Live Chili Peppers 2022....

[budda12ax7]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioc7D5SOSJY

Not a massive fan, but I thought this was good. Funny how they basically wear their street clothes. Nice Hendrix-y stuff from John.

[whitewatersky]

I saw them 5 times earlier this year. they were so good. to enjoy them like I do, you gotta be a fan, obviously....
was well worth all the time, money, effort for this megafan .
my show videos are here: https://youtu.be/a2mgxYLqX1g

[PorkyPrimeCut]

I'm not gonna rag on this time.

Although I'm not much of a fan, Californication has a place in my heart after it became the unofficial soundtrack to my backpacking adventures in New Zealand, back in 1999/2000. Everyone was playing it!!

I think this is as good as I've ever seen them performing live.The best track off the album & such a hilarious contrast between Frusciante's scruff & Keadis's terrible "uniform".

[Kent]

Lost interest after BSSM. They seem to have lost any edge or novelty.

[Embenny]

Strongly disagree. I think they did most of their best work after BSSM. John's songwriting and playing is what took them from a novelty act (a white boy rapping over white guys playing funk), and his influence was much stronger post-rehab (Californication onwards). But he was young and strung out and the drugs really stunted his work - he wrote and played far better sober than he ever did in the late 80's and early 90's.

I love Josh Klinghoffer but completely lost interest in the band when John left the second time. Josh just wasn't the right fit. Half the time, the songs and the production seemed to be trying to bury him as though to prevent people from noticing John was gone. It just felt way off.

I've given the new albums with John a listen and there's some decent stuff in there, but it very much sounds like what it basically is - John shaking off over a decade of rust. He almost never played guitar on his albums after leaving RHCP the second time. He was mostly doing weird synthesizer shit.

He seems to be regaining his songwriting and playing form, though. The newest stuff is stronger than the first songs they released upon his return. Same trajectory kinda happened when he rejoined in the late 90s.

[wooderson]

I have a soft spot for "Scar Tissue" - but the later emphasis on ballads and Kiedis crooning in general, ugh.

[wingnutkj]

Strongly disagree. I think they did most of their best work after BSSM. John's songwriting and playing is what took them from a novelty act (a white boy rapping over white guys playing funk), and his influence was much stronger post-rehab (Californication onwards). But he was young and strung out and the drugs really stunted his work - he wrote and played far better sober than he ever did in the late 80's and early 90's.
...
He seems to be regaining his songwriting and playing form, though. The newest stuff is stronger than the first songs they released upon his return. Same trajectory kinda happened when he rejoined in the late 90s.

I think I'm with you on this - I find John to be the most interesting member of the band. I've not listened to the most recent stuff though - the talk-like-a-pirate single they released put me off a bit, and "Return of the Dream Canteen" album cover is one of the worst things I've ever seen with my eyes. I've no idea why it offends me so much, but it's AWFUL.

[budda12ax7]

Working on "Snow Hey Oh"....some serious guitar workout ...but fun.

[whitewatersky]

Working on "Snow Hey Oh"....some serious guitar workout ...but fun.

I'm sure you've seen this, but worth a look if a John fan:
Paul Davids: EPIC RIFFS | Is this the hardest riff to play on guitar? - Frusciante
https://youtu.be/vbuUgetNnKQ

[PapaB]

I like the RHCPs, (I think they have a song Cabrón too! ) especially because I'm a fan of one of Frucinante's biggest fans, a young man named Dave Simpson, on the internet.
This cat is terrific, has a great video chanel, and loves JF.
O

[Embenny]

Working on "Snow Hey Oh"....some serious guitar workout ...but fun.

