• John Frusciante Teeth
• John Frusciante Sr
• John Frusciante Heroin Relapse
• John Frusciante Rotten Teeth
• John Frusciante Before And After Teeth

Frusciante was eventually rediscovered in 1998, a fragile, decaying figure who had sealed himself into his Hollywood Hills home. His upper teeth had fallen out, his legs, arms and ankles were.

Introduction To The Article:

• This is, after all, the band that has outlasted trends, drugs, madness, seven guitarists, nervous breakdowns, £70,000 of dental surgery (Frusciante's teeth fell out from drug abuse) and one death.
• Dec 12, 1996 His lower teeth, thin and brown, appear ready to fall out if he so much as coughs too hard. John Frusciante is living the cliche-the rock star holed up at the Chateau Marmont, where bigger.

This Article Is An Exact Reprint from The New Times, A Local LosAngeles Area Magazine: released in the November 14, 1996 issue. Isent a copy to the official RHCP Fan Club, and receivedconfirmation that the information here is correct.

John Frusciante Teeth

Keep in mind that this article is over three-years old. I assumeJohn has quit (or seriously reduced) his drug use. Read this articleas just a little RHCP-History.

Reprinted Article:

His upper teeth are nearly gone now; they have been replaced by tinyslivers of off-white that peek through rotten gums. His lower teeth,thin and brown, appear ready to fall out if he so much as coughs toohard. His lips are pale and dry, coated with spit so thick it lookslike paste. His hair is shorn to the skull; his fingernails, or theSpaces where they used to be, are blackened by blood. His feet andankles and legs are pocked with burns from unfiltered Camel cigaretteashes that have fallen unnoticed his flesh also bears bruises, scabs,and scars. He wears an old flannel shirt, only partially buttoned, andkhaki pants. Drops of dried blood dot the pants. There had been rumorspassing through the Hollywood rock world-stories no one denied, mostlybecause they didn't much care any more. There were whisperings abouthow he was holed up in his Hollywood Hills home, a place few dared totread because of the stench; it was the smell of death, a few peoplemumbled during more Overwrought moments, or more likely just the smellof feces and urine collected over weeks and months. There were storiesof a former superstar rock star guitarist who now sees little of theoutside world, who stays in his house to read and write and paint andplay guitar. And shoot up.

But they're not just rumors. John Frusciante is living the cliche-therock star holed up at the Chateau Marmont, where bigger names than hehave checked in to check out Four years ago he was in one of rock androll's biggest bands, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' guitarist just as thegroup was climbing up from the college~radio ranks and into the arenas.Now he's a transient in the hideaway's hallowed hall-ways: The livingroom of his suite is fllled only with dozens of CDs (from Bowie to Devoto his favorites, King Crimson and Nirvana) scattered on the floor,bottles of mineral water, cigarettes, journals, and alcohol sterilepads

