Top Guitarists of Recent Times

John Frusciante:

Frusciante joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers as they were on a massive ascendancy when he was only 18 years old and appeared on their 1989 album ‘Mother’s Milk’ replacing founder guitarist Hillel Slovak after his tragic death.

Frusciante had a prodigious talent as a teenager and his approach to guitar playing was heavily inspired by the rhythmic complexity of Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. He has also shown his roots to be in punk and the new wave underground scene particularly in his earlier recordings.

The massively successful BloodSugarSexMagik was the album that launched the Red Hot Chili Peppers into the mainstream. However, the enormous success of the band on the back of the never faltering hit “Under The Bridge” brought its share of problems for Frusciante. He disappeared soon after into a haze of heroin fuelled obscurity.

Nevertheless, he managed to record a number of solo albums before rehabilitation and an almost miraculous return to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Californicaton, By the Way and Stadium Arcadium followed spawning some of the band’s most famous material. 

Frusciante with a 57 Strat

Frusciante always tended his playing towards phrasing rather than virtuosity, maintaining that the finest guitar players from the 1960s will never be surpassed. The tendency towards speed which occupied most guitarists during the 1980s meant, for him, that a lot of the new wave guitarists such as Matthew Ashman and Bernard Sumner were overlooked.

He developed what he terms his ‘grimy’ sound believing it necessary to never use clean sounds and to mistreat the instrument as well as employing various types of distortion whilst performing. He has always measured his guitar playing in terms of depth of emotion and intensity of feeling, always trying to push the boundaries particularly in the sounds he uses and by warping tempo. Notice good examples of this in the chorused guitar phrases on most of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, throughout Stadium Arcadium and at the end of “Dani California”.

As well as taking influences from Hendrix, he was inspired by glam artists such as David Bowie, by Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart as well as listing Joe Strummer, the Smiths and Fugazi as his favourites. Frusciante has always had a penchant for vintage guitars, his most commonly used being a 1962 strat.

by Simon James, Guitar4Free, 2012