By Ethan Maurice | January 20, 2022
There is speculation that John Frusciante — the guitarist most renowned for face-melting licks with the Red Hot Chili Peppers — is a modern day Jesus Christ. While this speculation is largely fueled by a few photographs of John floating around the web dressed as Jesus, I’d like to add to the internet that the similarities go deep than appearance.
While half-joking, I am also half-serious.
Without knowledge of Frusciante outside of his playing in the Peppers, this article may at first seem the raving of a fanatic loon. I won’t deny it: I do have great love for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Scar Tissue was the book that hooked me on an ever-since reading habit as a college freshman. Red Hot Chili Peppers Live at Slane Castle is one of my favorite concerts on YouTube of all time. I saw them live once, and attended Flee’s Acid for the Children book tour two years ago.
By the end of this article, however, I think you may agree that John Frusciante does in fact reside on a plain of existence remarkably different than the most of us.
The John Frusciante Interview on Creativity and Inspiration
To grasp the “Jesus” of John Frusciante, you needn’t go further than this forty-five minute interview. It’s from the documentary, The Heart is A Drum Machine. I can’t remember how I first stumbled upon it, however, it was the impetus for a deep, incredulous dive into John’s solo records the past year.
I’ve listened to the interview five or six times now. Each time I come back, I grasp something deeper and more profound from John’s perspective. Last week, I decided to mine the wisdom for my commonplace book, playing and replaying sections as I penned the most profound quotes from the interview onto index cards. John sees and speaks from a perspective so different than cultural standard that it took the repetitive listening and writing his words out to really grasp them.
For your fellow enlightenment, I will include my ten favorite index cards from the interview below:
“I think the force that created us is expressing itself through our existence... that everything that we do and everything that we create is nature expressing itself the same way that when a flower grows out of the ground or a tree grows out of the ground is nature expressing itself.”
“The idea of somebody considering themselves responsible for a piece of music is ridiculous. We’re only acting into the laws of nature that have given us the possibilities that we are exploring with the intelligence that we’ve been given. You have something like the frequency spectrum from low to high. That’s what we’re working with. It exists as part of the structure of physical reality and our brains are learning to interact with it through learning an instrument.”
“The more I stopped believing that it was me that was doing it, the more I just started allowing the force that was making me feel what I feel to be the thing that was carrying the whole thing. It wasn’t something that had to be forced. It wasn’t something I had to pressure myself to do. It just felt like it was something that was happening.”
“Half of it is that it’s happening, half of it is that there is something making it happen... Sometimes things that we don’t understand are scary. Death is scary. I guess we put a lot of things that we don’t understand in that scary category cause so many of us are scared of death. But it’s this process that we are living into... the perpetuation of reality... the fact that yesterday still remains as a thought... the fact that something you put on the shelf is there the next day... the fact that a consistency is running through things, that there’s a permanency to things, of matter, is also something that we should be happy is that way. It could be so many ways.”
“If you don’t follow the interests inside you that compel you to do things your life will just gradually lose meaning until you’re old.”
“By consistently reading, or consistently practicing an instrument, or by consistently studying the laws of science you will gradually grow in a way that’s inward, but will always give you a fascination for where you are and what you are and why you’re here. I believe that by doing that, for a person in old age, it can be a privilege. It can be a way of going more and more away from worrying about the outer presentation of what you are and being concerned with what you are on the outside, you can gradually enrich what you are on the inside.”
“It’s the nature of everything in reality to change from one thing to another, and our minds are doing it all the time.””
“It’s important to look for things and to find things yourself. You’ll find that something is guiding you toward the things you need to be listening to. The more you do it, the more in touch with that force you will be.”
“Each moment in a song is dying and becoming something else as the whole thing is going along. It’s basically that idea of reincarnation, just moving through the course of a four minute song. One section turns into another section, and back into being another section. It just gradually builds and grows.”
“With sex, it’s like both people are gradually coming to feel the same thing as one another... and when people come to a show... they’re all feeling what each other is feeling... To be able to feel that what’s in you is in everybody around you, I think, is your ability to experience the real truth of what’s really going on: that it’s all one thing.”
The Messianic Mistake
The interview above flips the general perception of John Frusciante on its head. Often described as a “guitar god” and placed high atop a rock & roll pedestal, John is actually the literal opposite of such high and mighty: a worshiper of interest and sidestepping servant to “that current, the creative force of the universe, or the source, or God, or whatever you want to call it.”
Fully aware that “the force that was making me feel what I feel to be the thing that was carrying the whole thing,” the specialness repeatedly ascribed to him is not some genius, self-generated thing, but a connection to and exploration of something larger. Again, as he says in the interview, “the idea of somebody considering themselves responsible for a piece of music is ridiculous. We're only acting into the laws of nature that have given us the possibilities that we are exploring with the intelligence that we've been given.”
This is the paradox, the messianic mistake we always make: we idolize and fixate on the individual who’s gifts come from connecting with something larger — “that current, the creative force of the universe, or the source, or God, or whatever you want to call it.” The individual who gives their self over to that “creative force” is mistakenly seen as possessing special gifts, being chosen, or the generative source of divine acts. Paradoxically, it is precisely their ability connect with, trust in, and go with this thing much larger than themselves that allows them to divinely do.
