What’s the most famous bridge in music? The one James Brown was forever taking us to? Foo Fighters and Kate Bush burning them?
The answer is easily the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ signature tune “Under The Bridge” from 1992’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
One of the band’s biggest hits, featuring Anthony Kiedis’ lyrics of despair about his dark days of copping smack, well… under a bridge; but the RHCP frontman has never revealed the exact location of his former Los Angeles haunt. Even saying in a 1992 Rolling Stone interview that, “I don’t want people looking for it.”
Well one particular fan, Vulture magazine‘s Mark Haskell Smith did go looking for it – and found it.
In the article, Haskell Smith goes into investigative detail about his wild goose chase through Downtown L.A. to locate Kiedis’ former drug stoop. After some major catography and cross-referencing with other popular songs that reference the area (including Jimmy Webb and post-punk act Thelonious Monster’s “Down on Union Street”).
Eventually, the Vulture scribe discovers his final destination is MacArthur Park in Downtown L.A., including “a small pedestrian tunnel… which bisects the park into north and south.” Finally concluding that “it must be the bridge in the song. It links Sixth and Union — the intersection Kiedis claims he was walking toward — with the drug dealers at Seventh and Hoover. And, unlike the other bridges, it provides a discreet location for private time with personal demons.”
One of music’s great mysteries solved then.
Now all Haskell Smith needs to do, is find out which girl got broke, which kiss got sucked and what ‘it’ in “Give It Away” is; and he’s got a money-spinning ‘Red Hot Chili Tours’ venture on his hands.
