John Frusciante - 2001 Full Chateau Marmont Interview (audio) 7-18-2001

John Frusciante - Chateau Marmont Interview

This is the audio only, working on the master video and hope to restore or bump up the resolution as this was recorded on a SDV-CAM tape in 2001.

In 2001 John was touring to promote TO RECORD ONLY WATER FOR TEN DAYS.
I’d seen him at just about every Los Angeles show and got to know his manager/team.
At a show for the LA Weekly Awards in 2001, John played a short 5 song set.

While in line to get in this night, a tourist visiting from Spain named Nacho Recio was in line with me. We began talking and I told him I’d send him some John bootlegs of current shows. So we exchanged emails. He then asked me what the best approach would be for him to get an interview with John for a Spain TV show he was producing. I suggested he go speak with Louie Mathieu (John’s road manager for this tour) who was standing outside the venue at that very minute. He did, and the two exchanged emails/or numbers. A few days later, Nacho emails me to say he has been granted an interview with John that next day. The problem was, he was a tourist staying in Venice Beach, and he didn’t have a car (I did), he didn’t know where the Chateau Marmont was (I did), and he was not fluent in his English (I was). So, he asked me if I would do him a HUGE favor and conduct the interview and give him a ride to the interview while he worked the camera/sound with his partner Lena. To the contrary, he did ME the biggest favor I could ever dream of.

We arrived to the scheduled interview very early. The front desk rang his room, no answer. So they asked us to wait in the lobby. We hung out for 30min or so and tried him again, this time they said he was available and to go on up to his room. At this point, I got nervous, before this it seemed too good to be true, and I didn’t want to get my hopes up. John answered the door, having just woke up by the phone call. He said he was going to go running but let us in to set up while he got dressed instead, which is why he looks a little disheveled in the video. Surreal is not even the word I would use. We finally got all set up and we started making some small talk and rolled camera/sound. I asked him a lot of questions about his early history, Thelonious Monster audition story from his point of view, as it’s been told so many ways, depending who you speak to about it. The more questions I asked, the more comfortable John became, and really opened up about his come back to the band, music, drug addiction/rehab, working with other artists. I think we ended up taking up about 90min of his afternoon. After the interview, John played us the demo of a song “RICKY NELSON” as he called it then, a song he and Josh Klinghoffer just recorded. He also gave me a CD of unreleased demos, he made me promise to burn and return the CD to him, and be sure I get a copy of the CD to his webmaster Chris Middleton who ran John’s website at the time, www.johnfrusciante.com

He knew his demos were leaking on the internet and had no real plans to officially release them, so he wanted them out on the internet for free. This is now referred to as “From The Sounds Inside” or “Internet CD”. It had no real title, and Chris Middleton held a contest on his web site to name this CD…but it’s not official. Needless to say, I had he CD in my hands, we listened to it all the way to my house in Pasadena. We got to my house, I burned a copy of the interview from DVCAM to VHS, I burned a CD for Nacho/myself/Chris and I drove him back to Venice Beach. We listened to the CD all the way there. Nacho left back to Spain a few weeks later and started to work on the interview for his TV Station. Some clips are on You Tube. I sent the CD to Chris in Canada; he released them on the official John Frusciante web site a few weeks later. Chris and I recently re-connected on Facebook and he’s doing well and still in Canada and we spoke about this time back in our lives. I also hear from Nacho who gave his consent to this audio interview. He's doing amazing things in his career as well.

To sum this up. John was in a great mood that day, reminiscing about the old days. His room was filled with keyboard, synths, digital 8 track, guitars, Hoffner Bass, CD’s everywhere, CD booklets everywhere. His manager Louie stopped in to check in on us halfway through the interview for a little while, he made some calls from John’s kitchen and then took off once it seemed everything was okay.

The band was in the middle of writing songs for BY THE WAY at this time and John would be going to band rehearsal later that day. To me, it was about being at the right place, right time, and knowing my way around Hollywood that helped make this happen.

Inspired by the recent Broken Record John/Rick Rubin interviews. Richard Alan White videos and Sonja Farrell photos all recently coming out.

ENJOY! More to come! - Ralph Paredes