The Lost & Found Department
rare and not-so-rare items worth finding again…
by Andrew Lau

Item #0005 - Niandra Lades And Usually Just A T-Shirt

Who: John Frusciante

What: Chemically…ah, enhanced first solo LP by Red Hot Chili Pepper's eccentric guitarist.

Where: Originally released in 1994 on Rick Rubin's American Recordings (45757-2), then again in August on 1999 in conjunction with Frusciante re-joining the Chili Peppers and then again in June 2003 in tandem with Frusciante's third and more accessible solo effort, Shadows Collide With People. Still in print, but just barely. None of the re-releasing attempts, however, generated any major sales boost although word-of-mouth continues to spread; the legend of this record is yet to be determined.

Why: That the sanest, most cohesive song on this CD is a Bad Brains cover speaks volumes about the rest of the material. Bad Brains being the seminal Washington D.C. quartet that played punk at amazing speeds and then turned on a dime to play reggae at lazy, windswept stoner pace. John Frusciante's version of their 1981 anti-Nazi anthem "The Big Takeover" is amazing example of a cover version rising to the greatness of the original. His take is a churning, multi-tracked acoustic guitar/mandolin stomp heightened by a mid-tenor voice. It could've been a single if that were an issue.

Frusciante wasn't looking for hit singles with this record, however -- he was looking for the beauty within via self-destruction. Niandra Lades And Usually Just A T-shirt is the sound of an extremely talented musician forcing himself into an abysmal drug fueled tailspin -- complete mental and physical chaos. That being said, this CD is one of the most interesting tailspins put to music, right up there with Skip Spence's Oar; or the collected works of Rocky Erickson, Julian Cope and Syd Barrett.

Frusciante, an extremely sensitive guitar prodigy, found himself in the unusual position of replacing one of his guitar heroes at the age of seventeen. Hillel Slovak, the Chili Pepper's guitarist, had died of a heroin overdose in June of 1988. The band had been touring and recording since 1984 and were gaining in popularity when Frusciante was asked to joined. Their second release with him in the band, 1992's BloodSugarSexMagic, thrust the group into international success. Soon he saw himself as an imposter of his former self; being a rock star wasn't as good as it seemed. So, he ran. Abruptly quitting the band while on tour in Japan, he took his spooked self back to Los Angeles and holed himself up spending the next year in deep depression. Becoming a junkie was a choice he made both to get him closer to the "ghosts" he claimed guided him during the recording of Bloodsugar, and to snap him out of his creative slump. It worked on both accounts. Frusciante jumped into the addict's life full bore, smothering his confusion with hard drugs and tinkering away with instruments and a four-track recorder in his living room whenever the spirit moved him. Anyone looking for that 'ol Chili Pepper white boy funk is in for a shock.

Backwards and forwards guitars, howling vocals spitting stream-of-conscious lyrics, feedback, piano, vocal effects, layers and layers of both electric and acoustic guitars fill the CD with caustic music the likes of which this world had never seen. The art work is grocery-bag-brown with two photos showing the musician standing in a barren landscape with a 1920's styled outfit of a brimmed, possibly knit hat and fur collared coat. His face is heavily made up; his skin is inhumanly white. On the inside are hand-scrawled lyrics and song titles; words are crossed out and disfigured with what appears to be burns.

The first half of the CD (Niandra Lades) opens with his coarse, whispered ghost voice counting off the song followed by a puzzle of amazing guitar work, layers of it, actually. Electric, acoustic, distorted, clean…three or four different songs going off at once. Then his voice cuts over the top setting the tone immediately: "Thank God I found you/Beautiful talkin' well it was to me/Do you see?/There's no more me/I'm happy as can be."

"My Smile Is A Rifle" (fantastic title) follows and begins with more amazing guitar work that drips with melody then switches into a waltz as he sings, "My smile is a rifle, won't you give it a try/My smile is a rifle and I'm pointing it at you…" Perhaps not wanting to take himself too seriously, he forces his voice into excruciating high pitches and squeals not heard since Yoko Ono's Fly LP. More vocal experiments with "Running Away Into You" as he takes the last word of each line and puts it through a delay system and turns up the pitch until the words finally turn into a series of tones, while he lazily strums an acoustic and sings the song's title behind it giving it a ghastly unreal effect. "Mascara" contains two alternating guitar parts along with his double tracked vocals. He sings two different sets of lyrics, one of which happens to be the chorus for the very next song, "Been Insane": "I've been insane/Well the time is slow/Don't you want sunshine instead of phony lights?/All your billboards in light/I want big fight against the baby inside/That your mistaking for pain…"

Despite the chaos, his playing has been fairly precise until track 11, "Blood On My Neck From Success" (another great title). Here his voice is low and ragged (no doubt from the opiates) and his playing sloppy. It's heroin addict John taking on rock star John in a chilling battle over credibility and self worth: "I've got blood on my neck from success / For landing on the corner / [screams] Scared / What they want from me / They…"

The thirteen tracks that make up the second half, (Usually Just A T-Shirt), are all untitled and are mostly instrumentals (some clocking in at 60 seconds, a few over six minutes) combining backwards electric and forwards acoustic, piano and sampled effects. Songs cut off and another quickly clicks on in its place. Eerie disembodied voices, screams, moans and yelps punctuate the acoustic guitar runs on "Untitled #8" (track 20) bounces between the bluesy finger picking of Blind Boy Fuller to Sonic Youth string bending experiments.

The high water mark of Frusciante's drug induced chaos hits on "Untitled Track #3" (track 15 on the CD). Thick, clean electric guitar plucking in tandem with his voice as he rams together words and images: "A dove is a glove that I wear on my heart and you know I like to dress smart it doesn't have any part it doesn't have any part of the world of fashion, and you're there to put me down, and I'm sick of all the frowns that follow me around…"

There was little in the way of promotion for this thing. Frusciante ended up scaring the hell out of the few writers who bothered to show up with his ghastly state and vague answers (once confusing a writer from Bikini Magazine for one from Guitar Magazine and wondered out loud when the guitar questions would start). Reviews were luke-warm at best, most of them cutting the troubled musician some slack. His label cut him from their roster. A year later, a now famous L.A. Weekly article found the musician in a gone state, missing his teeth and hair, fingernails and pants stained with blood, ratty clothes and vague answers to questions. Good as dead. He recorded and released another CD, 1998's Smile From The Streets You Hold (Birdman Records), that is even creepier and wasted sounding than Niandra Lades and now very out of print but well worth finding if you like this one.

From there he disappeared for a few years and emerged battered but not beaten. Having cleaned up in 1999, Frusciante rejoined the Red Hot Chili Peppers who had been in an artistic slump since his departure. His third solo release, the much more stable To Record Only Water, was released in 2001. In the space of twelve months (February 2004 and February 2005) he wrote, recorded and released four solo records. Although they all have that now distinctive Frusciante stamp of eccentricity, none of these post-drug phase records have the death chill imbedded in the music.

It took the Lost & Found Department years to finally get comfortable with this CD. Once you do get used to it, (if you get used to it), it's difficult to tear yourself away. Compelling, 100% honest, raw and uncompromising with amazing Leo Kottke/John Fahey guitar work. A challenging piece of work but pure gold if you can handle it. Plus he lives in the end.