Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt - John Frusciante

Dedicated to Clara Balzary, bandmate Flea's daughter
(Source: wikipedia.org)

"My smile is a rifle, won't you give it a try?"


The first time I listened to Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt was in the back of my family’s campervan parked in Calais after we’d just been robbed. I hadn’t listened to it – or any of Frusciante’s narcotic haze of nineties releases – since, preferring his more polished offerings of To Record Only Water for Ten Days and Shadows Collide With People, until my sister bought me a copy of Niandra Lades for my birthday. My main memories of the album were Frusciante’s wails making me jump as I tried to drift off with my headphones in. So, safe to say, I was a little apprehensive upon receiving this gift.

    
Although released in 1994, the first half of the album – Niandra Lades – was recorded prior to Frusciante’s departure from the Red Hot Chili Peppers during the recording of Blood Sugar Sex Magik at the allegedly haunted mansion formerly belonging to magician Harry Houdini. The album’s second half, on which all the tracks are untitled – Usually Just a T-Shirt – was recorded on tour preceding Frusciante’s departure from the band in Tokyo. Two tracks, 'Height Down' and 'Well I’ve Been', recorded with River Phoenix, were supposed to feature on Niandra Lades as the pair were close friends, but they were removed at the request of River’s family following his death in 1993. However, they do feature on Frusciante’s next solo album Smile from the Streets You Hold (released in 1997 to his future chagrin), and they make for an eerily beautiful if very trippy listen.

The inspiration for Niandra Lades:
Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, c. 1921
(Source: stadium-arcadium.com)

The back story to the album’s artwork is definitely worth reading up on. The cover of Niandra Lades is one of my favourites (my all-time favourite is U2’s War), and it features John in drag as his female alter ego Niandra Lades (alongside scrawly handwritten lyrics), whose look was inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s character Rrose Sélavy from 1921. Rrose Sélavy is a pun on the French ‘Eros, c’est la vie’ or, alternately, ‘arroser la vie’ meaning to make a toast to life. John’s idea for an alter ego apparently came from his love of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust (his avid cocaine use and desire to look like a skeleton also stemmed from Bowie). The photographs featured on the front and back covers of Niandra Lades are stills from a short film entitled Desert In Shape by John’s then-girlfriend Toni Oswald in 1992. The film was soundtracked by Frusciante but never officially released, although I believe it’s been screened in some galleries before (more on that here).

One critic described Niandra Lades as “disturbingly intimate”, and not to take the words out of their mouth, but I probably couldn’t put it better myself. The album is dreamy and somewhat unsettling, and you can’t help but feel that you’re listening to something private that you weren’t supposed to hear, but you almost enjoy it. Frusciante sings kind of tunelessly, and although he claims he “was stoned for every note [he] played on the album”, there is something ambient and almost profound in his ramblings. 'Blood on My Neck From Success' explores his alienation with the sudden attention the Red Hot Chili Peppers were receiving at the time, and 'Your Pussy’s Glued to a Building on Fire' (coolest song title ever?) is dark and simply stunning. 'My Smile is a Rifle' is my favourite song on the album and I can’t even put it into words; the raw emotion is ethereal and hypnotic and wistful and just fucking magical. The first half of the album also features a Bad Brains cover, 'Big Takeover', a fiery punk song slowed waaaay down. Usually Just a T-Shirt is an avant-garde mish-mash of guitar, piano and synths and Frusciante’s heavy cocaine and heroin use is apparent, but fundamental to what makes Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt what it is – whatever that is.

A gaunt-looking and evidently high Frusciante gives an interview
to a Dutch TV channel in 1994
(Source: imgarcade.com)

I think Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt is one of those albums that you have to just ‘get’; sort of like The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. It’s a cult classic, and I for one love it. My sister is a die-hard Katy Perry fan and she gets its appeal. My Dad hears nothing but noise. It’s the twisted, unconventional, otherworldly experimentations of a junkie, a tortured soul, a musical genius, even. If you hadn’t already guessed, my appreciation of the album has changed drastically since that grey night in France when we were robbed; bizarrely, the items that were stolen we found returned in a neat bundle again the next morning.