The Incredible Story Behind ‘Under The Bridge’

How Anthony Kiedis channeled his loneliness to world-renowned art.

It’s 1991 and Anthony Kiedis is feeling stuck.

The singer and co-founder of the Red Hot Chili Peppers has made quite the journey at this point. He’s only 29 years-old and the band has already recorded and released four albums. Their fourth album, Mother’s Milk, is the threshold where the RHCP finally start seeing success outside the conventional rock scene. Two years prior to this moment — in 1989 — Kiedis recalls in his memoir, Scar Tissue, that someone outside of music recognized him and his mates. It was the first time that “somebody other than the musical underground had arbitrarily become aware of us.”

Fast forward two years later, Kiedis and the team are recording their fifth studio album. This album would be released in September 1991, and the Chilis spent spring of that year recording it.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and you may reckon that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were obviously going to make even better music than in Mother’s Milk.

Mother’s Milk was their first album recorded after the band’s turmoil of the late 1980s. Hillel Slovak, the band’s founding guitarist and key to their early success, died in ’88 from a drug overdose. Around that time Anthony Kiedis was experiencing drug addiction himself and was able to overcome it thanks to rehab. Right before rehab, their founding drummer, Jack Irons, quit the band due to its chaos. After Kiedis came back from rehab, it wouldn’t be long until the band’s replacement for Irons, D.H. Peligro, was fired due to his own substance abuse. At some point in between, John Frusciante was hired to replace Hillel at guitar. He was known for his adeptness yet nonetheless was inexperienced and wasn’t ever in a band. Chad Smith was hired in lieu of Peligro, but that didn’t guarantee anything either. Maybe this guy would have issues, who knew?

In short, no, it was not obvious that the Chilis would do a good job with their fifth album.

They went from being a band of four co-founders (all four of whom have legacies; from Irons later joining Pearl Jam to Flea being regarded as one of the greatest bassists of all time) to half empty, and replacing their guitarist and drummer slots without certainty. Many bands would’ve died in this situation. After all, it is well regarded that team chemistry can be the make or break or an organization’s performance. The Chilis were on thin ice.

At this point in the story, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have only recorded one album together with their ’91 lineup: Mother’s Milk. That was in 1989. Although Mother’s Milk did achieve success, the band still had their problems.

Kiedis had been sober since his rehab program in ’89, and though this is a good thing, some would consider him not the easiest to work with. His bandmates still wanted the thrill of their highs, but couldn’t do anything around Kiedis. That ostracized Kiedis: when Flea and Frusciante wanted to smoke weed — which was pretty often — they felt like they couldn’t do it around him. And Chad Smith, though a talented drummer, wasn’t ever buddy-buddies on the same level as everyone else. He had his own life to live. Between Flea and Frusciante somewhat ignoring their singer and Smith’s lukewarm bond with his own band, Kiedis felt lonely.

You can imagine how stacked the odds were against Kiedis and the band.

Yet despite personal drama and new changes, that didn’t stop Kiedis and his friends from making world-class music.

One day during that spring in ’91, Kiedis arrived at the studio to find Flea and Frusciante already there and very high. They were in a “‘let’s ignore Anthony’ state of mind.” Kiedis couldn’t have been more crushed.

On his way back home from rehearsal, Kiedis suddenly remembered a time that reminded him of his loneliness. He recalled a time when he went to downtown LA to satiate his voracious appetite for drugs under a bridge with some gangsters, while his girlfriend was wondering where he was.

Despite how low times were under that bridge and even on that day in the band, there was one thing in common that saved him from isolation: the city of Los Angeles.

No matter how lonely he felt, Los Angeles was always there with him.

“I felt I had thrown away so much in my life, but I also felt an unspoken bond between me and my city. I’d spent so much time wandering the streets of L.A. and hiking through the Hollywood Hills that I sensed there was a nonhuman entity, maybe the spirit of the hills and the city, who had me in her sights and was looking after me. Even if I was a loner in my own band, at least I still felt the presence of the city I lived in.” — Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue, p. 264

Upon parking his car he got straight to work. He wrote in his notebook some poetry that would later be the lyrics of what we know today as Under The Bridge. The Chilis wouldn’t pursue it as a song until Rick Rubin — their producer for this album — found Kiedis’s notebook a month later and encouraged them to turn it into something. Turning that poetry into a song led a long way, as Under The Bridge is still regarded as one of the best songs the band has ever produced. The song would end up being one of the many greats of this fifth studio album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

It’s tempting to point to fate as the catalyst that allowed Under The Bridge to happen in the first place. If Rick Rubin never looked through Anthony’s notebook, then maybe no one would’ve ever encouraged the singer to vocalize his loneliness.

At the same time, maybe Kiedis would’ve pursued Under The Bridge without Rubin’s suggestion.

But who knows? That’s what makes it so magikal.

Note: Most of this reporting came from Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis and Larry Sloman.