Scar Tissue (55 page)
I called him up and asked whether it was okay if I came to visit him. He was fine with it and asked if I could bring him some cigarettes and a pastrami sandwich with a lot of mustard. So I showed up and he ate the sandwich and I tried to get him to wash his arms. Again, our exchange was kind and loving and caring, so different from what everyone around either of us thought our exchange would be like, based on our past turmoil. I still hadn’t recognized how unhealthy my own dynamic of relating to him had been before he left the band. I never understood just how sensitive he was and how hurtful I was capable of being. I didn’t know that all of the jokes and the jabs and the kidding and the goofing and the sarcasm had really hurt his feelings and had a long-lasting impact on him.
Long after John quit, Flea said to me, “Do you have any idea how much pain you caused John?”
“What are you talking about? He and I were best friends, we spent every waking moment together. We played pool together, we chased women together, we ate Lucky Charms together. We were two peas in a pod.”
“No, you hurt John’s feelings a lot of the time,” Flea said, “because he looked up to you and you were so brutal to him.” That was the first time I was even aware that my love for him had ended up being a difficult experience for him.
When John left the band, I resented him for not being my friend and for abandoning our musical comradeship. But all the time that he was out of the band and going through his anguish, I prayed for him constantly. From going to meetings I’d learned that one of the reasons that alcoholics get loaded is because they harbor resentments. One of the techniques they teach to get rid of a resentment toward somebody is to pray for him or her to get everything that you want for yourself in life—to be loved, to be successful, to be healthy, to be rich, to be wonderful, to be happy, to be alive with the light and the love of the universe. It’s a paradox, but it works. You sit there and pray for the person you can’t stand to get everything on earth that you would want for yourself, and one day you’re like “I don’t feel anything bad toward this person.”
That was part of the reason I prayed for John. The other part was that I didn’t want him to die a sad and miserable death, so I prayed for him almost every day. I would sit there and say, “Whoever’s out there, whoever’s getting this thought from my mind, could you please look after John Frusciante, because he needs it.”
In January 1998, Bob Forest convinced John to check in to Los Encinos, the same old-school treatment facility that housed W. C. Fields, back in the day. John had already kicked heroin by then, but he had been smoking crack and drinking. I went to visit him there, and he seemed committed to being in there, but a little peculiar. Our conversations were sparse and unusual. Every now and then we’d talk about a Nirvana song or a da Vinci drawing.
During one of my visits, we were sitting there having one of these minimalist conversations when John jumped off the bed and went flying into a perfect James Brown split, circa 1968. Then he got up and sat back down. I don’t know what his motivation was, but it seemed like he was feeling his oats and letting it be known that he still had the fire to fly into a James Brown split, if need be.
I was open to the possibility of John coming back to the band, even if it still seemed remote to me. After leaving Los Encinos at the beginning of February, John rented a small apartment in Silver Lake. One day in April, Flea went over there, and they sat together and listened to records. Then Flea popped the question: “What would you think about coming back and playing in the band?”
John started sobbing and said, “Nothing would make me happier in the world.” They both cried and hugged each other for a long time. Then Flea took a trip to Cambodia, which gave John and me time to clear the air and talk about the problems we had in the past. We went to the Farmer’s Market, one of my favorite places in all of L.A., and sat down and had some salmon tacos.
I broke the ice. “Do you have a problem with me at all about anything?”
“No, not really,” he said. “What about you? Are you mad at me for anything?”
“I thought I was, but I don’t feel mad right now. I thought we should probably go over all this stuff, but I don’t feel bothered by any of it anymore,” I confessed.
“Me, neither,” John agreed.
Flea was expecting to get a report of some daylong deliberation deal, of all this animosity dredged up, but neither of us was feeling it. The major problem was John didn’t even have a guitar to his name. So we went over to the Guitar Center, and I bought him a great old ’62 Stratocaster.
John was thrilled by the idea of being back in the band, but he was also scared, because he hadn’t played a guitar for a very long time. We decided to make his return low-key—nothing mattered other than playing music. We didn’t give a fuck about record deals, or the fact that our manager had quit, or that our record company had lost interest in us. None of that mattered. We just wanted to get in a garage and rock out together.
Flea was living in an incredible Mediterranean superstructure in Los Feliz, a famous old house because tons of musicians like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed had lived there. We assembled in Flea’s garage, a portion of which he had converted to a rehearsal space. Chad had set up his drums in the corner. Flea had this look on his face like “Okay, no great expectations. Let’s just play music.” We had some shitty little PA system set up. John wore a look of uncertainty, but he plugged in his guitar, and we started playing. And it was us again. I think I might be the only one who thought so, but the room filled up with heavenly music, made for no motive other than to see what it sounded like when we banged our instruments together.
For me, that was the defining moment of what would become the next six years of our lives together. That was when I knew that this was the real deal, that magic was about to happen again. Suddenly we could all hear, we could all listen, and instead of being caught up in our finite little balls of bullshit, we could all become players in that great universal orchestra again.
Despite
my elation at our reunion, it took awhile for us to find the groove. John was rusty, both mentally and physically. I was a pile of rust dust, too, but slowly and surely, things started getting better. There was a lot of joy emanating from Flea’s house. He had two dogs, a mastiff named Martian and a feisty boxer called Laker. Every day we’d make tea in the kitchen, play with the dogs, and then go out to the garage and work. Flea had set up the rehearsal space like a recording studio, so at the end of the session, I’d leave with tapes of the new music to lyricize.
