa Monica Civic and which turned out to be a very violent show. I think there was some guns and stuff at that show. But at one point she comes up to me and she says, John, I've got your new drummer. He eats drums for breakfast. And I told everybody that afterwards that they were like, go to corny line, like eats drums for breakfast. And then he came to audition for us, and then after he left because he just wrote us the whole time. We were used to DH kind of following us, and Chad came in and he drove the whole thing. He started he started by playing a slow, funk groove and he just gradually sped up and sped up and sped up until he was playing like crazy fast, you know, speed metal kind of thing. He was very impressive. There was another couple of drummers who seemed good, but Chad just seemed like he could be the driving force in the band in his own way, you know, like yeah, And so after he left, Flee said he really does eat drums for Breakfast because he seemed so out of his mind. He was just because when he was speeding up, he was going, fuck yo, fuck yo. He was really putting a lot of energy into it. And yeah, how hard he hit and everything, and how funny he was. Because that's how it struck us. I think the second he started playing, Anthony started having a laugh attack. And when Anthony has a laugh attack, it goes on for you know, minute, like ten minutes or something, and that's what happened when Chad played. He just couldn't stop laughing, and I got you know, that was contagious. I started laughing. So yeah, we were like falling on the floor laughing at how intense he was. Amazing. So yeah, there was only a couple of months really rehearsing with Chad just given him the chance to come up with his own drum parts to the tunes that we'd already written and stuff. But he was very fresh to the band. We offered him a chance to do a recording with us. We recorded the song Taste the Pain for a movie soundtrack, and I remember it was December of eighty eight, and this is before we decided to hire him. We thought this would be a good chance to see how it goes, and he said, I can't. I've got to go to Detroit to be with my family for Christmas. I was like, what the hell is wrong with this guy? Doesn't he realize like the chance that he has here, Like there was definitely a concern that there was a lack of appreciation from Chad about realizing from my perspective, like what a great band this was, what a great chance this was. He didn't seem particularly like floored by the idea. He seemed very indifferent and nonchalant about the whole thing, you know. Whereas for me, I was so scared every move that I made that like I would do something wrong and not be in the band anymore, you know. But Chad was just like very casual about it, which to his credit in a way. But yeah, So we used Fish from Fishbone for that session, But in the end we did decide that Chad was the drummer. Do you do any gigs with Chad before that recording the album? Definitely played with him during the recording of the record. I'm not sure if we play with him before. We were definitely doing little weekend jaunts all the time at colleges and stuff like that. Yeah, it'll be a club show here and there. But yeah, it's funny. I don't have any memory of what the first show with Chad was. It was definitely during the album. We were continually going out and doing these little weekend shows to pick up extra money and stuff, and he was always really good. It was so it was great to play with somebody who played stuff the same way basically every not. I mean, he improvised and he was responsive, but you could depend on him for tempo. He would definitely help the show be the solid show that it could be every time, which is great. Yeah, we'll be right back with more from John Fasante. We're back with the rest of Rick Ruban's conversation with John Fasante and a special guest who joins the chat. So tell me the experience of making the first album. Was that the first time you ever recorded in a proper studio. Yeah, that was the first time. Well you know that that we did that song Taste the Pain, and that went really smoothly that. I remember the bass and the guitar and the drums, what we played when we did the basic track, that was what was on what wound up on the record, you know, like like the live take was the full guitar take that I played, which was how I expected that I would play in a studio. But but I was real glad that everything locked in so so well and that I was as good as I thought I could be. But when we did Mother's Milk, Michael Beinhorn had this concept of the producer. Michael Binhorn had this concept of really exaggerating the heavy metal funk aspect of the band, and he wanted everything to be fast and pushed, like in timing. For people who don't know, it's when you're in the studio you talk about things being laid back or pushing. Usually when you say that someone's pushing, it means they should redo it and lay back a little better, you know. But in Michael Bienhorn's case, he was wanting us to push everything. And I never even heard these expressions before laying back, pushing. I wasn't quite sure what they meant. I thought that you just played on time and that was the object, And if the concept had just been to lay back, I think that was what I was doing naturally when I thought I was playing on time, but he wanted everything to be pushed extra hard, and we were playing all the songs. When I hear the album now I hear I feel like we're playing them about ten fifteen vpm