Funk rock pioneers Red Hot Chili Peppers have penned their fair share of stadium-conquering hits across the years, but Under The Bridge undoubtedly stands as their most impactful.
Initially written as a poem by singer Anthony Kiedis, it was producer Rick Rubin who found the lyrics in Kiedis’s notebook and convinced him to take it to the rest of the band.
What happened next would be a life-changing moment for the four members of the band, as well as early ’90s rock music in general.
Rubin, who had a front-row seat for the creative process, revealed it was “wild” to witness the birth of an international anthem.
“They’d never done a song like that before,” Rubin recalled in a 2024 interview with Rick Beato. “It was a poem that Anthony had written. I said, ‘What’s this one?’ and he said, ‘That’s not for the Chili Peppers’.
“I said, ‘It’s really beautiful, why would you say it’s not for the Chili Peppers?’ And he said, ‘That’s not what we do’.”
Thankfully, Rubin helped Kiedis appreciate the power in the words he’d written, and eventually persuaded him to take it to guitarist John Frusciante and then on to bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith.
Kiedis’s initial hesitance came from the fact that his band were known for playing loud, uptempo party music. He struggled to see how such a soulful ballad could exist within the template of their collective sonic vision.
“Historically, they were a band that played funk music with rap vocals,” Rubin explained to Beato. “That was the Chili Peppers sound.
“I said, ‘What about singing it to the other guys?’ and he was shy about it. He sang it for John, who came up with the guitar part. John and Anthony sang it to Flea and Chad who said they loved it, and it became a Chili Peppers song.”
It was a pivotal moment in the group’s evolution.
Rubin continued: “Because of that, it then broke open the frame of what the Chili Peppers were. They could be anything. Knowing that they were more than a sound, if the four of them liked what they were making, that’s what the Chili Peppers are.”
The lyrics in Under The Bridge explore Kiedis’s years as a heroin addict, documenting the loneliness and isolation that came with addiction.
And though he’s never disclosed which bridge it was that he frequented, the song’s title refers to the place he would visit to score drugs and get high.
With tensions between Frusciante and Kiedis escalating one day at rehearsal, the singer found himself driving home on the 101 Freeway and feeling triggered by memories of his past, having turned his life around by this stage.
As revealed in his 2004 autobiography Scar Tissue, Kiedis recalled a time when he “had this beautiful angel of a girl [Ione Skye] who was willing to give me all of her love, and instead of embracing that, I was downtown with fucking gangsters shooting speedballs under a bridge.”
He decided to channel those feelings into creativity and ended up singing the song’s main melody all the way home. When he got back, he immortalised the words in his notebook as a way to deal with all the lingering trauma and anguish.
Under The Bridge also deals with the singer’s relationship with Los Angeles – the so-called City Of Angeles that his family relocated to when he was 12 years old.
“It really repulses me these days,” he told Goldmine in 1996. “Just sucking in that toxic cloud of hellish smog every day that I live… not a pleasant thought. But I do have a strong family tie to that city that I’ll probably never be able to sever.”
The accompanying parts written by John Frusciante are a great example of how guitar players can benefit from understanding the CAGED system, designed to help us memorise different shapes of the same chord across the neck.
It begins with a D chord played as a C shape with the root note on the fifth fret of the fifth string before resolving with an F# chord positioned around the second fret, using a classic E shape barre.
The embellishments on the fourth and fifth strings help guide one chord into the next.
An Emajor7 based around the seventh fret is then left to ring before we arrive at the first verse, which borrows heavily from the Jimi Hendrix rulebook – with its generous helping of G shape CAGED ideas, mini melodies inside certain chords and his thumb fretting root notes in places.
The same Emajor7 chord takes us into the chorus, which Frusciante starts on the second beat of the bar with an F#min chord on the ninth fret, leading into an E chord two frets down and an upper register B chord using the D shape from the CAGED system.
He chose to include a lot of rakes and scratches to add motion to his part, so even where there was no chord being played or left ringing, the Strat-wielding guitarist was still contributing some musical information to the choruses and filling space.
As for the outro section, Frusciante uses an E shape triad on the second, third and fourth strings with the first string ringing, going from A to Amin and then G to F. The idea is simple but incredibly powerful.
Released as the second single from the Blood Sugar Sex Magik album, Under The Bridge performed well across the world, topping the singles charts in Australia, Belgium, Mexico and the Netherlands.
In 1998, British pop group All Saints released an uptempo cover of the song reworked into an R&B style, resulting in their second No.1 single on home soil.
The song was also covered by Carlos Santana in 2010, with the Mexican-American guitarist adding some fiery A minor blues not heard on the original.
All these years later, Under The Bridge remains not only one of the definitive songs of the ’90s, but arguably one of the greatest rock ballads ever recorded.
