Flea and John Frusciante in 1991: “Space is a huge part of it”

In November 1991 Guitar World ran a double interview with the Red Hot Chili Peppers' bassist and guitarist. Blood Sugar Sex Magik had just come out; nobody yet knew how big it would become. The text is online in the fan archive Invisible Movement. Below are the passages about how they played. Every quote is short and verbatim, with our commentary alongside.

Two houses, two moods

Di Perna visited them separately. Frusciante, then 21, received him in a silk dressing gown at his house in the Hollywood Hills, with Captain Beefheart on the stereo. At Flea's place, near Griffith Park, there was table tennis. Kiedis and Flea were seven years older than Frusciante and had been his teenage heroes.

Frusciante: away from Mother's Milk

The journalist opens with the cleaner guitar sound. Frusciante is clear about the album before:

On Mother's Milk, producer Michael Beinhorn had wanted heavy, distorted guitars. On Blood Sugar Sex Magik Frusciante plays clean and sparse. Asked whether that leaves room in the songs, he says:

He compares it to the moments in your life when you don't have to do anything. The point was to make each other sound good, he says, and showing off didn't come into it. What he likes least is music that tries to force a reaction out of the listener.

Flea: the same people, at last

Flea explains why the band sounds so tight:

He is right. Until 1991 the band changed guitarist or drummer after almost every album. By the time they recorded Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Kiedis, Flea, Frusciante and Chad Smith had been playing together for more than two years, with a whole tour behind them. You can hear it.

Two takes, then it's done

About the sessions in the Laurel Canyon house, Flea says they played almost everything live, the solos included:

If he didn't like the first, he played a second that sounded completely different, and that was that. Frusciante himself says he used a small Fender practice amp and sometimes went straight into the desk. He also shows off a Stratocaster he'd had the frets taken out of. You can't play chords on it, and that is exactly what draws him to it:

In his view it sounds better when you aren't in full control. You can hear that fretless guitar in the bridge of Mellowship Slinky and in the Suck My Kiss solo.

Flea: fewer notes, bigger bass

Flea had made his name in the eighties with fast slap lines, and he knew it. On this album he chose differently:

He names Eric Avery of Jane's Addiction as an example. The same year he told Guitar Player that the only song on the whole album where he slaps is Naked in the Rain. He also talks about his childhood: Louis Armstrong as his first love, a stepfather who was a jazz musician, and playing in the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic before he found rock.

Hillel Slovak

Asked whether Hillel Slovak influenced him, Frusciante answers:

He admits it took him a while to find his own place after a guitarist that original. Three years after Slovak's death, he sounds like someone who has only just found it. More on the line-ups in the members through the years.

What we take from it

For a tribute band, this interview is a manual. In the studio a second take from Frusciante often sounded nothing like the first, so there is no single fixed version of such a solo. And with Flea, the space between the notes makes the groove more than the number of notes does. In our band Mark (guitar) and Tom (bass) play those parts. The full story of the album is in the story behind Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

De Peppers editorial team

Written by the editors at De Peppers, the Red Hot Chili Peppers tribute band from Noord-Brabant, the Netherlands. Every fact is sourced at the bottom of the piece. Spotted a mistake? Email info@mia-automation.com and we will check it.

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