I Do Not Like Mondays

Man, I do not like Mondays. So to refocus once again, here’s something that I was surprised to learn I’ve liked for more than three decades now. It didn’t feel like so far back, but it is.

This is “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers — I have to include a “the” before their name for it to sound right to me — which was released as a single in 1991 along with the album that contains it. This was another time that a song led me to buy a whole album right away, way back then.

Although we’re talking about a song from over 30 years ago, I know people who’ve lived fewer years (some much fewer) than that who know it and also like it. This song put the Chili Peppers on my radar screen when I was a kid, and I might go so far as to call it iconic. It’s a landmark sort of song, and it’s very, very widely known.

It’s always struck me as different from other songs around that time in the alternative rock genre I’d probably place it in. One thing you notice right away is it’s very easy to hear what lead singer Anthony Kiedis is saying.

But what is this song really about? I’d never formally dug into its meaning, but formed some of my own ideas based on what I heard.

I assumed it’s a story meant to be set in Los Angeles, since the “city of angels” is mentioned and maybe also because that’s where the band was formed. The story it’s telling seems to be about someone who feels very alone, and coupled with being “under the bridge,” to me that feels like a homeless person. That doesn’t really fit, since the song also describes this lead character driving a car.

The person it’s describing — who for analysis’ sake could simply be fictional — does not want to remember some particular, apparently negative incident and instead asks to be taken “to the place I love.” The song specifically has this lead character asking to be taken there “all the way,” which is a little odd and doesn’t fit with going to some physical location but rather something more like an emotional place.

I could never figure out what that “place” was from what’s in the song. But once the choir / backing vocals fold in toward the end, you hear about the person in the story drawing blood, but that is followed up with the person not being able to “get enough.”

Those lyrics that lead to the song’s end are:

“(Under the bridge downtown)
Is where I drew some blood
(Under the bridge downtown)
I could not get enough
(Under the bridge downtown)
Forgot about my love
(Under the bridge downtown)
I gave my life away”

The choir then repeats “away” several times. According to the album jacket, Kiedis wrote the lyrics/ song, and the choir vocals at the end were performed by the Chili Peppers’ lead guitarist John Frusciante’s mother, Gail Frusiante, “and friends.”

As I’ve heard this one over the years (never saw the video till I looked it up), I saw three possibilities.

1. The storyteller hurt someone (or worse) under a bridge, ruining his life.

2. The storyteller abused substances, and might be describing something like an overdose that could’ve ended his life, and by the sound of the story, perhaps came close.

3. It’s just a song and there’s no deeper, cohesive meaning in there.

I’ll tell you right away it’s not No. 3. In a 1991 interview in the Netherlands, Kiedis said the song was driven by him feeling lonely:

“I was in a sad, lonely mood, and I was driving home from a rehearsal one day while we were in pre-production for this record, and I just felt like — in the face of 10 million people [in Los Angeles] — I was all alone and I couldn’t connect with a single soul in the universe,” he said. “And so the only thing that made me feel better was to sing to myself, and that was the song that came out.”

But in the Chili Peppers’ short documentary “Funky Monks” from 1991 that explores the band recording this album, Kiedis revealed more about the song and feeling lonely that day driving home. Guess what? The meaning behind this song is pretty much dead-on the No. 2 possibility I’d reasoned through above.

Kiedis described being a “hardcore junkie” for years and noted that he’d been clean since 1988. “Under the Bridge,” he said, was describing part of an “incomprehensible demoralization” that came from addiction and included loneliness and emptiness “that you’re trying to fill up with whatever you can find.”

“Without thinking about anything, this entire song came through my head … the crux of the song is based on loneliness,” Kiedis said.

He also addressed the song’s lines sung with the choir elements that he “drew some blood,” “could not get enough,” “forgot about [his] love” and “gave [his] life away.”

“What that was referring to was a point in time about five years ago when I had nothing in my life — I had no friends or places to live or automobiles or relationships with my family … and all I had was this connection of mine named Mario, a Mexican mafia ex-convict, and he and I would stroll the streets of downtown looking for our next score,” he said.

He didn’t paint a pretty picture. On a hot afternoon in the middle of summer, Kiedis said he and Mario bought illicit drugs and went to a bridge in a downtown Los Angeles ghetto to use them. Since it was a freeway bridge, there was a passageway you had to go through to get underneath it, and only certain members of this Mexican gang were allowed in.

“The reason that they let me in was this guy Mario said I was going out with his sister, which was a lie just so we could go in there and do what it is we wanted to do,” Kiedis said.

He added that that day felt as low as his life could get.

And additionally, wonder no longer: that reference in the song to “the place I love,” he said, is “where I am now” that he’d been clean. That place he wanted to get all the way to was “creating sound with my best friends.”

So all told, this is a pretty but also pretty dark song — and it’s meant to point to a positive message about coming away from addiction and substance abuse. And apparently, it’s also somewhat timeless.

Content © Aaron G. Marsh