January 31, 2020

Me and My Friends #15 - Trading Places

August 26, 2007. Bramham Park, Leeds, United Kingdom. The Red Hot Chili Peppers have limped to the end of a year-long world tour for their ninth album, Stadium Arcadium. Just before the show, John Frusciante addressed the crowd:

We've been on tour for a year and a half and this is our last show, and I just wanna thank our crew who work so hard to make our shows happen every night and to make it so we can communicate our music to you. So thanks to our crew, past and present.

John's message was a thank you to the band's hard-working crew, but it was also a goodbye, in a sense. The fans there didn't know it, but this would be Frusciante's last show with the band for thirteen years.

The next time the Red Hot Chili Peppers played live, Josh Klinghoffer -- Frusciante's friend, protege, and the band's second guitarist throughout 2007 -- would be in his place, and would be for the next decade, until Frusciante's surprise return in December 2019.

After that show in Leeds, the band flew home:

That right there is the last photo of John as a Chili Pepper (until the next one surfaces, later this year).

For the next few months and years, the band may have entered hibernation, but its individual members were all very busy:

• Anthony raised his son and helped develop a TV show for HBO, which was ultimately never made.

• Flea raised his daughter, guested on a number of tracks, joined a band with Thom Yorke, and enrolled at USC, completing a music program.

• Alongside his session work, Chad probably had about three more kids (I honestly can't keep track), started and toured his Bombastic Meatbats, and kept the animal theme going with his supergroup Chickenfoot.

• And after guesting on a number of other projects, including the Wu-Tang Clan, John completed and released his tenth solo album The Empyrean, which featured Josh Klinghoffer in a major supporting role.

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While all this was happening, John was undergoing a vast shift in his world view, and had completely changed his musical outlook. He revealed nothing at the time, but had already decided to quit the band a second time by early 2007; for the rest of that tour, he was simply showing up and doing his job while waiting for the end.¹

This didn't need to happen; originally, he was content with getting straight back into the studio after the tour ended.²

But the rest of the band (or maybe just Flea) wanted some time off:

we were so well-received as a band that it didn’t really occur to me to quit until Flea came to me at one point and said, “I want to take a two-year break after this tour.” And he said that to me about halfway through the [2007 “Stadium Arcadium”] tour, and when he said it I was kind of shocked, 'cause I thought we were on a roll, let’s just keep moving with this, you know?

And after that time off was granted, John's mind changed:

But once he said it to me, my mind started thinking, "What would I do with that two years, if I had two years to just do whatever I wanted?" And by about four months later I was so excited about quitting the band I didn’t even want it to be a two-year thing anymore. I just knew that I didn’t ever want to be in the band again, you know? And I didn’t actually quit until several months after we were already on the break, but I knew I wanted to quit months before the tour was over. I was determined to.

Fans wouldn't hear this until years later. As far as everyone was concerned, they were simply on a well-earned break after close to a decade of recording and touring three different albums, and when things felt right, they'd get back together.

John had actually transitioned away from guitar-based music earlier than some might think; he had been tinkering with synthesizers since 1999, and the recordings that were released as Trickfinger I & II were made between September and December 2007. The skills shown off on those albums were developed in hotel rooms on the Stadium Arcadium tour.

Speaking to Guitar Player magazine in August 2014, he clarified what his mindset was like at the time:

For example, I was in Japan for one of our last shows and I was practicing in my room, playing along with all these acid house songs. I was trying to play guitar in the way that people programmed the Roland TB-303, and I realized, “Wow, this is a lot like Robert Fripp’s style of jumping octaves and wide intervals.” After a while I started getting a feel for it, so when I went to sound check I played that way while jamming with Flea and the drum roadie, and it was awesome. But then I got onstage with the band and started playing that way, and spiritually it just could not happen.

(Helpfully, we can actually hear what that soundcheck sounded like, thanks to the almost exclusively-Japanese practice of ripping band monitors from outside the venue.)

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Once he was home, and had effectively left all band responsibilities behind, John dove into the electronic music scene with his typical obsessiveness.

Here's a photo of him at a June 2008 "Super Jam" with Aaron "Venetian Snares" Funk, Nine Inch Nails multi-instrumentalist Alessandro Cortini, and many others. Two months later, John spent time in Winnipeg with Mr. Funk (is that his real name?), and started the project that would wind up being released as the Speed Dealer Mom's EP.

That looks like a man enjoying his much-deserved freedom. (The full set of photos is here.)

