Lassoed into the line-up at the age of just 18, John Frusciante had already battled an addiction to cocaine. Four years later, after Frusciante left the band in a state of disillusionment following the huge success of their fifth album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Kiedis, Flea and drummer Chad Smith decided their next guitarist should be a man who had found acclaim in a band whose collective drug use made the Chili Peppers look like Cliff Richard and the Shadows.
If Dave Navarro thought he might have a smoother ride than he did as a member of Jane’s Addiction, he was in for a sharp surprise. After five years of clean living, Kiedis had once more embraced benders of a kind that had his new bandmate pounding on his door with news that he had secured a place in rehab for the singer.
When Navarro was fired in 1998 after relapsing (Kiedis said the guitarist “had his own agenda, and that was to get high”), he was replaced by Frusciante – back in the Chili Peppers for a second stint.
After originally leaving the band in 1992, Frusciante had “decided to be a drug addict… because it gave me the ability to focus on my art and to forget about the rest of the world”. Six years later, he had reduced himself to the point where his arms were covered in abscesses and his teeth were falling out.
“I was smoking crack all day long, shooting heroin, shooting cocaine, drinking wine, taking Valium,” Frusciante told Mojo magazine. “I was this close to killing myself. But when I was going extremely fast in my head and feeling I was about to die, I would get these warnings from spirits saying, ‘You don’t want to die now’.”
Evidently, he didn’t. Instead, Frusciante began an on-off relationship with the Chili Peppers. After departing the group for a second time in 2009, he returned a decade later. At the time of writing, at least, the line-up of Kiedis, Flea, Frusciante and Smith has been in place since 2019.