faster than we would play those songs live, like we really He would make us redo a take because we weren't pushing hard enough, and he would come out to the live room and he would jump up and down and shake his hand in the air and get all sweaty and stuff. He was trying to make us push extra hard. And I think that's what a lot of people, you know, I know, people who come from like the jungle drumming bass, you know, break core kind of music, that they loved that album when they were kids for that reason, because it was this really fast, intense, pushed version of funk, which not that different in some ways from what happens when you speed up a breakbeat. You know, I didn't know what pushing was, and I couldn't do what he was wanting us to do. Chat and Flee seemed to understand what it was that he wanted, but it got to the point where I couldn't track with Flee and Chat anymore. And I thought this is just because I'm I suck and I'm a failure and I'm the worst one in the band. And so almost everything, if not everything that I played on that album I did as an overdub because I couldn't get into that groove. It just felt unnatural. Yeah, it felt unnatural. It felt you know, like I say to this day, but definitely at that time, it felt like we were playing every song faster than we had and the groove of it wasn't supposed to sit in a pocket, but was supposed to be constantly pushing forward, and that was just an awkward thing, you know. So, Yeah, it was difficult album for me to make, like, you know, not knowing anything about the recordings to a lot of a lot of my work on it was just me and Michael Beinhorn sitting there with me playing and sort of being in the dark about what he was gonna think was a good take and what he wasn't. Yeah, definitely had a really difficult time making making that record for that reason. Like it was definitely a forward thinking concept at the time, you know that. I think a lot of people were influenced by in different ways. It felt like he had such a strong vision that it didn't feel like there was any room for me to find what it was that I had to say or to fit into that in a way that was comfortable. And he kind of took over the project during the mixing process, like like none of us were there, none of us. It wasn't until we had the finished copies of the record that we even heard the thing like, and songs were re edited and things like that in ways that were totally unlike the way that we wrote the songs and stuff. Yeah, that was a pretty intense experience. And then you went on tour after that. Yeah, then we toured for like a year and a half. Oh there's Anthony. Hi John, Hey, Hey, what's happing in Hi? Rack? I hope I'm not interrupting. No, oh good. We just got a history lesson that was fascinating for me. I loved it. I think you would enjoy it too. You might not know the backstory that you weren't part of two John, the backstory of John. Yeah Jack John before the band's interesting. I had met John. Oh yeah, I didn't even tell that story. There's a couple of Anthony and I connection stories that I didn't mention. Anthony what's your what's your meeting? John's story, It's kind of gruesome. It's gnarly, it's not a So the Red Hot Chili Peppers had a show in Pasadena, yep, Perkins Palace. At Perkins Palace, which was a storied venue. A lot of great shows there, including King Crimson. We're fleet passed out, but we had a show there. And I was going through a very nebulous period in my life where I was doing a lot of narcotics and sometimes I would show up late to shows, or sometimes I would miss the occasional show because I was just lost in a haze. On this particular show, I was running late because I was downtown Los Angeles buying narcotics. And I showed up. It was dark out, and there was a park in front of Perkins Palace, and I was going to go fix somewhere in this park to kind of take the sick edge off myself, and I ran into these two beautiful, excited, vibrant, stoked for the show fans, or at least you know from my point of view. And one was John and it was at Bill No. This was a guy named Matt. The guy, Yeah, Matt, So John and Matt approached me and they were like, oh my god, we're here for the show. We can't wait. You know what songs? Are you gonna play? This kind of thing? And I was like, oh, it's so nice to see you. Yeah, I'm just gonna be in there in a minute. I'll see you guys inside. You actually didn't brush us off. You actually like like like we like I think that guy Matt. I's like, hey, Anthony, what are you doing? You know, and and and You're like, oh, I'm just taking a contemplative walk, a little too contemplated to be honest. So we had our interaction and they did make a large impression on me. I was I was touched by the enthusiasm and just the the beautiful aura of these people that were so into the show that I felt honestly a little bit demoralized about because I was going through this weird time and I knew I would not be at my best, which mattered to me a lot. Yeah, but I had this this addiction thing going on. And so we parted ways and I went and found a staircase and I sat down and I literally took care of my business on the staircase, just to be well enough to go and play. And as I looked up afterwards, I realized I was on the stairs of the passage in police department, that that's the location I had chosen to do my dirty work, and I was I was foggy. Then I went inside, went backstage prepared full of day glow colors in black light, and you know, madness and a girlfriend and my band was