But he hadn't completely separated from the other band members. Although the exact point it was recorded is still unknown, at some stage in early 2008 John and the rest of the band recorded a song with George Clinton.

Furthermore, here's a photo of John and Flea (and Linda Ramone) at the Johnny Ramone tribute on August 1, 2008:

(That day, John gave an interview, but didn't talk about the band at all.)

---

In Autumn 2008,³ John informed the other members of the band that he had decided to leave. Anthony spoke about the moment in the Oral/Visual history book:

When John came and said, "I feel like doing something else now," I really was overcome with a wave of gratitude for the years and months and days and hours of the creative collaboration that I have had with John - the lifetime of him in this band. Normally if someone is going to quit, like Flea sometimes feels like doing, I'm like, "hey motherfucker, don't quit we have a good thing going." But when John wanted to quit I was like, "How am I going to fight that?" I don't even feel like fighting it - he wants to, God bless him.

(I'm sure that's the sanitized version. Who knows what it was really like.)

This would have happened at the end of their one year hibernation period. In an interview with Rhythm magazine in July of that year, Chad said:

September’s coming up so we’re going to get together after the summer and see what we want to do. We’re not breaking up, nobody hates anybody or anything like that. We’re just taking a nice healthy break to do other things.

I don't know why John waited to tell the rest of the band instead of making it known to them immediately. But the conversation about him leaving most likely happened in September of 2008.

If John hadn't been so final at that point, it makes sense that they then extended their hiatus another year... perhaps all he said was that he needed more time, and that he was willing to come back at some point.

If he had quit permanently then and there, which seems to be the case, the sensible thing to do at that point would be for the band to release the news, tell the world their intentions going forward, and get to work -- if they felt doing so.

But, this band being what it is, it wasn't that simple. For over a year, they decided to keep that news a secret, go on another hiatus, hire a new guitarist, rehearse and write music with him, and only announce that John had left once the news had leaked elsewhere.

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Why they didn't simply come clean is unknown; perhaps they were expecting John to come back. Perhaps they were embarrassed: another guitarist leaving? How many was this? Eight?

Perhaps the three remaining members were unsure if they wanted to continue at all; that maybe it was time to hang things up and leave a great body of work and an asterisk-shaped tombstone behind: HERE LIES RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS, 1983-2008

The simple version is that John left and Josh joined. The complicated but still incomplete version is below. I don't know the complete truth, though I do know that ambiguity leads to rumors, and that's what happened here.

This is an attempt at clearly laying out how it all unfolded. There might be missing bits; there might be too much information. Please, let me know what you think.

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I should say, early on, that I'm expecting a lot of this information to be discredited or clarified in the coming months. When John starts giving interviews again as a member of the band, more information about this period might come out. If that happens, I'll update this piece at a later date.

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This photo below is the most recent photo we have of John Frusciante and Anthony Kiedis together, taken October 2008, at Flea's daughter's 3rd birthday party:

(That was also the last photo of John and Flea together until this one.)

This is an interesting photo, because either John hadn't quit by then, but was just about to -- or -- he had quit, and he was still hanging around with the rest of the band. Some awkward moments, maybe.

(on Anthony's right: Flea's sister Karyn and her husband Gavin Bowden, the director of Funky Monks)

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If John did leave in September, it would have coincided with him playing live with Flea, Josh, and Stella Mozgawa in the first week of that month. That show, at the Troubadour, was supposed to be part of the Rock4Change benefit concert, but ended up being its own thing once the Rock4Change people postponed their event. It featured an Aphex Twin cover; Aphex Twin would be the act that John referred to again and again in the years to come as a beacon of musical freedom.

---

Shortly after that concert, Flea announced the band were actually going on a two year hiatus, and that's where it all begins. Reading between the lines, you can tell Flea didn't really want to speak about the band, and probably knew at this point that John wasn't coming back:

We needed to get away from it and get a fresh perspective on things. We’re just taking the two years off and seeing where we are at the end of that.

---

A month afterwards, Chad gave an interview to Music Radar to spruik Chickenfoot, and said fairly emphatically:

Nobody's quit.

But - you know, maybe he wasn't being entirely truthful. He continues on to say that he had just been to Anthony's house, and that Anthony had just been speaking to Flea; these were probably the conversations that happened after John quit.

This holding pattern, the refusal to come clean immediately, is probably the source for the rumours that John didn't exactly quit, and that he stated he would be coming back at the end of the second year of the hiatus.

But who knows. (Well, I know four people who do.)

---

News of The Empyrean, which had been finished for a while, finally surfaced in November, weeks after John quit the band.

