{ Lick That Riff! }

Hello everyone and welcome to another in the great series that is Hero Worship. This is where I take one guitarist and lay my worship on this unsuspecting guitar hero, with the help of Total Guitar magazine, of course. And this weeks hero definitely deserves the title of Guitar Hero as he shown us through the 90s and 00s that he is an exceptional guitarist. In 2003 Rolling Stone Magazine placed him as the 18th best guitarist in their 100 greatest guitarists list, and I believe this placing was perfect. Some thought his greatest moment came when he played one of the most beautiful guitar songs ever written, Under The Bridge. But he came back 6 years later even stronger after kicking an addiction to heroin to make some more great guitar albums. Californication and By The Way saw his band, Red Hot Chili Peppers get back to making their best music. He often says these two times were some of his happiest times with the band. So who is this amazing guitar god? Well, of course, it’s John Frusciante.

What Total Guitar Said

You Know Him by his: Watertight rhythm playing and melodic solos, usually punched out on a strat, tele or Gretsch White Falcon.

Greatest Moment: Frusciante’s arpeggiated intro to Under The Bridge – scoring skags in LA’s seedy underbelly never sounded so sweet.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, losing one guitarist to heroin could be seen as unfortunate; losing two almost seems like carelessness. And yet, with the grim inevitability of Spinal Tap’s drummer turnover, that’s exactly where the Red Hot Chili Peppers found themselves back in 1992, when John Frusciante was forced into a six-year sabbatical by the same drug that killed his predecessor, Hillel Slovak.

Even if Frusciante had never hit another clipped funk chord, his understated virtuosity would still be filed under genius. Drafted into his favourite band aged just 18, the LA prodigy’s economical playing was the perfect tonic to Flea’s slap-bass excess, and turned 1989′s Mother Milk from gurning frat-rock into something vital and genuinely potent. However behind incendiary gigs and casually knocking out the guitar album of the 90′s with Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Frusciante slipped into freefall.

In any normal account of rock star excess, of course, this story would end with Frusciante pawning his Strat to fund a spiralling smack habit, so it was no small wonder to see him emerge clean and lean in ’98, rejoining the Chili’s for their two finest albums to date, Californication and By The Way. Frusciante now releases solo albums at the rate most people make cups of tea, and – most impressive of all – his talent still burns red hot. A fucking legend.

Well that is what Total Guitar had to say about Frusciante. It’s hard for me to put into words my feelings on this man, because he was probably one of the most influential guitarists for me when I look back. I was around 12 when By The Way was released and I had just started playing guitar. So his playing was extremely impressionable on my. I remember purchasing the By The Way Guitar Tab book so I could learn all the stuff he played. So to reiterate what TG said. A fucking Legend.

Farewell.

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