kind of mad at me, and we did the best we could, but it was subpar, and from my standpoint, I was not on fire. But that's the first time I met John. What was the second John. Well, there's this funny thing in about nineteen eighty six, I think it was my stepdad came home one day and told me a story that he was driving on the freeway and the cars were all stopped. It was a lot of traffic, and he was eating a banana and he threw the banana peel out the window, and some guy jumps out of his car, picks up the banana peel and stuffs it back through the window at him and makes some intense remark about about littering, and makes a remark about the banana and him and gets back in his car. Then I'm driving in a car with Anthony about two years later, and Anthony tells me the same story, only he's the guy who gets out of the car and picks the banana peel up and stuffs it back through the window. Amazing crazy. Yes, yes, that was my m o. You know, a bit self righteous. And I'm Leabrea. One time, way earlier, I saw somebody throw a bag of McDonald's out their window, and fries and paper and cups went flying all over. And I did the same thing. I collected it all up and stuffed it back in their car, and they ended up chasing me north on LaBrea, rowing hamburgers like weapons, and I remember like dodging and ducking, and I don't know, when I was a kid, I also did the same thing. I saw young people throwing their candy rappers into bushes and I was like, no, no, no no, no, no no, that's a bush. You cannot harm the bush. So then there was this period of time where hellel. Slovak had died, Jack Irons had quit the band and flee and I as was our kind of energetic momentum where like we you know, we love these people, but we must continue playing music. Together. And it's hard to find the right people to play music with. You know, it's the chemistry. It doesn't matter. They could be the most brilliant people on earth, but you have to find that weird, soulful, guttural connection. And we had tried playing with Blackbird McKnight as a guitarist and DH Pelegro as a as a drummer, and and that wasn't totally working out. And then Flee had mentioned that there was this sort of prodigious young person from the valley who was supposed to be a real sensation of guitar playing, and I was intrigued. And then Bob for said, Hey, I'm going to get this this young guy, John Fraschante to join Felonious Monster. And all these kind of bells and whistles were going off in my head. And I had a conversation with Flee and he's like, yeah, this I jammed with this this young person, and he was he was on point. So then I went and saw John audition for Thelonious Monster in a garage on Fountain and saw him play, and I was like, I just I have to intervene here. I can't let this happens he's too perfect for what we are doing. And I was, you know, I was probably a selfish punk at that phase of my life. And I remember having some conversation with John in the driveway like that was a great audition, But you know, would you consider maybe joining our band instead of this band? That that's my hazy memory. John probably has a clearer picture. Yeah, yeah, I mentioned it. You did. Yeah, same same, same basic, same basic series of events. Yes, And you know, like I said, finding that person, these people who you really connect with on an invisible level and that you know can hear you and you can hear them and somehow put your musical energies together to make sound and song and and have a life together. It's you know, it's that's some kind of divine intervention when this happens, because I've just seen many times that's it's a hard fit to find. Absolutely, Yeah, how did What do you remember about that rehearsal that that thelonious rehearsal with John? What do you remember? I remember being mesmerized by John's personality and prowess. So he got up on stage with all of these much older, more experienced guys and really was kind of the dominant force, and it was just full of energy. He was just young and no one had thwarted his love or enthusiasm or you know all of that stuff about music and entertainment and just you know, being a person on stage. And I was like, that would be a fun person to interact with. And he just knew how to play. I mean, he learned songs very quickly. And I liked him as a person. You know. I became very close to John at that point in my life, and yeah, I just liked being around him. Do you remember the first time you and John played on stage together? Well, I remember the Holy Gully stage where we were hearsed quite quite vividly. John was playing Were you playing in Ibanez? Yeah? I was yeah, yeah, which which was different and new for us. I think it had been collaged. Well, I had two guitars. I had one guitar that had naked ladies all over it under the finish, and then I had this. I guess I didn't have the abends with the naked lady guitar. Was what I had when I joined was that it was a performance guitar. It's made by this guy in North Hollywood. So now I'm trying to think of our very first show. That would have been Texas. What right, No, Arizona, Arizona, Phoenix, like a one off. Yeah, we did one show in Phoenix. Then we played the John Anson Ford. That was the second show. Wow. Yeah, so yeah, the Arizona show, i'd really just remember that we had to go there. But the John Anson Ford I remember very well because we decided to wear costumes. Yes, yeah, we were like superhero costumes, except for our drummer DH, who wore a Bumblebee costume, much to his chagrin that