The Red Hot Chili Peppers song Chad Smith doubted: “It doesn’t really have a hook”
It’s never easy to spot a hit song out in the wild. When a band starts recording an album’s worth of material, the massive amount of song blending makes it borderline impossible to pick out one track as the calling card for the rest of the songs on the album. While Red Hot Chili Peppers may have been on the verge of taking over the world with Blood Sugar Sex Magik, drummer Chad Smith never really understood the power behind one of their most enduring anthems.
Then again, Smith was never in the trenches with the group. Compared to the brotherhood between Anthony Kiedis and Flea, Smith had come in relatively late to the band’s career, having been playing in various hard rock outfits before locking in with the bassist’s sense of rhythm when they jammed for the first time.
Although the album Mother’s Milk showcased the band working out their heavy rock credentials, they were slowly starting to get to the essence of their sound working with Rick Rubin. Recording in his mansion in California, Rubin would emphasise the simplicity behind the band’s classics, urging Flea to play lines that were more rudimentary than what he was used to on songs like ‘Give It Away’.
When the band began looking for other material, Rubin would head over to Kiedis’ house to pick his brain about what material he had. Looking through his various pieces of poetry, Rubin stumbled upon the basis for what would become ‘Under the Bridge’, taking from a lyric that Kiedis had written about feeling alone after his years lost to addiction.
Urging him to show the track to the rest of the band, Kiedis initially resisted, thinking the song was far too personal to bring to the Peppers. Once John Frusciante began playing the signature guitar figure from the final track, Kiedis opened himself up to his audience, talking about how hard it is to not have a partner while also having a kinship with Los Angeles for helping him through the dark times in his life.
While ‘Give It Away’ would be an easy frontrunner for one of the band’s signature tunes, Smith was a bit confused when the label thought ‘Under the Bridge’ had the potential to become huge. Despite many hard rock bands having their own brand of ballads, Smith thought it was far from the best track on the album.
Discussing the song later, Smith said that the track wasn’t really in line with what soft rock was supposed to be, telling Legendary Rock Songs, “It doesn’t really have a hook, and not to take anything away from Anthony, but he’s not the greatest singer in the world. [It’s] just cool and soulful. He’s not the guy who wins all the awards, Michael Bolton”.
When looking at the final track, Smith doesn’t even have much to do, either. Despite the song having an epic payoff, Smith barely turns up for the first half of the song, playing the bare minimum to keep time before the rest of the band comes screaming in during the song’s epic outro.
Regardless of the band’s reluctance, the song would become one of their most celebrated efforts, opening the doors for the rest of their material to toy with ballads like ‘Scar Tissue’ and ‘Slow Cheetah’. No one may have understood what ‘Under the Bridge’ would become, but its legacy has earned it a spot next to the most celebrated rock songs of its decade.