John did several interviews as part of the promotional process for the album, and one of the interviews was with Music Radar, the same site Chad had just visited.

This was... controversial, to say the least.

Joe Bosso: I did an interview recently with Chad Smith who basically said that there was about a year or so before the Chili Peppers were going to be active again. Is that basically the plan?

John: No, there’s no plan!

Joe Bosso: Okay.

John: Yeah, there’s no plan.

Joe Bosso: So, you guys havin’…

John: You're going to have to stop the tape recorder.

Joe Bosso: Okay.

John: The official…or…or you can leave it on and I can just say, the official, the official news is just that there’s no plans to do anything and we’re on a hiatus of an undefinite…of an indefinite length. (Mhm…) Yeah, there’s, there’s just absolutely no plans to do anything and, and uh, yeah, that’s it. Yeah, we worked really hard for ten years and, um, you know, there’s other things in life.

What's happening here? Is John being told by Warner Bros. or Q Prime to keep quiet? Is he pissed that the band are making noises that they're going to keep going without him?

Josh's recent interview with Marc Maron suggested that John was, in fact, slighty put out at the fact that the band didn't simply break up once he left, something that I've always suspected may have been the case. This may be the reason why he was so dismissive of that aspect of his life in several interviews from 2014-2018.

---

A month later, John went on Mike Watt's radio show, and gave another interview. This one in particular is fascinating, because Josh was present, and it was six short months before Josh was asked to join the Chili Peppers himself. Which -- as Josh has said -- basically destroyed the relationship that the two men had.

There's obviously no indication here that John had quit -- they don't even ask about the Chili Peppers (probably an agreement ahead of time). He does start to talk about the fact that he felt stifled working in a band environment:

probably if I wasn’t so busy in the band over the last 10 years, we would’ve done stuff like that more often but, um, you know, it seemed like I was always so anxious just to make solo records anytime there was a little break.[...] I’ve always just spent all my time recording since I was a kid, so it’s kinda more natural for me to do that than it is to do a band, you know. A band has been something more that I sort of, uh, settled into, it didn’t come naturally, at first. I’m much more comfortable just working by myself and calling the shots, stuff like that.

...which would fit into things he'd say a few years later.

There's a rumour that has been floating around since basically 2010 stating that John quite openly gave his blessing for Josh to join the band, and ahead of time even taught him how to play certain parts of certain songs. I don't think that's true; if it was, Josh wouldn't mention that he wasn't able to speak to John over this last decade, and Josh doesn't need to be taught how to play the guitar.

But if it is true - it would have started to happen at this point, behind the scenes.

---

Clearly John's comments spooked the band's management, because Chad went back to MusicRadar and tried to calm the storm:

I can't speak for John - he's doing his thing and hopefully he's happy - but I think when we're all ready to play again, when we feel like it's time to be the Chili Peppers again, we'll do it. You can't force anybody to play who doesn't want to. I'm not naming names. I'm just saying we all have to feel that the time is right to get it together.

That phrasing, again, is interesting, because it implies that John hadn't quit permanently, or that he implied he would be back. Or perhaps the band had already moved on.

Or, perhaps one member of the band in particular wasn't sure if he wanted to continue:

In an interview with Drum magazine in August 2011, Flea said:

But after he left and some time went by, I felt a very profound love for the band for a variety of reasons, and felt like it was time to get together and do it.

I think that sentence is important: after he left and some time went by - that implies there was a gap between John quitting, a fallow period, and the band then getting back together. They could have easily broken up in that period, but they remained in stasis.

All throughout this period, and well into the next few months, Chad repeatedly stated that the band would get back together in October of 2009 and start working again then. But -- if John had left, who would be playing guitar?

---

John gave the clearest indication yet that he had quit in an interview that came out in March:

I am not interested in being part of a band anymore.

And later that month even attempted to play live, as part of the Speed Dealer Moms, but that was cancelled at the last minute due to equipment problems. Show or not, John's head was elsewhere.

---

The following month, as if it wasn't already obvious, it was announced that the entire band -- bar John -- were to appear live, at a benefit honoring Anthony.

(The insider line that went around at the time was that John was out of town with prior commitments.)

As Chad says, at a certain point during the proceedings:

Flea starts playing something on the piano. Immediately Anthony and I are like, "Oh, that would be a good bridge part!" We just fell right back into it without even trying. Anthony's like, "Just you tuning up your drums gives me that feeling."

That performance, under the name The Insects, was helped along by Josh Klinghoffer.

