You may know John Frusciante as the intermittent guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He infamously quit the foursome only moments before he was due to go on-stage with them in Japan in 1992 because of a premonition he had. For the next seven years Frusciante rarely picked up a guitar, and spent most of his time in a drug induced daze. But he insists those days were not ill spent. “I didn’t quit playing music because of the drugs,” he explains, “I quit playing because I wanted to stop playing music, and the drugs were something I took to self medicate myself. And it worked.” During that time he often communicated with ghosts and the disembodied voices that were his constant companions-voices that imparted knowledge according to Frusciante “that few men ever get to hear.” But by the end of 1997, he had cured himself of his addictions by watching videos and dancing alone for hours in his living room. His new solo album Shadows Collide With People (Warner Bros.) is in stores now.

HARP: What did you do after you quit the Red Hot Chili Peppers?
John Frusciante: At the time that I quit the band I made the decision to be a drug addict. For me that was what I had to do at that point. I needed to separate myself from the rat race of the world.

HARP: I understand after finishing the sessions for the Chili Peppers, you’d work on your solo album, but on Wednesdays you would go out dancing.
JF: When I first stopped doing drugs, the hardest thing was to get back to being able to function as a person. Your mind and body becomes used to it, and you just feel like this real boring person when you stop. And there was about nine months where I didn’t even feel like I deserved to be called John Frusciante. So I would just dance. I had this pretty good size living room and all day long I would do these dances to all the music that I liked, whether it was Black Sabbath, or the Cure or something else.

HARP: What’s the the biggest difference between the Chili Peppers now and the band twelve years ago?
JF: Everybody’s very appreciative of the other guys. I think deep down, at the time of Blood Sugar each one of us thought that he was the most important one in the group, and I think that now we see what we create together as a group as the most important thing.

HARP: Early in your career the live shows were a testosterone fest. Did the aggressive nakedness ever bother you?
JF: I definitely lost my taste for being like that once I developed any kind of sensitivity as an artist. I don’t know if you ever saw me at that period of time, but by the time we were touring for the Blood Sugar album, I just stood there on stage with my back to the audience. I didn’t participate in Anthony and Flea’s athletics. There was something ugly about it to me. It was masculine to the point of being gross.

HARP: What’s one thing you’d change about yourself?
JF: I really love being myself, I wouldn’t change places with anybody. I think anything that anybody wants to change about themselves, they should take a closer look, because it could just be a matter of looking at that flaw in a different way, rather than removing it.