Frusciante is holed up in the Chateau Marmont this night because he hasbeen kicked out of his Hollywood Hills home for not paying rent, and henow has no permanent address. After this interview, he was booted outof the Chateau, then kicked out of the Mondrian. As of a few days ago,a business acquaintance who until very recently spoke to Fruscianteevery day says he hasn't heard from the man for more than a week. whenthat happens, some people shrug: Well, maybe he's dead. It isFrusciante who first mentions his heroin use ~five minutes into theinterview, no less ~yet at the end of an exhausting night ofconversation, he also asks that the details of his life as a junkie beveiled; he explains that he doesn't want the cops fucking with him andthat any article describing his hobbies might bring the heat down onhim. But thats unlikely, and a quick glance at his fragile, decay^_ingfigure reveals the sad truth his silence could never hide anyway. Helooks 20 years older than he did during his Peppers days, and his voiceis harsh and slurred now. He doesn't eat food, instead gulping cannedhigh calorie formu^_la normally consumed by the elderly and invailds.He likes the way his body appear~a skeleton covered in thinskin-because that's how David Bowie looked in The Man Who Fell toEarth. Frusciante says he almost died in February; he explains hisbody had 'a twelfth of the blood its supposed to have, and thatblood was infected. My body.wasn't making any new red bloodcells.' So he quit the drugs for a few months and cleaned up, asmuch as he could. But the world didn't look right to him through deadsober eyes, didn't feel right to him through numb hands. The spiritsdidn't visit, the ghosts didn't talk to him; the door heroin opened forhim had been shut, and he would agan force it open even if it killedhim. when Frusciante joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1988, he wastouted as a clean young thing~ fresh faced 17-year old SouthernCalifornia kid who would stand in direct contrast to original guitaristHillel Slovak, who died in June of that year of a heroin over-dose.Frusciante joined just in time to record Mother's Milk, whichcon^_tained the minor hit 'Knock Me Down,' an anti-smack songabout Slovak ('If you see me gettin' high~ knock me down')that would seem hilariously ironic now if it weren't so pathetic inretrospect After all, lead singer Anthony Kiedis himself just got offjunk after years of claiming he was clean; bassist Flea was a user: andcurrent guitarist Dave Navarro is a former junkie. The needle and thedamage indeed. Frusciante quit the Peppers in 1992 after spending ayear on the road with the band-a year of watching the crowds multiplywith almost every gig. Frusciante had come to hate the crowds who sangalong with every word and danced to every song; he couldn't understandthe conection hetween artist and audience, and he came to loathe thepeople who were cheering and adoring him without knowing' him. Andmusically he felt stifled by the tight structures of the songs and theway audiences expected the band to perform the hits exactly as they hadbeen recorded. Frusciante had been straitiacketed by expectations,stifled as a musician, cut off from the ghosts that wanted him to playtheir music. The first couple of years I was in the Chili Peppers, Idon't consider myself a very good guitarist by my own standards,'he says now. 'I don't feel like I was 100 percent taking thefeelings and colors in my head and adequately transferring them to theguitar and into the world where they became something concrete insteadof just a feeling that floats through outer space. But then I became asgood at that as a person could be, and every night when I would play, Iwould play different solos and different guitar parts. I just had agood relationship with the spirits and with the ghosts and with thecolors in outer space. 'A song is something spir^_its can getfeelings from, but its nothing a human being can be aware of~ except Iam.So they give it to me as just a color and as a vibe and as a feelingand as an aes^_thetic echo in my head, and then I'm able to take it andturn it into music. when he returned to LA, he sat on his couch fornearly a year, depressed and alone and unable to function. He wonderedwhether he had made the right decision in quitting the band, or injoining in the first place; he was con^_vinced he was pissing away histalent He had only experimented with drugs, smoked pot 'every daywhen I was 20,' and says he first shot heroin right after therecording of 1991's breakthrough Blood Sugar Sex Mogik and then dalliedwith the drug on and off again. But he finally became a junkie as afinal salvation, and in time he again started writing in his journals,paint^_ing, and recording. Now he can't be without his needles or hisguitars; three guitars are scattered onthe floor of his Chateau suite,and he often fondles the neck of one as he talks. 'I used torecord every day' he explains. 'it's good that I do at allnow. When I quit the band, I couldn't look at art, I couldn't paint, Icouldn't read books, I couldn't play guitar, I couldn't listen tomusic, I couldn't do anything but lay on the couch depressed, and thenI became a junkie and came to life again and became happy and startedplaying music again. But I couldn't exist at first. I was so depressed~Icouldn't talk to people. I Was just the most hopeless, miser-ableperson you have evetr seen. I thought I was through with music and thatI was gonna die within a couple of weeks from depression. I thought,Where rI'm at in my head is the head of a person about to die. Ithought my body was literally gonna give up. 