For John Frusciante, 1996 was a tough year. "I don’t care whether I live or die," the guitarist admitted to an American journalist who called to visit him in the winter of '96 during his brief stay at the upscale Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles after the guitarist had been kicked out of his Hollywood home for non-payment of rent.
A barely-functioning drug addict at the time, with a $500 a day habit, Frusciante admitted that he'd "almost died" earlier in the year: his body contained just one twelfth of the blood it was supposed to have, he explained, and that blood was infected. A blood transfusion saved his life, but the near death experience did nothing to make Frusciante take better care of his health: his first thought after the procedure, he later confessed, was, "Great, I’m good to go again. Let me get my hands on some more drugs." At the point at which he was kicked out of his home, the guitarist also reportedly owed $30,000 to his drug dealer, and might have been killed if friends hadn't rallied round to take care of his debt. Some understandably wondered if they were merely delaying the inevitable.
Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro wasn't one of Frusciante's closest friends at the time, so in mid-1996 he was a little surprised to receive a phone call from the man he'd replaced in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Frusciante told him that he was in detox in a Los Angeles hospital, and was determined to kick his habit, but he needed a favour.
"He called me and said, 'I’m sitting in a hospital and I don’t have a guitar. Can you loan me one?' Navarro recalled in a recent interview with Guitar World.
Navarro was only too familiar with the pain of drug addiction, and the challenges involved in getting clean, and so had no hesitation in gifting Frusciante one of his guitars, a Gibson Les Paul that he had purchased five years earlier for a prospective audition with Guns N' Roses which never came to pass. The guitar wouldn't remain in Frusciante's hands for very long.
"He apparently sold the guitar once he got out of rehab," Navarro told Guitar World. "And that was that – I never saw that guitar again."
But the story doesn't end there. Years later, Navarro received an out-of-the-blue phone call from Frusciante, now re-installed in the Chili Peppers.
"He goes, 'I remember years ago, when I was in the hospital, you brought me this Les Paul, which was really nice of you. Thank you so much for that'," Navarro recalled. "He went, 'I got out of detox and I sold it. I’m really sorry'."
The contrite guitarist asked Navarro if he could drop by his house. When he arrived, he was bearing a gift for his host, a Gibson Les Paul Custom, known to guitarists the world over as a Black Beauty.
"He was like, 'I just wanted to apologize for selling your guitar,'" Navarro remembered. "'I know it’s not the same guitar, but I know you had a Black Beauty in Jane’s Addiction on the original record, and [it] got broken, and you don’t have it anymore, so I got you this'."
Touched by the gesture, Navarro welcomed Frusciante into his home, and the pair spent the next few hours talking about music and their intertwined histories. A proper friendship was born.
On February 8, 2020, Navarro and Frusciante played together for the very first time, when Jane's Addiction and Red Hot Chili Peppers were both booked to play a charity event in Los Angeles hosted by the Tony Hawk Foundation.
“I called John immediately and said, Dude, you have to join us for a song. I'm not going to let you not play with us," Navarro told Guitar World last year, explaining how Frusciante came to guest with his band on Mountain song. "He was like, 'Yeah, I'd love to.' And that's how it happened.”
Who doesn't love a happy ending?
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