This is why we can compare John Frusciante to Jesus, and why (I’d venture to guess that) John felt comfortable dressing up as Jesus for a photoshoot: both tapped into something much larger, gave themselves over to it, and are endlessly misunderstood and idolized as the source of “their” gifts.
Is this not what John’s expressing in the photograph below?
Photograph by: Ross Halfin
This interview offers a sort of paradigm shift. A shift from ego-centric cultural standard to a perspective more expansive, wondrous, and mystic.
If we look to John Frusciante not as a who but a how, instead of idolizing him as divinely touched or unreachably gifted, we can see him as an example of how we might be able to do the same. His approach to making music is a map for how we could tap into something much larger ourselves.
Pulling from the above interview and quotes this looks something like:
Recognizing “the force that created us is expressing itself through our existence” and that “we're only acting into the laws of nature that have given us the possibilities that we are exploring with the intelligence that we've been given.”
“Allowing the force that [is] making [you] feel what [you] feel to be the thing that [is] carrying the whole thing.”
“Follow[ing] the interests inside you that compel you to do things.”
“By consistently reading, or consistently practicing an instrument, or by consistently studying the laws of science you… gradually grow in a way that's inward, but will always give you a fascination for where you are and what you are and why you're here… Going more and more away from worrying about the outer presentation of what you are and being concerned with what you are on the outside, you can gradually enrich what you are on the inside.”
To keep “look[ing] for things and find[ing] things yourself. You'll find that something is guiding you toward the things you need to be listening to. The more you do it, the more in touch with that force you will be.”
To me, this seems to add up to passing the reigns from the logical, reasoning, part of the mind to our deeper, subconscious, intuitive, and creative centers of mind. However, there’s also something much larger and deeper going on too:
Frusciante’s perspective offers a leap from self to Self — a way to live and act through a wider lens than individual lens. Blurring the lines of the idea of the egoic, isolated, everlasting soul, John’s view casts of the concept of identity across the whole of space and time and offers a way to live our daily lives in reverence and harmony with “that current, the creative force of the universe, or the source, or God, or whatever you want to call it.”
Consider it: are we not the present form of a process that has been long at work — big bangs, the laws of nature playing out in orbits and galactic collisions of matter, complex molecules cooking into existence in the nuclear hearts of stars — endless happenings all somehow leading to life sparking here on our planet growing increasing complex and capable “into the laws of nature that have given us the possibilities that we are exploring with the intelligence that we've been given” right up to this present moment where we find ourselves the current crest of a wave that dates back farther than we can conceptualize?
We need not be musicians “to explore the laws of nature… with the intelligence that we’ve been given.” From bacteria to blue birds to babies, more or less, all beings are doing this. Through John’s lens, life itself can be seen as a creative force exploring the possibilities of the laws of nature, finding infinite ways forth in an endless array of forms we call “species” across almost all environments on planet Earth. John recognizes himself as an expression of this creative force, and seeks to align his actions and life with it.
A prophet like example not to idolize, but to emulate.
More Wisdom of John Frusciante
In researching for this article, I found two more profound pieces penned by John that I’m just going to tack onto the end of this article. If you’ve come this far, trust me, take the time to dig each:
The Creative Act (Or The Will to Death)
A 2013 post from John’s (since deleted) blog that defines and explains “The Will to Death,” his theory of the creative act.
“The phrase The Will To Death refers to the underlying, predominantly unintentional, organization in works by artists who love and are devoted to the creative force, but hate what they see of the life force and its ways. It is a set of abstract principles which may be applied in the creative act. In artistic symbolism, one comes close to death, and not only does he not die, but he lives more fully for having had the experience. It may be conceived as a set of musical/mathematical formulae which the musician utilizes without knowing it.”
A description of the story, meaning, and intention of one of Frusciante’s highest flying albums. To me, the idea that art can spring from intentions like these is incredible and worthy of intense consideration.
“He eventually realizes that the highest point in heaven is a potential inside him, and that no thing is any different than anything else. What is beyond him is inside him and inside everyone. And that the feelings within him are perfectly suited to the opportunities to be creative here on earth. The attempt to be one with that force is an ongoing challenge that is such a privilege, the fruits of which make all the confusion of the path part of the privilege. He realizes that the ways in which the imaginations source is hidden from him are guides and road signs to help him become one with that source by means of his own resourcefulness. He realizes that confusion and pain have been as much the cause of what’s made his life meaningful and pleasureful as things he mistook for being pure goodness. Everything here contains its contradiction and so up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards, happy and sad, pleasure and pain, are each two things, which are one. And all things we believe to be separate are one thing. The illusion of separateness is the cause of pain, and it is also part of the cause of all the works of beauty people have created. ”
Frusciante’s Transcendent Tunes
Enough textual explanation, though. The truest experience of John’s transcendence is surely his music. Spotify’s This is John Frusciante playlist is a great place to start.
I’ll also leave you five of my favorite of Frusciante’s songs for your auditory enlightenment. I find each and the message contained within — dare I say — holy work.
