Anthony Kiedis on Under the Bridge, Rick Rubin, and Addiction

The hardest of the hard, the gangsters of LA. I'll be riding down the Sunset Boulevard, and I'll hear Under the Bridge coming out of a lowrider, and it is the toughest, scariest, most, you know, loaked out looking dudes just melting with Under the Bridge. I'm like, okay, that was a day well spent in a writing that song. Do you always close with that song? Do you guys mix up any flavors? We mix it up, and... But, yeah, it's a meaningful tune. It has the detest of time. When you guys close with it the other night, I was like, yeah, you kind of have to. I owe a lot of that to Rick Rubin, that song. He's amazing, isn't he? He's all right. What a trip. He's all right. He's such an unusual person. If we're a beginner, he's pretty good. So we were writing Blood Sugar Sex Magic. And I was... At the time, we would just spend our days together. He was a lot less busy. He wasn't a dad. And we would just hang all day. What are you working on? Show me the songs you're writing. Because he's producing our record. And I showed him all my, you know, sexy songs, heavy, funky songs. He's like, okay, that's good. We can work on that. He's like, anything else in the book? Just a poem that really isn't a song. I mean, it has a melody, but I don't think it's for us. Well, let me hear it. I was like, it's kind of embarrassing. It's a little sentimental. Love to hear it. It was Rick, because Rick knows, like, there's no rules. You want the thing that's not expected. So I sang him under the bridge and he was like, that's your best song. I was like, it's just a poem. Bring it into the voice. Show him the song. So without Rick's push, you know, for the counterintuitive, sensitive guy song, we might have never had a chance to write that. There's some people in the world that are magic. Yeah, I love Rick. And he is magic. He's a magic person. Yeah. He has, like, when you're talking to him, like, he has a sense of ignoring the bullshit and just tuning into the magic. It's a very, you could tell when you're talking to him, it's not nonsense. It's like a science almost. It's like an understanding of what it is. And he just follows that frequency. He just, he chases it down. Yeah, he's tuned into that. Yeah. He's very good at that. He's another person, if you look at his origins, it's no accident that he ended up being the person that he is. Single child out in the suburbs of New York City, I think, Long Beach, Long Island. And he had an aunt, very cerebral boy, already just like very smart kid, but living a boring, culture-free life of the island. And he had an aunt who lived in Manhattan who loved her nephew. And every weekend or every other weekend, whatever, he would go spend with her. And she was cultured. She was like, we're going to the opera. We're going to the symphony. We're going to the museum. We're going to go see all this different stuff. And Rick was amazed by the music and the art and the culture that she was sharing with him that he wasn't getting in his home life. And he just started tapping into the magic and dedicating himself in a way that led to him starting his record company when he was in the NYU dorms. But it wasn't an accident. He got fed the raw materials as a kid, and it opened up his dream. I think probably also being a single kid, you're not influenced by your siblings either. So you have a chance to sort of be who you actually are. Less influence. He would get on a bus and go 200 miles to see James Brown when James Brown was still on tour by himself. And he would get there five hours early. They were like, you got to wait in the parking lot because doors don't open for five hours. As a kid by himself to go see James Brown, I was like, yeah, you're qualified. Just out of appreciation, not even thinking there was a career involved in that. That's what's so crazy about his story. There was no career to be that guy. Nope. No, he invented a career. Yeah. There was no future in hip hop. No. People looked down upon it. They thought it wasn't even music. Yes. Call us back when you have some music, they would say. Isn't that hilarious? He was telling me the whole story of the connection between Aerosmith and Run DMC about people like, what the fuck are you doing? You're like ruining Aerosmith. And then the hip hop people are like, what the fuck are you doing? You're putting hip hop together with rock? What the fuck is that? And then meanwhile, it's like, oh my God, you just united two worlds. Yeah. You united two worlds and opened up a whole new realm of possibility for music. And you just did it by following magic. Yeah. Yeah. So I met him in maybe 1985 and we were flailing. I was lost in a retardancy of drug addiction. Just too thin to win. How did that start? Huh? How did that start? I'll tell you, but first I got to show you the little Rick tidbit. So I was basically a junkie, but still showing up to work from time to time, which was the basement of the EMI studios on Sunset Boulevard. They gave us a little basement to rehearse in. They had signed us, but we were going nowhere very slowly. Couldn't get out of our own way. But we were still making a buzz. There was still something exciting about us that caught people's attention and it caught