Happy 30th Anniversary to John Frusciante’s debut solo album Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt, originally released November 22, 1994.
Everything you need to know about Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt, the solo album made by former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante after he ran away from the band at the height of their popularity, can be found in Off the Map, a 2001 concert video.
The Chili Peppers show documented in that video, recorded after Frusciante had rejoined the group, features Frusciante singing "Untitled #3" from Niandra, before perfectly segueing the rest of the band into "Scar Tissue," one of the singles from 1999's Californication album, which marked Frusciante's return to the Red Hot fold. The two songs fit together perfectly, Frusciante's sad ballad sounding almost like a lost 1950s track sliding seamlessly into "Scar Tissue," which has a similar throwback sound. Someone unfamiliar with the two tunes might think they were one song, so well do they mesh together.
Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt is an artist's sketch book, letting the listener in to the creative process. The songs are lo-fi, recorded on a four-track, and occasionally even a stereo. The performances are unpolished, feeling like first-takes of ideas. But the ideas are solid, and as Frusciante showed with “Untitled #3,” they fit snugly into his songwriting canon.
The record’s rough sound can make this cohesiveness challenging to recognize. Part of the album’s free-flowing recording style was because Frusciante was in the throes of drug addiction, which, oddly enough, he claimed focused him on his music. In a chilling 1996 interview with Phoenix New Times, he explained, "Heroin emphasizes whatever you are...Like, if you want to record music, it'll help you concentrate on that more, but if you want to lie in bed and not do anything, it'll help you do that better."
The songs often mimic the cadences of heroin addiction. The aforementioned "Untitled #3" is less than two minutes long, but about half of that time is the end of the track, which degenerates into Frusciante muttering to himself. The impact is jarring and upsetting, but also provides a peek into an artist's private sketches, where they might have 20 different drawings of a foot from different angles. The creative process is weird, and while narcotics probably don't help with the refinement of the songs, Niandra feels like an honest window into how Frusciante composes.
The album can be a challenging first listen. There's an underlying poppiness to the melodies, but it's all wrapped in meandering guitar solos and desperate vocals that sound like someone calling for help from a distance too far away to investigate but too close to ignore. There's a lack of self-consciousness to the songs that leaves you feeling like you're hearing something you might not supposed to be.
Listen to the Album:
There are, of course, many bands who use a similarly lo-fi sound, if not even less produced. Artists like the wonderful Jack Logan and Guided by Voices have perfected that recording style, but don't deploy the emotional vulnerability shown by Frusciante. Every sound on Niandra conveys distress. The songs drown in his hurt.
Once you adjust to the palpable pain of Niandra LaDes, it's actually a surprisingly accessible album. Entertainment Weekly, hardly the standard-bearer for genre-defying music, gave the album a B- review, writing "There's a fine line between brilliant and unlistenable, and Frusciante squarely straddles it here."
The fact that Entertainment Weekly was covering the album at all is fascinating. Of course, 1994 was a long time ago, when there were many more magazines, and those magazines had the space and inclination to cover music. But it also speaks to how big a deal Frusciante was. Which doesn't mean the album sold. It didn't, selling around 45,000 in its initial release, barely 1% of what Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991) would eventually ship. But it's amazing to think an album like this would get any attention in a mainstream magazine whose cover featured Jimmy Smits and Dennis Franz promoting NYPD Blue.
Frusciante is a pop aficionado. His at-times prolific solo work, while never as mainstream as his on-again, off-again day job with the Chili Peppers, often flirts with conventional production and performances. He's covered Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" and the Bee Gees' "How Deep is Your Love" as solo pieces in concert with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Those influences don't just arise out of the ether, nor do they simply ever leave a person. These pop influences are similarly in evidence on Niandra LaDes. "Curtains" is just voice and piano, and while it's a stretch to say it's influenced by Elton John, if one concentrates on the pretty, rolling melody and tunes out what sounds like a scratch vocal track, you can almost imagine John performing it in a huge stadium, backed by a mammoth band, Billy Joel, perhaps, lurking close by.
Conversely, some of the tracks are much harder to understand. "Blood On My Neck From Success" sounds like it was recorded using an unplugged electric guitar. A plugged-in electric spills itself all over the track, sounding more like a recorder than anything else. It's mixed so quietly that you have to crank the volume to hear Frusciante hint at a melody over the repetitive groove. There could be a song in the swirls of noise, but it's very hard to hear, the visual equivalent of peering into a dark room through smudged glass. "Untitled #10" is less than 30 seconds of a funk/country riff with no vocals. At 25 tracks, Niandra is a bit of a mixed bag.
Thinking about Frusciante sent me back to Syd Barrett, another talented guitarist who left a popular band (Pink Floyd) due to addiction struggles. Interestingly, Barrett's early solo records (The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, both released in 1970), while odd at times, also feel fairly comprehensively produced. Whatever Barrett's performance and consistency issues, his producers were able to iron them out, if not completely remove the imperfections, so as to tidy up his recordings. Frusciante, working three decades later, has the luxury of home recording to allow him to deliver his music, as he imagines it, pretty much directly to the listener. And the result is just that: music from an artist struggling with addiction, but still trying to create. It's unmediated Frusciante.
And that's what ultimately makes Niandra LaDes so interesting: the unobstructed view it gives of Frusciante at that specific moment in time and the insights it provides into his creative process. His work is a puzzle, but the pieces don't necessarily fit together within self-contained albums. Instead, they extend across his work as a whole, from the solo albums, to the Chili Peppers, even to his electronic work performed as Trickfinger. There's a connection between it all, but the fun of Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt is that all of the pieces are out of order, some even flipped over, and the listener gets to assemble the puzzle into their own personal picture.
It doesn't make for an easy listen, but, as heard in Off the Map, the payout makes it worth the effort. Frusciante’s sketchbook is also a blank canvas.
LISTEN:
Editor's note: this anniversary tribute was originally published in 2019 and has since been edited for accuracy and timeliness.