Anthony Kiedis’s private poem was, reluctantly, reimagined as a ballad and made the band megastars in the process
News report: “Under the Bridge” is no longer RHCP’s most popular song. Its Spotify play count was recently overtaken by “Californication”, for some reason. That song is a great example of Anthony Kiedis’s lyrical gibberish, beginning with the words:
Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind’s elation
And little girls from Sweden dream of silver screen quotation
And if you want these kind of dreams it’s Californication
Psychic spies from China? Like, they try to read your mind, literally? And how can you steal elation? And why is it not “girls from Sweden dream of silver screen QUOTATIONS?” Making it plural would make the line work. What, you couldn’t stand letting an off-rhyme slip through Anthony? You had to rhyme “quotation” with “elation” perfectly? Wait a second, those two words don’t rhyme at all.
That song is terrible, but “Under the Bridge” holds up remarkably well. It isn’t my favorite Chili Peppers song (that would be “Soul to Squeeze” off of the Coneheads soundtrack), but “Under the Bridge” could easily be for second place.
“Soul to Squeeze” sounds vaguely like Pavement’s “Zurich is Stained”. It sounded out of town, sloppily performed, lyrically angular and nonsensical, and artfully empty. It was rough, too rough to fine tune enough to put it on a polished album, but that is what I liked about it. Anthony Kiedis and company could craft a top album, if they weren’t trying to temper their ambitions to what they think their audience wants to hear.
“Under the Bridge” was never meant to be a song, much less a hit single, or even on an album at all. It was originally a poem Anthony had written in one of his notebooks. Anthony actually wrote poetry for the sake of poetry, not just to create ideas for lyrics. The poem was about his habit of walking under a bridge in downtown L.A., as well as his struggle with addiction and thinking it would feel good to do heroin along the way.
Rick Rubin read the poem and strongly encouraged Anthony to turn into a song, which he initially resisted. He thought it was too personal and emotional to turn into a funk rock song, and turning it into a melodic song wouldn’t fit with the band’s discography.
After being convinced to try, John Frusciante stepped in to write a chord progression. It turned out, he had a wide musical vocabulary, and he was just as likely to listen to The Beatles’s Revolver and Jimi Hendrix”s Axis: Bold as Love as much as Parliament-Funkadelic or Sly Stone. There is something distinctly “Castles Made of Sand” about John’s riding chord transitions and little twirls and ornamental flourishes. When he set out to write a chord progression for a sincere emotional depth, he thought old school pop ballad, like The Beatles’s “Something” or Joni Mitchell’s “River”. After coming up with a chord progression that you could write lyrics to, he stepped back, and worked on a guitar intro that would set up the emotional vulnerability of the poem he read. He wrote this to inspire Anthony to figure out the route to an actual melody.
After John established a solid canvas, Anthony found it rather easy to come up with the melody. The entry point for what it should sound like made sense, with the amount of work Frusciante put into trying to inspire it. Flea switched from slapping his bass strings with his thumb and played Long sustained notes with his finger tips. Chad chose to keep the drums sparse and minimal, giving the song the ability to build when it hit the, well, bridge.
Strange but true, Anthony did not write the line “Under the brdge downtown” to be the lyrics for a bridge of a song. It really was a coincidence, not a thought out gimmick (but a brilliant one. I still half think we call it a bridge of a song because Anthony branded the concept so here).
The music video was directed by Gus Van Sant, and he somehow made a brilliant stylist. The visual ideas were all his, choosing John Frusciante’s colorful clothing and the hues of the lights covering Anthony’s bare skin. Gus was not one to move the camera, or cut to various angles or takes. With the camera stationary, every movement onscreen became a story. Seeing John play the intro straight without cutting to anything else. Seeing Anthony full the space and actually perform the song was key to the charm of the video, which took off to all-time most popular level on MTV lists.
The song is remarkably tame compared to any other song on this list so far (it didn’t incite riots, it wasn’t filled with exploitive filled blasphemy, it wasn’t a kyt crib death, and it wasn’t named after a kid that actually committed suicide), even though it was largely about heroin use. The music video amped up the drama, which made it seem like the song was about tragic life or death circumstances. Very few had reason to question the intent of the song, which seemed very heartfelt and actually important, maybe more than it actually was.
The video builds to a long shot of Anthony run to the camera in ultra slow motion, his pec muscles moving with a little bounce as you see his Adonis -like perfectly sculpted body. It was very unlike rock stars at the time to appear showing off skin or be sexually objectified even a little bit, outside of leather pants or deep v openings in the shirts. Anthony was legitimately very sexy, which seemed bizarre for what could seem like a light ballad by a singer-songwriter.
The video became too popular for many long-term fans, who became tired of seeing it everywhere and worried its success would change the band’s sound and direction. Also feeling this way: John Frusciante himself. In 1992, the band went on SNL, and without telling the band, he decided to intentionally perform “Under the Bridge” out of sync with the rest of the band. It was an infamous performance, one that illicitrd a lot of head scratches from the viewers at home. Why would he do this?
John Frusciante was only 21 when the album exploded. He joined the band because he wanted to make interesting music and had no interest in being a rock star. He thought the band was chasing big, clean hooks and he liked music that was rough around the edges, embracing mistakes and rawness. He did not like performing to massive stadiums of new fans, and he became depressed and started using drugs heavily. The band was about to go on stage for a show in Tokyo and began talking about future plans backstage. John told Flea he was not going to play the show that night, that he was quitting. Flea told him he can quit as long as he played this show, and so he did. He left and became deeply addicted to drugs. The band hired Dave Navarro and released one of the most interesting failures of the 90s, 1995’s One Hot Minute. It felt a bit half baked in most ways, but intriguingly so.
John Frusciante changed his mind about the band in 1999 and decided to take the chance to rejoin, looking at it as the opportunity to get sober and get a fresh start for life. In my opinion, he wrote the best lick of his career with “Scar Tissue”, another heartfelt song about heroin addiction. I find it quite delightful, but even fans of “Under the Bridge” ended up feeling it was overplayed by Y2K.
Love them or hate them, RHCP are a band that has embraced their natural aptitude for fame as a substitute for the joys of drugs. Their art seems from a place of genuine honesty, and the band members have a history of being extremely interested in taking their craft to interesting places, onstage and off. Like most artists, their talent hit a fever pitch for only a short window of time, I would argue between 1991 to 2002, with a 7 year gap in the middle. They grew into a band that became bored and samey, content on going through the motions. They soon were exactly the thing John Frusciante one tried to rebel against. But hey, it still beats heroin addiction.
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