he hated it and we couldn't understand and why why is he hate the bumblebee costume so much? You know, he looks amazing and there's a giant bee playing drums and he was uncomfortable. And it turns out that John Belushi, who had also dressed up as a Bumblebee on Saturday Night Live, also detested the Bumblebee costume. Do you remember, Anthony, do you remember the first gig with Chad? Oh? Wait, yes, yes, yes, I do? Is that the roxy? Oh? Is that true? Well? It was either first or second? I think you're right, yeah, I think yeah, And he was late. He was really late. Wow. Chad is such a force of nature himself. His audition, which took place with John and Flee at the Holy Gully, was so profound and unforgettable. We had played with this series of drummers and they were interesting. They could do certain things, okay, And then Denise Zoom, the former girlfriend of Billy Zoom, had suggested this guy from Detroit, Michigan. And Chad walks in very cavalier, nonchalant, you know, could could really care less of who we thought we were, and we thought we were quite a lot at that moment. And he sat down and just blew everybody's mind with his power and his attack. And you know, Flee was used to kind of leading the dance, and suddenly he had this drummer, Chad Smith, who wait drums for breakfast, apparently taking over the dance. And we were all laughing hysterically trying to keep up with Chad's race on the drums. Then we called him up and you know, he had this this giant poof of hairsprayed glamorrock hair or something, and we said, shave your head and you have the job in the band, and he was like, I think I'll pass. Like, wow, no, no, no, you get the job. You just have to shave your head. That's all right, thanks though, And at that moment we were like, this guy is strong enough in his own conviction of self that he doesn't want to shave his head to join our band, which kind of maybe made us like him even more. And then he was late to his first show. I was so mad at him for not shaving or being late, for being late. I just remember because I already had those feelings like this guy just does not realize what a great band, you know, what a great situation this is, and yeah, he doesn't appreciate it. And then when he showed up late, I just write, what the hell is wrong with this guy? It's so funny, it is it is. I remember he was going to continue going. He was he was enrolled at the music school g I T Or the Drum Institute or whatever. And at his first rehearsal with us after he joined, I was like, so, you're gonna quit the music school, right, and he's like, well, no, my parents paid for it and I'm gonna keep I'm gonna keep going with that. And I was like, don't you understand this is a world famous band here like like like like you can make a living doing this now, you don't need to go to a music school, you know. He just it was really hard to get on board. Let's let's talk about where you're self effacing is like saying, yes, this is the best band in the world, but but in reality, at this point in time, are the Chili Peppers the most popular band in in LA? Would you say we were world famous in Hollywood? I mean, it really depends on who you ask, because you know, we are very first show in nineteen eighty three, we played one song because that's the only song that we had. And after that that performance, if you would have asked me who is the most popular band in law, what is it? Yeah? Obviously, so we had an inflated sense of who we thought we were. But but it wasn't coming from a purely narcissistic standpoint. It was kind of in our world. We could feel that we were gonna do something special and it felt that special within ourselves. So by the time John joined, you know, we had had some real highs and lows, some ups and downs, and but we were certainly in the conversation as far as you know la popularity, I would say, were we not, John, Yeah, Like I would say, the other bands at that time that were that seemed to be at a similar sort of level of popularity were like Jane's Addiction and Fishbone At least in that world, I guess there were like heavy metal bands and stuff, but that was a completely different world that often played at completely different venues and stuff like that. Like, but as far as like the things that seemed to be rooted in punk to some degree, like, yeah, it was, I'm pretty sure it was those three bands that we're sort of playing at the same basic size places and stuff like that. When you say, yeah, yeah, but we were not truly world famous at that point. But I think the band could play The band hadn't played everywhere in the world, but I think the band could play clubs pretty much everywhere that we wanted to play. You know, yeah, we could play ding walls and in the UK. Thanks John Vashonta and Anthony Keatis for talking about the early days of the band. Make sure to check out next week's show, where Rick will continue this conversation with both Anthony and John. We'll hear about how John we joined the band as well as the stories behind the songs on their new album, Unlimited Love. You can hear Unlimited Love and all our favorite red Hot Chili Pepper songs on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast. We can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced Helpful Leah Rose, Jason Gambrell, Bent Holladay, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafield. Our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review us on your podcast app. For our theme musics by Kenny Beats, I'm justin Richmond,