portrait of the artist as a young man

the below is taken from the 'funky monks' dvd, which documents the recording of the red hot chili peppers' 'bloodsugarsexmagik'. there's a nice back story to the making of this album; wikipedia has a pretty good account. it's one of those albums that ranks up there as a personal guitar bible, and in tandem with my best efforts to learn it song for song, i've made it a point to become acquainted with where guitarist john frusciante's head was at the time of recording, something for which this dvd has been a go-to resource.

i am a fan of what he has to say starting around the 3:52 mark:



it's good to bear in mind that john frusciante was only 20-21 years old at the time, not to mention that he was smoking a shitload of weed, and you sort of have to forget about the locker room humor on display in the rest of the clip, but that said, there's a lot of wisdom there; a balanced ego is a great ally in creative endeavors, and it is good to recognize that the outside world has the potential to upset that balance by stoking/diminishing the ego.

where john frusciante veered into deadly territory was when he chose to avoid perceived ugliness in the world by escaping into heroin shortly after the recording of the album. music's filled with too many instances of greatness succumbing to self-destruction, and one of rock's great survival stories is that he fought back against his demons (ones that left him barely clinging to life) and entered rehab, emerging a healthy, replenished individual who claims that a pursuit of asceticism has taken him higher than drugs* and who has gone on to generate a fairly staggering creative output.

side-stepping the world's ugliness by numbing yourself to the point where it doesn't register is the path of least resistance, and leaves you ill-prepared for when darkness inevitably comes calling to roost. the funny thing is that actually embracing the world's ugliness and accepting it as an indelible facet of experience is not letting it win or giving up, and in fact takes a great amount of strength to do. there is an irony (the good kind) to the fact that once you start accepting that there is ugliness and falsity and suffering in existence, and embracing the humility that comes from serious contemplation of one's infinitesimal place in the scheme of joy and woe, that the inner voice actually begins to grow, and finds that it has a function in harmony and order just as essential as anything else.

* realized at some point that i'm troubled by the semantics of the old cliche that you hear from people who have lived rock and roll and come out the other side and insist that spirituality gets you 'higher than any drug' -- it inhibits the potential of spirit by framing it with the language of altered consciousness.