Although he’ll tell you it took years for him to get his chops back, I loved the way John was playing when he didn’t have the technical capacity to do everything. He toned down and developed an incredible minimalist style. Every day he came up with something spectacular. I had a notebook filled with lyrics that I was dying to turn into songs, so besides the rehearsals, I’d go hang out with John at his apartment in Silver Lake. In typical John fashion, there was no furniture at all, just records and a turntable and a bed and a blender. He was going through a smoothie phase, so there were smoothie materials on the walls and the refrigerator and the stove. It was like Jackson Pollock lived there. We’d sit and smoke and smoke and work. It was incredible to once again have one of the great musicians of our time so telepathically connected to me. He’d play me a complicated, weird instrumental piece of music that he had stayed up all night recording, and I’d be like “Oh yeah, I know exactly what I’m supposed to do with that.”
John seemed truly humbled by life. He had been beaten down, and I think the clouds had lifted, and he saw what he had been through and felt like “Holy fuck. I can’t believe I’m alive. I’m not going to blow it this time.” He hadn’t been back long enough for people to tell him how wonderful he was. It’s always nice to be around someone who’s that talented and that excited about life and music, and whose ego hasn’t been inflated by other people yet.
Everyone was having fun. It was as if we had nothing to lose, nothing to gain. We didn’t care; we were making music for the sake of making music. Compared to
Blood Sugar, One Hot Minute
wasn’t nearly as successful, so people had lost faith in us. There was a feeling within the record industry that we’d had our day in the sun. But the more we played, the more we started creating stuff that we believed in and wanted people to hear.
It was really hot when we began rehearsing, so we would leave the garage door open. After a few weeks of work, I ran into Gwen Stefani of No Doubt. She was Flea’s distant neighbor across the ravine on the opposite mountain. “I hear you guys play every day,” she said. “My friends come over, and we sit around and listen. It sounds great!” It was nice to get the compliment, but it was a bit embarrassing, because we thought we were in this private world, working out our ugly spots.
At the beginning of June, we took a break from rehearsing to play our first gig since John had rejoined the band. I had promised the Dalai Lama that we would be available if we got the call from Adam Yauch, and we did. The Tibetan Freedom Festival was a two-day event at JFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. The night before, we did a surprise gig at the 9:30 Club, just to get our sea legs. Come the day of the show, the area got drenched with a thunderstorm, and halfway through the concert, a girl got hit by a lightning bolt, forcing the evacuation of the entire stadium and the cancellation of the rest of the show.
That night there was a logistical meeting. The Beastie Boys camp obviously didn’t have our back, because the organizers told us that due to the previous day’s storm, some groups would have to be canceled. Since we were the last band booked, we wouldn’t be able to play. I couldn’t believe it. We’d come all the way from California and were pumped to play our first big show with John back in front of ninety thousand people. Thankfully, Pearl Jam was scheduled to close the show that day, and Eddie Vedder got wind of our dilemma and threatened to pull out unless we were given part of their allotted stage time. It was an amazing show of support from them, and we never forgot it.
It was still light out when we assembled backstage. We stood behind the backdrop, surrounded by amplifier cases, and got into a soul circle, bowed our heads, and did a collective group hug. Then we went out there and completely rocked out. The audience was 100 percent behind us, and it was such a joyful moment to be back onstage with John.
The next day I figured everybody had forgotten about the poor girl who’d been hit in the head by lightning, so I went to visit her in the hospital. She was in bed but awake, and she showed me all her burn marks. Her worst burns were where she had metal on her body—a bracelet, her underwire bra. But the really ironic thing was that she was talking on her cell phone when she got hit—that’s probably why the lightning hit her—and her last name was Celfon.
Back in L.A., the songs were coming fast and furious. Except for one. The first song that John and I worked on, even before we convened in Flea’s garage, was a song called “Californication.” I’d written the lyrics when I was on that cleansing trip to Thailand, when the idea of John being back in the band was still inconceivable to me. While I was on a boat in the Andaman Sea, the melody had crept up on me, one of those simple melody structures that lends itself to flying words into. One of the things that struck me on my travels to exotic places, including the Sea Gypsy Village in Thailand and the bazaars of Indonesia, was the extent to which American culture had permeated all these places, even to the time of bootleg Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirts. When I was in Auckland one time, I ran into a crazy lady on the street, and she was ranting about the fact that there were psychic spies in China. That phrase stuck in my mind, so when I was back home, I started writing and writing, and they became my favorite of all the lyrics that I’d collected over the last year.
I showed “Californication” to John, and he loved the lyrics and started writing some music. But for some reason, even though there was a perfect song in there, we couldn’t find it. We tried ten different arrangements and ten different choruses, and nothing ever worked. All these other songs were pouring out of us. We’d been working for a few weeks when someone started playing an ultra-sparse riff that sounded like nothing we’d ever done before. As soon as I heard it, I knew it was our new song.
Around that time, I had met a young mother at a meeting. She was living in a YWCA with her baby girl, trying to get sober but failing miserably. The beauty and sadness and tragedy and glory, all wrapped into one, of this mother/daughter relationship was evoked by the vibe of that music.
From “Porcelain”
Porcelain
Do you carry the moon in your womb?
Someone said that you’re fading too soon
Drifting and floating and fading away
Little lune
All day
Little lune
Porcelain
Are you wasting away in your skin?
Are you missing the love of your kin?
Nodding and melting and fading away
By late June, we had completed about twelve songs. “Scar Tissue” was another song where you open up the top of your head and it comes dusting down from outer space. Rick Rubin and I had been talking about sarcasm a lot. Rick had read a theory that it was an incredibly detrimental form of humor that depresses the spirit of its proponents. We had been such sarcastic dicks that we vowed to try to be funny without using sarcasm as a crutch. I guess I was also thinking of Dave Navarro, who was the King of Sarcasm, faster and sharper than the average bear.