Evidently, he impressed the band members that night, and perhaps he was already on their mind as a replacement. Either way, one month later, on July 21, 2009, Flea called Josh while he was at a Dodger game, and asked him to join the band.

Josh asked Flea if he could call him back, clearly shocked. He considered it for a while; he may have even spoken to John about whether or not he should join. He said yes.

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Chad clearly enjoyed talking to Music Radar because he went back to them in August:

What about John Frusciante? He's the one guy who's always been in question. In fact, earlier this year he told me that he had "no plans" to do anything with the Chili Peppers.

"I know he said that. Like all of us, he was coming out of a real Chili Peppers pressure-cooker. I'll be honest: I haven't seen John, but Flea had a sit-down with him recently, and from what I understand it was very positive. I have every reason to believe that, come October, we'll all four be making music again as the Chili Peppers. John's a very important component of the band. I love the guy. He's an incredible musician."

By this point, Josh had agreed to join the band, so "all four" of them wouldn't be getting together, and I'm guessing the sit-down talk with John had something to do with that.

Again, one might wonder why they hadn't said anything about John leaving, but by this point they were yet to play with Josh -- that would be in October -- so maybe they were hesitant about jinxing things.

---

A month later, and Chatty Chad speaks about the band again:

John (Frusciante, RHCP guitarist) made a couple comments a while back on how he's got no intention of diving back in..

Chad Smith: Yeah, he wasn't too anxious to get back and get going. But one way or another, we'll get going.

One way or another, we'll get going. Without John.

---

October finally rolled around and with it, the hiatus ended. The band -- featuring Josh Klinghoffer on guitar -- convened at The Alley rehearsal studio on Monday, October 12, 2009.⁴ This news got out quickly, through the ever loquacious Chad, and even Anthony's father.

---

The biggest wave of news came from this interview, which lit up the internet like nothing else. There it was, plain for all to see: confirmation from John that he hadn't quit, a shout-out to It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and even some nice comments about Dave Navarro. The only problem was... that was fake, and looking back, that was damn obvious.

---

At the time, all this news was a relief of sorts. Sure, John had spent much of 2009 talking about how he had no plans to be in a band, but here they were rehearsing again. Good news, right?

Wrong. The fun was dampened once again by an interview Chad gave to Classic Rock magazine in late November.

So the Chilis have finally returned to work, following the 2006 double-set Stadium Arcadium. Did guitarist John Frusciante, who in recent interviews seemed to express antipathy towards doing so, take some persuading?

[Sounding uncomfortable]: Well… at this time I can’t talk about that. I have been told to stay away from the John questions.

Nevertheless, the tenth album is underway? What I can tell you is that the Chili Peppers are writing songs, and we’re looking forward to making a record next year.

Sinking feelings. Stay away from the John questions? And why couldn't they just talk about Josh?

To this day, I still have no idea.

---

The news about John finally broke in an "confirmed" way in early December.

This part is frustrating, because I could simply link you to all this, and perhaps if that page was still up there'd be a lot more to go on. But sadly, where it originated from -- the stadium-arcadium.com forums -- is down, and probably forever, God rest it.

In a long thread that was home to many instances of the five different stages of grief, one moderator posted the following message:

I've been speaking to someone via e-mail over the past month and this person claimed to have close connections with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. At first I just thought it was a typical time waster making false claims, but the more I've been speaking to this person, the more I've become convinced that what they're saying is credible. It's not just because of what they've told me, it's also because of the information they've cited to me too. Everything collaborates with what's been going on over the past few months.

Essentialy they've told me that John Frusciante left because his heart just wasn't in it anymore and he was more interested in doing other things like producing and working on his own private projects. Apparently John DID join the chili peppers when they went back to the studio recently to rehearse, but John became too overbearing and this caused conflict in the band and he left as a result. The reason Chad said that he wasn't allowed to answer questions about John is because there are still hopes that he will return to the studio.

I'm only telling you this now as this person I've been speaking to has finally given me permission to reveal this information. They've told me this in good faith so I didn't want to jeopardize the level of trust I have with said person by posting this information up earlier. This person has also told me a few additional things which I've promised to keep private until I'm told otherwise, but these things also serve to increase my belief almost completely in what this person has told me. It's because of this that I'm stating that I'm willing to say that I personally think that John has left.

I really hope said person is wrong and my judgement is wrong too, but I really do think it's true now. I know this information still doesn't bring us any closer to some sense of resolve, but I just felt that I should share this with the fans because I am now almost certainly convinced that this is true.

(I'm still not sure who this actually was. If you're reading this, or know who it was, please get in touch.)

