What is "Californication?" Anthony Kiedis:
It's not a sexual reference. "Californication" is really just the act of the world being affected and saturated by the art and the culture being born and raised in California. Travelling around the world, no matter how far I go, I see the affect that California has on the world. It's about that good and bad, beautiful and ugly.
Flea: This is our greatest and best album, thank you.
John Frusciante: Yeah. Yeah, it's my favorite.
F:
The truth is that only once have we made two records in a row with the same lineup, and that was "Mothers Milk" and "Blood Sugar [Sex Magik]." We liked "Mothers Milk" at the time but "Blood Sugar" was leaps and bounds beyond it. I don't know if it's going to happen again, but we just made "Californication" and we just think that it is the greatest thing that we have ever done.
MusicMania: Would you say this is the classic lineup of the band?
AK:
In the last ten years, it's certainly the classic lineup. Having, you know, Hillel [Slovak] was also an amazing lineup for us, because Flea and Hillel had a certain brand of telepathic communication that only happens once in a lifetime. John is kind of the other classic lineup.
MusicMania: So let me start back seven years ago. What was the feeling in the group when John left? Were you, like, devastated or --
AK:
Yeah, I was devastated. I was confused and it hurt, because you know, for one thing, John and I had gone from being very best friends... to just being completely alienated from each other. Now seven years later I see that it all made perfect sense and it had to happen that way.
MusicMania: So John, what where you thinking when you decided to leave this group seven years ago?
JF:
I told Flea that there was nothing I was enjoying about being in the band anymore. All I know is we hated each other, we didn't make each other feel good as people, we didn't like being around each other. It was lame. I mean, we were good and were tight on stage and deep down we loved each other, but we all reacted differently to the various personal problems that we had throughout that year.
MusicMania: Was this like a drug thing?
JF: No, not a drug thing. It had to do with the way we responded to being successful.
F:
I don't know. I think it was different for all of us, and [at] that time, we weren't getting along good. I can only speak for myself. It was terrible.
JF:
It was. At first I wasn't quitting, because I loved Flea so much and dug what we had together and playing together that so much that I wasn't going to quit the band and leave Flea without me. But then I realized I was making Flea miserable. There was no reason for me to stay in the band at that point, when my love for him was the only thing keeping me in the band and the only thing making me feel good. I started to realize he was going to feel better without me.
MusicMania: Did you feel better when he left?
F: Yeah.
MusicMania: Of course then, you didn't have a guitar player.
F:
[Laughs] Yeah. Actually I was really sad when he left, and it was terrible and I didn't even know what to do. But then after that we went on and did some tours, though it may not have been... well, definitely we were just playing stuff we created with John, and the hardcore magic that helped us create what we created wasn't there. It still was a lot easier to work with John. The separateness of what was happening was so hard. It was just a lot less stress, and maybe it was not as deep, but I was more relaxed.
