After Queens, Red Hot Chili Peppers took the stage for their festival-closing performance. Dinosaurs from way back when Lollapalooza was only a gleam in Perry Farrell’s eye, RHCP can still make a live show boil with tightly wound energy. It wasn’t Flea’s multicolored Riddler-style unisuit, or Anthony Kiedis’ silky hair and calculated shirt-removal moments. It was the quartet’s sense of themselves as a band, often playing together at the center of the stage, arranged in a loose star shape, Flea slapping away at his bass while John Frusciante played his beat-up Stratocaster like a man possessed. Which, in a way, he is. Frusciante’s struggles with heroin are documented, so when he’s on stage with RHCP, the frailness of his face and body hidden not only by long hair and a baggy suit but his furious, impossibly focused guitar playing, you stop and thank someone that addiction works both ways. The Chili Peppers didn’t play enough of the truly durable hits from their deep catalog, and more than one bass solo is never necessary. But Frusciante even reined in the jamming, and when the onstage camera captured him in close-up, his eyes squeezed shut and a look of rabid concentration on his face, you knew his performance was about joy and pain in competing amounts.
Toward the end of the band’s set, the stage emptied but for Frusciante, who played a brilliant solo version of Simon and Garfunkel’s "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her." It wasn’t accompanied by any VH1 Storytellers intro. Frusciante didn’t even notice that the majority of the crowd — jackasses seemingly more happy to crowd-surf and mosh lamely than enjoy the set — weren’t even listening. He just played the song, the onstage camera displaying his POV on the enormous big screen, one skinny guy with long hair playing a folk ballad for 30,000 people who didn’t know how good they had it. It was another moment inside a massive weekend of music, and it made everything — Jared Leto, mismatched bookings, outsized sponsorships and almost being kicked in the face by an Afro-headed Australian — more than worth it.
note to frusciante fans: yes, we know that John has been free and clear of drugs for quite some time, living the life of a man possessed by music.
"Ascending endlessly and I don't even have to try," John Frusciante, Curtains