The information wound up being mostly correct, of course. But the other section, about John coming back and then leaving when things didn't go his way, that only ever appeared here. Rumours have floated around, but I think they were all sourced from this post.

Is it true?

Hard to say. I don't think so: it doesn't really line up with contemporary reports, and what the band said at the time (when they were being truthful).

We know now that Josh joined the band in July, so John being there in October makes no sense. It could have happened in September 2008, around the time that Flea, John and Josh got together to play that one-off show. An explosive argument could have been the catalyst for the one year hiatus being turned into a two-year hiatus, and John quitting for good.

But that's not what's written up there -- it clearly states that he had been playing with the band recently, as in a few weeks previous. Some even say that he turned up with synths in tow, and planned on integrating that into the band, but I'm pretty sure that was only something brought up years later. I think that part of the report is a case of Chinese whispers, or telephone, or an outright lie.

This could have happened, but word of it has never appeared elsewhere. If it's true, maybe that will come out when John starts doing interviews again. But I doubt it.

---

A few days later, the news surfaced in the gossip section of Buddyhead, which had a knack for breaking news in the LA scene in those days. Travis Keller, who ran the site, told me that he found out the news from Josh himself:

I knew because Jenny from Warpaint was me and my girlfriend's neighbor, and she was dating Josh at the time. So we were all out at a bar the night he got offered the gig.

By "the night he got the gig", I'm not sure if Travis is referring to July 21, 2009 -- when Josh was asked to join the band by Flea -- or some later date, such as December, when he posted the update. Josh was already a full member of the band by December of course; they had been writing since October. Was Josh offered the spot on two separate occasions, or was the news just delayed?⁵

Perhaps December was when Josh was drafted into the Chili Peppers contract with Warner Bros., and became an "official" member from that point, and that's how the news got around?⁶

He asked me if he should take the million dollars offered to join the Chili Peppers and probably never be taken serious as a real artist ever again, or suck it up and focus on his own band. I said take the money, fuck it.

That same day, the news also broke on a website called BuzzBandsLA.

I asked Kevin Bronson, who runs that site, if he had any insight as to where his scoop came from:

If I remember correctly, the only reason I was quick on the Klinghoffer news was because Josh came out of the L.A. indie scene, and a mutual friend tipped me off that it was happening.

Our ever-present friends Music Radar even got into the mix, quoting a source close to the band, and giving some extra detail:

"Josh Klinghoffer has been playing with the group for a couple of months now," says the source. "Optimistically, the Peppers are trying to lock down a replacement for John, who has apparently quit.

"Mentally, John checked out a long time ago. He's interested in doing his own thing, his own albums - the whole big rock band machinery just doesn't appeal to him anymore."

(Chad, who had given several interviews to Music Radar over the past few years, may have been that source, but I don't know. The source does sound they might be the same person talking to the Stadium-Arcadium moderator, and I have my suspicions that it was somebody working at their rehearsal studio.)

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With these sites all releasing the news basically on the same day, it was pretty much confirmed that John was out and Josh was in. There may be the chance that they were all simply repeating the news from one another, but a lot of behind the scenes info was floating around at that point, and I doubt we'll ever hear the real truth.

Nothing was actually confirmed of course, so there was still the chance that everything would be laughed off as a prank, or misinformation, or... maybe Josh had even joined in addition to John?

But the man himself revealed all a few days later, and there it was.

I vaguely recall feeling a swirling mix of shock-but-not-surprise that John was leaving, and relief that it was Josh of all people replacing him. But I'd love to go back and read all my posts again, see what I was saying at the time. It was no doubt something inane and idiotic.

This reveal by John was probably in response to the news leaking on the internet, but it could have been for another reason -- the Neil Young benefit gig, which was due to happen on January 29, 2010.

When the band got up there and Josh was playing guitar - there it was. Confirmation. And we all know how the next decade unfolded.

---

The Red Hot Chili Peppers recorded and mixed I'm With You between September 2010 and March 2011. Around the time the album was released, the band performed a few secret, low-key shows, at out of the way places like Big Sur and Nevada City.

The last of those shows, at The Troubadour the day after they filmed the Rain Dance Maggie video, was held on July 31, 2011, just before the band headed to the Asian festival circuit and the album was released.

John Frusciante wasn't there to see his protege make his Los Angeles debut. The day of the show, he was at his home in the Hollywood Hills, getting married to Nicole Turley in front of friends and family. The Chili Peppers, of course, couldn't make it.

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Cut to ten years later, and lots has changed.

Until next time,

Hamish.