surfsunadam

Lately I moved back into my parents house after 3 years of studying away from home and have been going through some old stuff and reflecting on the past and wanted to share some thoughts. I am 23 and as time goes on my childhood/teenhood is seeming to get very far away now, but I'm also feeling a renewed connected with it at the same time. I will try to document my falling into and falling out of obsession over the last 13 or so years of my life.

I got really into the Chili Peppers in 1999 when my mum got my brother Californication for Christmas at age 11 (at the time I told her it was a bad choice and she should have bought him The Offspring instead). My friend Jack also had the CD, and we always listened to Get On Top and I Like Dirt in the car getting picked up from 6th Grade at school. At 12 I found Blood Sugar Sex Magic in a CD shop in Bali when holidaying there with my parents which really got me hooked. I pre-ordered By The Way at Myer as a 13 year old and saw the peppers in 2002 in Brisbane with my best friend Wheeler. It was the loudest, most exciting sound I had ever heard and mum drove us home buzzing with our ears ringing, singing all the songs we remembered them playing. When my bro and I weren't watching surfing videos, we were watching Off The Map on repeat but funnily enough for a while I thought the skinny gaunt-faced short hair guitarist of that era was a different guy to the long haired slinky John we saw live! My brother and I could sing along to every jam and knew the between-song-banter word for word. One day I discovered the outro jam for Search and Destroy in the bonus features and thought it was the most heavenly music ever created by two human beings.

I started playing guitar around this same time. The first riff I ever learnt was Otherside in grade 7, my friend burnsey taught it to me one night on a sleepover. At the Grade 9 music night, my friends and I performed I Could Have Lied ... that's the other thing, all my friends were into the chili peppers. I wouldn't be friends with someone if they weren't haha. Our group at school was called 'the chilis' and we used to have skirmishes with the metal heads.

I had heard of Johns solo music around this time, I have a early memory of watching the Going Inside film clip and hearing a live recording that was online of one of the really experimental performances at the knitting factory .. I forget which number .. but the one that is just full on distorted constant noise with people chatting in the background. One day though, it must have been in late 2004, I found the old Shadows-themed site with the mp3 player floating in the cloud and I heard Carvel ... it loaded bit by bit with the slow internet. I thought it was just going to be all experimental noises but all of a sudden it burst into the most fantastic song to which I must have listened to over and over that day! It must have been fate that very soon after this I came across Shadows album in a tiny CD shop in Byron Bay.

And hence the obsession starteth.

The next phase of my life I am not very proud of - I was not very grown up after high school and spent two years or so (06/07/08) living at home, going through a rather late puberty, acne, low self-confidence, probably some form of depression, I pretty much quit my childhood passion of surfing, the normal late-teen stuff. I was going to a small local university, but doing it half-heartedly and failing a few courses. It was under these circumstances that I was able to devote all my energy to John through the portal of the internet.

It started just by reading through the old frusciante.net, finding out stuff and lurking on the forum, making a few tentative posts. I joined the Stadium-Arcadium forum too. I went to all 7 RHCP shows in Australia on the 2007 tour and stood right in front of John. I got into downloading bootlegs. I started collecting stuff ... ordered all the fru CDs and Vinyls, started tracking down rhcp singles to try to collect all the B-sides. I got pretty close. I bought every rhcp and John t-shirt I could find. I bought both the official 6 albums in 6 months posters. I watched every John and rhcp video on youtube. I checked youtube every couple of days, ordering the search by date added to catch any new uploads. I scanned through pages of 'John fruscainte picture thread', saving them all to my computer. I signed up for google alters for 'frusciante' and read every email google sent me when they found this word on the internet. I went through everything on this website, lapping up every magazine interview. I wrote out guitar tabs. I plugged my guitar into the stereo and played along to the whole of the Slane Castle DVD so the sound of my guitar would mesh with the dvd so it'd sound like I was in the band. I took the lenses out of some sunglasses and posed for photos wearing my fru t shirt doing the same pose as on the t shirt. I got right into Johns gear, mapping out his pedal board routing and paid stupid amounts of money to buy a WH-10 plus a bunch of other pedals he has. I bought a strat. I bought a P-bass. I bought a red Jag. (I used diadarrios 10 strings (and still do). I wrote and recorded a bunch of music basically imitating and paraphrasing johns licks. I jumped around my room with my guitar trying to play hullabullo style intro jams. I formulated and even half-beleived a religion I called 'frusciantism' where I summed up all of Johns speakings about spirits and other dimensions and combined it with a bit of stuff I read about lucid dreaming and the astral plane, where I actually considered John a prophet like figure. I ran home in my lunch break from work to listen to unreachable the day it was released and bought two copies of the Empyrean vinyl - one to play, one to keep sealed. I had a pretty serious romantic internet relationship with a woman I met through one of these forums. With her, I discussed if I would have sex with John. I hoped to try smoking weed, something I achieved when I visited amsterdam.

Its getting late, ill have to finish it and talk about my recovery from this affliction tomorrow ...