Tattooed Love Boys

''None of us have been hanging-out friends for a long time,'' Frusciante confesses, idly stroking his rough, Jesus-like beard one night in his home up in the Hollywood Hills. ''Maybe we know each other too well. When you're in a band, your lives are one life. You make the same money. You go to the same places at the same time. It's overload. It's better to have your own life to create your own identity. So when you do come together, you're not sick of each other.''

It has, in fact, come to this: Flea and Smith -- who roomed together on Smith's first tours with the band after he emigrated from Michigan and joined in 1989 -- are talking about sharing a daddies' bus, with accommodations for their respective families, on the Chili Peppers' upcoming U.S. tour. Flea and Frusciante, in turn, both practice Vipassana, a style of Buddhist meditation. ''There's no chant,'' Flea explains. ''You sit quietly and observe the images in your head.'' Flea, usually a motormouth, has gone to retreats where he managed to stay silent ''three days straight.'' Asked about religion, Kiedis -- who has been sober since the late Nineties -- simply says, ''I don't go for sects and denominations,'' although he is reported to be a follower of the high-profile branch of Jewish mysticism, kabbalah.

''We all have different priorities now,'' Smith says. ''When I'm not with the band, I want to be with Nancy and Cole'' -- his wife and year-old son. ''But I don't have to meditate with John to feel connected to him. Or play golf with Flea, although I have and will.'' Smith notes that in 2004, the band took six months off and he saw the others ''once or twice. It was fine. It wasn't weird. I'm forty-three. I want to be with my family.''

But when the Chili Peppers started writing Stadium Arcadium in September of that year, Smith says, ''I couldn't wait to go to fucking rehearsal. The shit we were coming up with was high quality. And there was lots of it.''

Even Kiedis is surprised by the tenacity of his relationships with the other Chili Peppers, particularly Flea. ''Recently we realized that it was a crying shame that Flea and I weren't hanging out anymore,'' Kiedis says. ''He was calling, inviting me to go kayaking. And I'm going, 'Yeah, yeah, one of these days.'

''Then I went through a difficult time two months ago -- I rediscovered some things about me that had to change -- and I had this awakening: 'This guy is important to me. And I can't be the guy who says, 'One day, one day....'

''We have reconnected,'' Kiedis says brightly. ''And it feels so much better.''

John Frusciante's house is much like his head. Both are almost entirely devoted to music. In Frusciante's living room, floor-to-ceiling cabinets are filled with vinyl albums; narrow paths have been plowed through the overflow piles of CDs, more LPs and guitars on the floor. On the remaining free walls hang original paintings by Don Van Vliet, the avant-rock singer-composer also known as Captain Beefheart.

Over an interview dinner of steak and vegetables that he whips up himself on his George Foreman grill, Frusciante talks excitedly about current passions: Hendrix, Mozart and the British pop-art band the Move, the last introduced to him by Frusciante's late friend Johnny Ramone. ''I have an addictive personality,'' Frusciante concedes later, relaxing on a set of cushions in the living room as he talks about, among other things, his decision to bolt the Chili Peppers in 1992 and the years of death-defying drug use that followed. ''But that part of me is to my benefit, because it enables me to make the music I do.''

In a band of outsized personalities -- Kiedis' warrior-frontman electricity; Flea's hyperkinetic energy, on stage and off; Smith's big-bear bonhomie -- Frusciante seems like a man of quiet drive, consumed by music and devotion to his band. Actually, in conversation, he talks a blue streak and openly professes his faith in cosmic forces and desires to transcend time and space. ''A lot of the time, when Flea and Chad and I play, there's an unmistakable feeling that the music was there before we went into the room, waiting for us.'' And he means it.

Frusciante was just as certain of his destiny as a teenager: ''I knew that I was going to be a rock & roll guitar player. When teachers told me, 'You gotta have something to fall back on,' I knew they were wrong.'' With his parents' permission, he took a proficiency test and left high school at sixteen. Two years later, he was a Chili Pepper.

''When I look back over the way I grew up -- my whole progress as a listener as well as a player -- it all led straight to being in this band,'' he says. Aside from several solo albums and sessions for friends like prog-rock extremists the Mars Volta, Frusciante, now thirty-six, has never been in any other group but the Chili Peppers. Even when he quit, he says, ''I didn't realize how much what I was playing had to do with Flea. I thought I was the goods, with or without him. That wasn't the case.''

Today, Frusciante is not just the band's guitarist. He is an orchestrator whose attention to guitar-overdub and background-vocal detail has transformed the Chili Peppers' records. His encyclopedic lust for music is everywhere on Stadium Arcadium: the loving allusion to Hendrix in the ''Purple Haze''-like guitar explosion at the end of ''Dani California''; the Mountain-inspired riff in ''Readymade'' (a tribute to Johnny Ramone, who loved that band); the high Sixties-pop harmonies Frusciante sings all over the two CDs.

''He's like a mad scientist in the studio,'' Smith says, ''and we let him do his thing.'' At one point during the Stadium sessions, Frusciante gave Smith a CD of seven songs on which he'd been working. ''The vocals were like the fucking Bee Gees -- not in a bad way, but it wasn't what I expected.'' Smith's wife had a more basic reaction: ''Wow, that sounds beautiful.''