In 1987, one year before he joined Red Hot Chili Peppers, the then-17-year-old John Frusicante scored an audition to join Frank Zappa‘s band. The teenager was a huge Zappa fan, who could play every guitar solo on every Zappa album by the time he was 16, but when within touching distance of scoring a gig with the legendary bandleader, he opted to walk away.
In a 2004 interview with UK music magazine MOJO, Frusciante explained why.
“I don’t know if this is a nice thing to print but he was very grumpy,” the guitarist told music writer Sylvie Simmons. “I watched the way that he was dealing with people, ignoring people. At that point I was doing cocaine – it was a part of my life I really liked – and I knew about his attitude to that. So I was sitting there thinking, do you want to be a rock star and write your own songs and draw all the girls and things like that, or do you want to be not allowed to take drugs, and it’s kind of a square band so there’s not going to be a lot of girls at the shows? And I thought, Nah, and I walked out.”
Frusciante came from a musical family. His father, also named John, trained at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School, while his grandfather and great-grandfather played fiddle and mandolin for diners in Italian restaurants in the city. From the age of four, Frusciante told Simmons, he heard voices in his head telling him that he would become a musician, and upon discovering punk rock in Los Angeles as a 10-year-old, that dream seemed attainable to the youngster.
“Before that I was into Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith,” the guitarist recalled. “I had deeply moving experiences with that music, but still it was something that everybody else was into. But punk felt specifically aimed at me. It was very real all of a sudden and music was not just this thing done by these gods.
“I’d read about [Germs vocalist] Darby Crash jumping off Santa Monica pier on 10 hits of acid, and the pier was a place I saw all the time, so I felt he could be somebody I could know. And the music was simple enough for me to be able to imagine playing.”
By his late teens, the punk-adjacent Red Hot Chili Peppers were Frusciante’s favourite hometown band. It was former Dead Kennedys’ drummer DH Peligro, briefly a member of the Chili Peppers, who introduced Anthony Kiedis and Flea to Frusciante.
At this point, following the June 1988 death of Hillel Slovak, the band were jamming with Parliament-Funkadelic guitarist DeWayne ‘Blackbyrd’ McKnight, but upon seeing Frusciante audition for his friend Bob Forrest’s band, Thelonious Monster, Flea decided that the young guitarist would be the perfect fit for his own band.
“They asked me if I wanted the job and I said, Yes, more than anything in the world,” Frusciante recalled to Simmons. “That night they fired Blackbyrd and hired me.”
And the rest, as they say, is history. Frusciante made his recording debut with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik and helped propel the band to global superstardom. He has subsequently played upon five further studio albums by the band.
