"It was done at various times," Frusciante explains of the forthcoming album. One song even dates back a decade, to when he was 17 years old and just about to join the Peppers. "These are some of the best things I ever recorded."
He wants to play some of the new music, so he goes to the portable stereo to find the cassette of the unmixed songs. But as he is fumbling with the tape, forwarding and rewinding to just the right spot, he accidentally knocks the stereo off its milk-crate stand. "Motherfucker!" he howls, and he kicks a small pile of CDs flying across the room. Then, in a second or two, he is again calm and focused, his temper under control.
"This is not the tape of my new record," he explains. "This is a tape of the things that are on my new record, but not all of the things are on the record. It's got a lot of things that aren't on the record, but the things I'm gonna play you are on my new record."
He hits play and turns up the volume, and the room fills with a song that sounds as though it has been lifted from an old Sergio Leone spaghetti Western; it's beautiful and eerie, feedback and restrained frenzy, lyrics slinking in between the off-kilter melody. "Kill your mama, kill your daddy," goes one particularly memorable phrase. The song is followed by an instrumental that seems to turn in on itself--a solo reverie filled out by backward tracks and other ethereal effects. It's haunting music--quite literally the unexpurgated sounds of Frusciante's demons come to life, an unedited electronic reproduction of the sounds inside his head--and as he listens to his own music, Frusciante seems once more tangled inside the notes. He closes his eyes and seems to nod off, letting yet another freshly lighted cigarette burn to its end and deposit its ashes all over him. But when the songs end, he snaps to life again.
"Heroin emphasizes whatever you are," Frusciante explains. "Like, if you want to record music, it'll help you concentrate on that more, but if you want to lie in bed and not do anything, it'll help you do that better. It helps you do anything better you want to do. At least for me, not for other people. A lot of people--close friends of mine who are clean, and I'm glad they're clean--they know that when I'm clean I lose the sparkle in my eye, I lose my personality, I'm not happy, I'm kinda empty. A lot of people say they feel a wall when a person's on drugs, but I have three girls who I love and consider my girls, and one of them came and visited me when I was clean in February, and she called me afterward and said she felt a wall. My head works differently than most people, so consequently drugs affect me differently."
Frusciante insists he wants to get on a stage again--the last time he performed was at the Viper Room the night his closest friend and champion and protector, River Phoenix, died outside its doors--and that he wants to assemble a real band to perform his pop songs, the ones that go verse-chorus-verse instead of just verse. And he still would like to release tapes of the Three Amoebas jam sessions he recorded with Flea and Porno for Pyros drummer Stephen Perkins years ago. Katznelson says he'll try to help Frusciante get his music out there, book a few gigs, make him some money so he doesn't keep getting kicked out of home and hotel. But he realizes it isn't going to be easy; there are never any guarantees with a man who's slowly killing himself while no one does anything to stop him.
"A lot of artists have their own demons, and he's one of them," Katznelson says. "If I made judgments on people because of their lifestyles, I wouldn't work with anyone. I work with a lot of artists who have problems--illegal substances or personal demons--but one is just as problematic as the other. If I was expecting him to tour and play and there was a lot of money involved, I would tear the hair out of my head. But there's not a lot of money. I just want people to hear what he's about. If he wants to play, fine; if he doesn't, fine. If he wants to do interviews, great; if he doesn't, fine. I think he's very . . . he's very used to his own skin."
In the end, Frusciante has become just another gifted musician who plunges a needle into his arm every few hours--between playing and painting, between reading and writing, between preparing a new recording and finding a new home, between living and dying; these days, record-label rosters are once again stockpiled with men and women just like Frusciante, though they have publicists to hide their artists' habits.
Since Phoenix's death, most of Frusciante's other close friends have abandoned him, sometimes after trying to intervene and save his life; they're too tired of watching him decay in front of them, too sick of watching him unapologetically kill himself. He knows they don't like being around him, but he doesn't give a fuck.
"They're afraid of death, but I'm not," he says. "I don't care whether I live or die.
