Under the Bridge

During the sessions for Blood Sugar Sex Magik, producer Rick Rubin was paging through Anthony Kiedis's notebook when he found a poem called "Under the Bridge" — a meditation written after three years of sobriety, about the loneliness of fractured friendships and the days when drugs had been Kiedis's closest companion in downtown Los Angeles. Rubin urged the band to record it. Kiedis resisted, arguing it was too emotional and didn't fit the Chili Peppers' style at all — which was, of course, exactly the point. John Frusciante, Flea, and Chad Smith built the music around the words, and the song went on the 1991 album anyway.

Released as a single in early 1992, "Under the Bridge" climbed all the way to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 — commercial territory the band had never come close to before — and was eventually certified six-times platinum. Gus Van Sant directed the video, filmed in Los Angeles as a mix of studio shots and street scenes, and MTV ran it relentlessly; for millions of viewers it was the first time the Chili Peppers registered as something other than socks-and-slap-bass chaos.

The mystery at the song's center never got solved: Kiedis has refused to identify the actual bridge where he once bought and used drugs, and the amateur sleuthing it inspired — one much-cited effort points near MacArthur Park — has never settled it. The song's legacy needed no address — it rewired what the band was allowed to be, opened the ballad lane they would return to for decades, and became one of the defining alternative-rock singles of the 1990s.