'And then I justdecided, I'm gonna become a fjunkie now' and the next day I was justhappy and better.. I just decided without [heroin], I have no controlover what thoughts take over my brain. See, with this, I have controlover what I want to think about, and when something comes into my~headthat is useless to think about, it won't take over I can get rid of itI would sit there and think about the way things could have been if Iwould have done it this way, the way I didn't do it But those arepointless things to think about, but thats all I could think about, andI had to just forget it I always had a reallY good discipline as far asmy head goes, but that stuff was just too heavy. With heroin, I wasable to all of a sudden have the power to get rid of those things thatwould pop up into my head and think about something else. liike, all ofa sudden I wasn't the boss of my head any more. In the fall of 1994,he released his first solo album on American Recordings, the labelowned by Rick Rubin, who had produced Blood Sugar Sex Magik. WarnerBros. Records, the Peppers' label, had rights to the album because of aleaving-artist clause in Frusciante's chili Peppers contract, butbecause he was living as~a recluse who refused to do many inter^_views,the label happily handed it over to Rubin, who finally released thealbum at the insistance of River Phoenix, Butthole Surfer Gibby Hayesand Johnny Depp. In the end Frusciante's solo album Niandra Lades andUsually just a T-shirt sold about 15000 copies~'a tiny number comparedto the six nullion the Peppers moved of Blood Sugar. Niandra Lade: Is abizarre and complicated album, two dozen tracks that grow increasinglyfragmented and frightnening as the album wears on; any Chili peppersfans who listened to the record expecting more punk-funk likely thoughttheir stereos were broken. Still, Frusciante expects to releaseanother album at the beginning of the new year, and David Katznelson,vice president of A&R at Warner Bros. Records,.confirms he plansto issue Frusciante's tentatively titledSmile from the Streets You Holdsometime in the spring. The album will be released on Katznelson's ownBurbank-based Birdman Records label (home to such avant favourites asThree Headcoats and Omoide Hatoba), with Warner handling some of thedisrtibution. 'This stuff isn't alien to me' Katznelson saysof Frusciante's music. 'Rick and John had a great relationship,but I kept thinking about John and listening to the record, and therewere a couple of songs on there that I thought were so insipred, and Ithought that if we put out another record on an indie label it wouldget more focus than if it had been put out on American or Warners orsomething with so many other records. So I called John, and and hejumped at the chance.' 'It was done at various times,'Frusciante explains of the forthcoming album- One song even dates backa decade, to when he was 17 years old and just about to join thePeppers- 'These are some of the best things I ever recorded.'He wants to play some of the new music, so he goes to the portablestereo to find the cassette of the unmixed songs. But as he is fumblingwith the tape, forwarding and rewinding to just the right spot heacciden^_tally knocks the stereo off its milk-crate stand.'Motherfucker' he howls, and he kicks a small pile of CDsflying across the room. Then, in a second or two, he is again calm andfocused, his temper under control. This is not the tape of my newrecord,' he explainS. This is a tape of the things that are on mynew record, but not all of the things are on the record. Its got a lotof things that aren't on the record, but the things I'm gonna play youare 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 liftedfrom an old Sergio leone spaghetti Western; its beautiful and eerie,feedback and restrained frenzy, lyrics slinking in between theoff-kilter melody. 'Kill your mama, kill your daddy,' goesone particularly memorable phrase. The song is followed by aninstrumental that seems to turn in on itself~ solo reverie filled outby backward tracks and other ethereal effects. It's hauntingmusic~quite literally the unexpurgated sounds of Frusciante's demonscome to life, an unedited electronic reproduction of the sounds insidehis head-and as he listens to his own music, Frus^_ciante seems oncemore tangled in^_side the notes. He closes his eyes and seems to nodoff, letting yet another freshly lit cigarette burn to its end anddeposit its ashes all over him. But when the songs end, he snaps tolife again. 'Heroin empha^_sizes whatever you are,'Frusciante explains 'Like, if you want to record music, it'll helpyou concentrate on that more, but if you want to lie in bed and not doanything, it'll help you do that better. It helps you do anythingbetter you want to do. At least forme, not for other people. Alot of people- close friends of mine who are clean, and I'm gladthey're clean-they know that when I'm clean I lose the sparkle in myeye, I lose my personality~ I'm not happy, I'm kinda empty. A lot ofpeople say they feel a wall when a person's on drugs, but I have threegirls who I love and consider my girls, and one of them came andvisited me when I was clean in February, and she called me after-wardand said she felt a wall. My head works differently than most people,so consequently drugs affect me differently.' Frusciente insistshe wants to get on a stage again-the last time he performed was at theViper Room the night his closest friend and champion and protector,River Phoenix, died out^_side its doors-and that he wants to assemble areal band to perform his pop songs, the ones that go verse-chorus-versein^_stead of just verse. And he still would like to release tapes ofthe Three Amoebas jam sessions he recorded with Flea and Porno forPyros drummer Stephen Perkins years ago. Katznelson says he'll try tohelp Frusciante get his music out there, book a few gigs, make him somemoney so he doesn't keep getting kicked out of home and hotel. But herealizes it isn't going to be easy; there are never any guarantees witha man who's slowly killing himself while no one does anything~to stophim. 'A lot of artists have their own demons, and he's one ofthem,' Katznelson says. 'If I made judgments on peoplebecause of their lifestyles, I wouldn't work with any^_one. I work witha lot of artists who have problems-illegal substanstances or personaldemons~but one is just as problematic as the other. If I was expectinghim to tour and play and there was a lot of money involved, I wouldtear the hair out of my head. But there's not a lot of money. I justwant people to hear what he's about. If he wants to play, fine; if hedoesn'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 needleinto his arm every few hour~between playing and painting, betweenreading and writing, between preparing a new record and finding a newhome, between living and dying; these days, record label rosters areonce again stockpiled with men and women just like Frusciante, thoughthey have publi^_cists to hide their artists' habits. Since Phoenix'sdeath, most of Frus^_ciante's other close friends have abandoned him,sometimes after trying to intervene and save his life; they're toofired of watching him decay in front of them, too sick of watching himunapologetically kill himself. He knows they don't like being aroundhim, but he doesn't give a fuck. -They're afraid of death, but I'mnot,' he says. 'I don't care whether I live or die.'