I'm sure you've seen this, but worth a look if a John fan:
Paul Davids: EPIC RIFFS | Is this the hardest riff to play on guitar? - Frusciante
https://youtu.be/vbuUgetNnKQ

I'm a big Frusciante fan, but I find videos like that a bit annoying. There's nothing particularly impressive about the technical fundamentals of the riff. Plenty of guitarists play plenty of things that are much more complex and challenging. Yes, it's sort of the guitar equivalent of a tongue twister, but like any tongue twister, all it takes to sort that out is some practice. I think making a big deal about it is missing the forest for the trees.

The truly impressive thing about that song to me, like most of Frusciante's best work, is the writing and arrangement more so than the technicals. The bass, drums, and melody during the verse are all very simple. Frusciante's riff provides the real intrigue that elevates the song into something special. One of his greatest strengths is his instinct for when to add "more" and when to pull it back. He identifies the holes in the groove or the song and has a real knack for figuring out how best to compliment it.

Compare Snow with a song from the same album likeWarlocks. The verse has so much movement and interplay between the bass and vocals that the best thing he can do is get out of the way. He only plays 3 notes per bar during the verse, and two of them are the same.

Both Snow and Warlocks have fantastic grooves. He puts the guitar front and centre in the former and recedes completely into the background on the latter. Both songs would be much weaker had he gone the other direction.

On the previous album, he took it to an even farther extreme on Throw Away Your Television. The bass and drums form such a complete groove, and the vocals have so much movement overtop that he simply plays nothing at all to begin with, then starts adding all of 3 notes every two bars. In order to continue the rise in energy heading toward the chorus without crowding the arrangement, he simply becomes an extra percussion instrument and plays muted 16th notes (filled out a bit by his delay pedal).

There's absolutely nothing technically proficient about any of that playing at all. It's incredibly proficient arrangement, though. He basically recognized that the verse didn't need guitar at all, so he sat out and then played the role of percussion.

When it was time to raise the energy with a guitar solo after the second chorus, he kept the focus of the song on rhythm by using a step filter overtop an incredibly simple solo. The step filter keeps the focus on rhythm and groove, which is the whole point of the song.

Contrast all of the above approaches with Dosed, one of Frusciante's finest arranging jobs. The drums, bass, and vocals are all very simple. All of the sonic intrigue there comes from the density and interplay of his multitracked arrangement, the way solo lines weave in and out of the base arpeggio (actually, arpeggios, as there are two separate ones simultaneously) as his harmonies fill out the space left by the simple (but pretty) vocal melody.

All of those songs take completely different approaches to the guitar's role in the song. From dense playing that forms the rhythmic backbone of the song (Snow) to "barely a guitar part" (TAYT) to rhythmic funk stabs (Warlocks) to dense multitracked layers that carry the song (Dosed).

Josh Klinghoffer could play every one of those guitar lines without breaking a sweat, as could thousands of other guitarists, but he never wrote or arranged anywhere near that proficiently. That is John Frusciante's true mastery, and is why the Chili Peppers' massive discography has two tiers of albums - "featuring John Frusciante" and "featuring everyone else."

But I'm hardly a blind fanboy. It took John a while to hone those skills. You saw some development between Mother's Milk (where he was still basically trying to be Hillel Slovak) and BSSM (where he started to really shift the direction of the band with songs like Under The Bridge, I Could Have Lied, and Soul To Squeeze, which they held back for fear of making the album too slow and soft), but then his addiction and rehab derailed him. He picked back up where he left off on Californication, but the songwriting and arranging continued to get stronger and stronger until he left after Stadium Arcadium.

His sabbatical definitely caused him to accrue some rust, because his work on Unlimited Love was nowhere near as inspired, though there are flashes of the old John in there. Return of the Dream Canteen shows some further improvement, but he's still not displayed anything closed to his chops from the mid-2000s.

That makes sense, though. He spent over a decade playing weird synthesizer shit and barely touched a guitar. I hope they keep at it, and that he reaches his old heights and beyond.

[BlixaFan]

Said it better than I ever could. I agree fully. John is a huge part of why I’m the guitarist I am today

[budda12ax7]

WOT??? To the above above post...