Lassoed into the line-up on the age of simply 18, John Frusciante had already battled an habit to cocaine. Four years later, after Frusciante left the band in a state of disillusionment following the large success of their fifth album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Kiedis, Flea and drummer Chad Smith determined their subsequent guitarist ought to be a person who had discovered acclaim in a band whose collective drug use made the Chili Peppers appear to be Cliff Richard and the Shadows.
If Dave Navarro thought he may need a smoother experience than he did as a member of Jane’s Addiction, he was in for a pointy shock. After 5 years of clear dwelling, Kiedis had as soon as extra embraced benders of a sort that had his new bandmate pounding on his door with information that he had secured a spot in rehab for the singer.
When Navarro was fired in 1998 after relapsing (Kiedis stated the guitarist “had his own agenda, and that was to get high”), he was changed by Frusciante – again within the Chili Peppers for a second stint.
After initially leaving the band in 1992, Frusciante had “decided to be a drug addict… because it gave me the ability to focus on my art and to forget about the rest of the world”. Six years later, he had diminished himself to the purpose the place his arms had been lined in abscesses and his tooth had been falling out.
“I was smoking crack all day long, shooting heroin, shooting cocaine, drinking wine, taking Valium,” Frusciante informed Mojo journal. “I was this close to killing myself. But when I was going extremely fast in my head and feeling I was about to die, I would get these warnings from spirits saying, ‘You don’t want to die now’.”
Evidently, he didn’t. Instead, Frusciante started an on-off relationship with the Chili Peppers. After departing the group for a second time in 2009, he returned a decade later. At the time of writing, at the least, the line-up of Kiedis, Flea, Frusciante and Smith has been in place since 2019.