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Many famous and noted people have spoken about their voice-hearing experiences in the media. We’ve included a few of these people below.

John Frusciante (Guitarist, ex Red Hot Chili Peppers)

I had just so many mental problems. It wasn’t until I was 28 that my brain actually felt like a spacious place. When I was 18, 19, 22, my brain was just clogged all the time – non-stop voices. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. There was a lot of confusion inside me, this flood of voices, often contradicting each other, often telling me stuff that would happen in the future, and then it would happen, voices insulting me, telling me what to do.

Danny McNamara (Vocalist, Embrace)

In his blog, Danny McNamara recently wrote:

Between the ages of 19 and 22 I suffered from a horrendous condition called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I won’t go into too much gory detail here but all I will say is that for the best part of three years I was in a living hell. It felt like the rest of the world was at the other side of translucent bullet proof ice. I couldn’t even cope with basic functions. I was having up to fifteen panic attacks a day. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating. I went down to about ten stone, which isn’t very much when you are 6ft 2” tall. I almost died. I’d spend all day fighting my thoughts, and all night running from imaginary demons and voices.

Once I locked myself in the bathroom because all I could hear in my head were these awful voices telling me to hurt and kill. I didn’t want to hurt anyone but I’d been fighting my thoughts for months and I’d got to the point where I’d become terrified that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. I even somehow had a knife in my hands. I remember shaking uncontrollably and sitting in the bath and turning on the hot water hoping the shock would bring me to my senses. It didn’t. As the pain from the scalding water went through my body the voices just got louder and more horrific and more confident and started laughing and saying I deserved it repeatedly over and over, and that I should use the knife on myself before I hurt my family on the other side. It wasn’t living and it wasn’t pretty, and so that’s as much as I want to say about it for now.

Aged 22, I picked up a guitar for the first time and learned some chords. The illness took a while to lift, but as it did, the demons that kept me up all night just enabled me to spend more time writing. So I sat there with my acoustic guitar and I wrote and wrote and wrote. And as I got better, I wrote even more. The illness that had smashed me to pieces, the horror that had me fighting for air, isolated and trapped behind an ice wall now enabled me to see the world with growing clarity as the ice melted. Colours burned brighter, orchestras played in my head. I felt so alive, I could f***ing taste it. Songs poured out of me. As my health came back, I was able to help my dad on the building site by day and then write songs all night. I wasn’t sleeping very much at that time but it felt like I’d wasted the last three years as a walking zombie and I didn’t know how long this new alive feeling was going to last. Well not only did it last, it continued and still continues to enhance every aspect of my life to this day.

Anthony Hopkins (Actor)

I’ve always had a little voice in my head, particularly when I was younger and less assured”, he said. “While onstage, during classical theatre the voice would suddenly say, “Oh, you think you can do Shakespeare, do you?” and he added; “Recently, I was being interviewed on television and the voice inside my head said to me, “Who the hell do you think you are. You’re just an actor, what the hell do you know about anything”.

Zoe Wannamaker (Actress)

“It’s like a little person sitting on your shoulder saying “No that’s wrong. Don’t do this. Don’t do that…

It’s got in the way when I was working, because my concentration would be tripped by this voice in the back of my head. You think you’re concentrating, but the voices were also saying “your not concentrating”.

I know it sounds like Joan of Arc, but it was a sort of chatter that would be going on while I was on stage.

They come back occasionally and have a good chat”.

Sigmund Freud (Father of Psychoanalysis)

“During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city … I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice. I then noted down the exact moment of the hallucination and made anxious enquiries of those at home about what had happened at that time. Nothing had happened.”

Gandhi (Father of Indian Independence)

“For me the Voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth, or the Inner Voice or ‘the Still Small Voice’ mean one and the same thing. I saw no form. I have never tried, for I have always believed God to be without form. But what I did hear was like a Voice from afar and yet quite near. It was as unmistakable as some human voice definitely speaking to me, and irresistible. I was not dreaming at the time I heard the Voice. The hearing of the Voice was preceded by a terrific struggle within me. Suddenly the Voice came upon me. I listened, made certain it was the Voice, and the struggle ceased. I was calm. The determination was made accordingly, the date and the hour of the fast were fixed…”

Saint Joan of Arc (Revolutionary Historial Figure)

Joan started to hear voices when she was 13. She believed these voices were angels and saints, messengers from God. Whilst Joan was initially scared of the voices, and felt unable to talk to others about them, she began to build a better relationship with them. Some of these angels appeared in visions, as faces or – sometimes – accompanied by bright light. The voices commanded her to support the french army fight off the english. Aged 16, she presented herself to the leader of the army and was ridiculed. A year later, she returned but the leader took her seriously. Dressed as a boy, she went on to lead 100s of men into battle. Whilst years later she was burned at the stake as a witch/heretic, she was declared a saint in 1920.

William Blake (Poet, Painter & Printmaker)

John Frusciante Sr

“I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate”

Philip K Dick (Writer)

Philip, talking about his encounter with ‘a transcendentally rational mind’, said:

“It hasn’t spoken a word to me since I wrote The Divine Invasion. The voice is identified as Ruah, which is the Old Testament word for the Spirit of God. It speaks in a feminine voice and tends to express statements regarding the messianic expectation. It guided me for a while. It has spoken to me sporadically since I was in high school. I expect that if a crisis arises it will say something again. It’s very economical in what it says. It limits itself to a few very terse, sucinct sentences. I only hear the voice of the spirit when I’m falling asleep or waking up. I have to be very receptive to hear it. It sounds as though it’s coming from millions of miles away”.

Vinnie Jones (English Footballer & Actor)

Jones says his biggest role model was his grandfather. He is convinced that Arthur Jones, a decorator who died in 1977, has continued to offer guidance from ‘the other side’.

“I talk to him all time,’ he says. ‘So many spooky things have happened over the years. When I was a groundsman I would talk to my grandad all day long and say, “Just give me one chance to play in the fourth division, anything. Four years later, I won the FA Cup.”

Socrates (Greek Philosopher)

Socrates’ relied on what the Greeks called his “daemonic sign”, an averting (ἀποτρεπτικός) inner voice that Socrates heard only when he was about to make a mistake. It was this sign that prevented Socrates from entering into politics.

Dr John Forbes Nash (Award Winning Mathematician)

“Initially I did not hear any voices. Some years went by before I heard voices and — I became first disturbed in 1959, and I didn’t hear voices until the summer of 1964 I think, but then after that, I heard voices, and then I began arguing with the concept of the voices. And ultimately I began rejecting them and deciding not to listen, and, of course, my son has been hearing voices, and if he can progress to the state of rejecting them, he can maybe come o ut of his mental illness.

The consequence of rejecting the voices is ultimately not hearing the voices. You’re really talking to yourself is what the voices are, but it’s also parallel to a dream. In a dream it’s typical not to be rational.

I had some philosophical ideas that were involved. I found myself thinking in political terms, but then I found myself able to criticize this thinking – – that it wasn’t very valuable to think in political terms. Even now, I sometimes have a new realization that it can be not so good to think in political terms about some of the current issues. One can leave that to others.

John Frusciante Heroin Relapse

So in rejecting some of the political ideas, that had a relation to the voices, so I could think of a voice maybe as presenting what was analogous to a political argument, and then I could say, I don’t want to listen to that”

Zinedine Zidane (French Footballer)

Zinedine talked about a voice that inspired him to come out of retirement

“This is even irrational and that’s why I am the only person to be able to truly feel it. One night, at 3am, I suddenly woke up and I then spoke with someone. But no-one knows it. Neither my wife nor anyone else. Until I die I will never tell (who that person was), this is just too crazy. This is someone that you will probably never meet.”

“During the hours that followed I was on my own with that person, at home, and I took the decision to come back. I had never experienced that before, I felt pushed by this force which dictated my behaviour. It was a revelation for me, I had to obey that voice that was advising me.”

John Frusciante Rotten Teeth

Zinedine later recanted this statement, saying that it had been misinterpreted. Reading some of the football fans reaction to his statement one wonders whether it was a misunderstanding or proof that hearing voices is still a very taboo subject in the sporting world.

John Frusciante Before And After Teeth

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