Rick Rubin's attention. And he was with the Beastie Boys and they were exploding with success and greatness, writing incredible music. And so Rick brought the Beastie Boys to our dingy little rehearsal spot and he sat there and we rehearsed while they watched. They're in these little dirty couches watching us and we went through our songs. And Rick said, we're going to go now. And I was like, okay, do we talk again? What's going on? We'll get back to you. Didn't see him for years, years and years and years went by. Eventually I got clean and he came back and said, let's make a record. But I said, what happened that day? You came and we played and you disappeared and I never talked to you again. He's like, I thought somebody was going to get murdered in that rehearsal space. I thought somebody was going to die. I had to leave. That's how dark we had become. That's how dark I had become. He was afraid someone was going to die and it was time to leave. Murdered. That's what he said. He's like, you guys were terrifying. You were scary. It felt like somebody was going to die. We had to go. When you look back on those times, do you understand how he thought that? Not exactly. But everybody has their own perception and there was darkness in the room. When you're following that lifestyle, there's definitely instead of a magical energy, there's a very discernible dark energy. But I didn't realize it was that dangerous. He was scared. How did you get on the road, the drug road? Well I think the road was already in me from birth. A combination of predisposed to addiction physically and then emotionally I developed the tendencies that I needed to squash some of the noise. Spiritually a little depleted. I started smoking weed and loved it. It was a very fun and at the time subversive thing to be a part of. Today it's pretty damn common. But then it was very outlaw as a young teenage boy. Years went by and there was no problem. Then I started introducing narcotics at a pretty young age and really had nothing to say about it anymore. I was like the caboose of a train just going wherever the hell that train said to go. It was interesting and it was exciting but it was also painful as hell. In the end this is a life of suffering. Fortunately my destiny was meant to survive that. It isn't really events or advice or anything that gives you the window to step out of that. It's a little gift from the cosmos that just makes you look at yourself and say I'm going to give you a chance. I'm going to give you an opportunity to put in the work to get better if you so choose. If not carry on. What was the narcotic of choice? Of choice I would have to say the combination of heroin and cocaine was at that moment at that point in time. Do you remember what you started with? Of those two? Yeah. I probably did the cocaine shortly before the heroin but right around the same time. Very young age. Did you do it because it was the thing that people around you did? Was it just exciting? Was it rebellious? What was it? Was it a part of rock and roll? It had nothing to do with rock and roll or trying to impress or put on a pretense. It was happening around me in my world. It was exciting and dangerous. Everyone's afraid of that. I think I'll do that thing that just a word scares people. But it was also a way of checking out. In the same way that one person will sit down in a bar and have some beers and just not stop. That allergic reaction to the sensation of finding your medicine. I had that reaction. I felt whole by putting these things in me until I had to pay the toll. It's like you steal from Peter, you got to pay Paul the next day and it's a terrible paycheck to write. Terrible paycheck to write. I can only imagine. It was finding the thing that I thought was going to make me well. But really it was just killing me. How long were you on that road for? I think I was 27 the first time that I was able to put in the work and get sober. Then I went to my young 30s and forgot where I came from and forgot the process of maintaining. It's like you get physically fit. It's not going to be for life. You got to show up or anything else. Your craft. You put it down, it fades. So I put down the craft of sobriety and it opened an opportunity. And I ended up going back out there for a bunch of years, like five years. Which was even worse because now I knew that there was a solution and I was just ignoring it. So there was nothing fun about it. And then the window came back and I had another chance to commit to sobriety. And I did and that was 21 years ago. How did you get sober the first time? So in a way, my best friend died, which did not instigate sobriety. Did he die from drugs? He did. But it definitely destroyed me emotionally. But I continued to use after he died. And then I got to the point where I could not turn off the noise with drugs and alcohol, literally flooding my body with the substance and still wide awake. So I was not getting the desired effect. I was like, this is terrible. I'm putting all this poison in me and I'm still here. And I called up a friend and rehabs were not a thing at that time. I called up a sober friend and I was like, what are those rehab things? I got to find one. He's like, the only one I know of is very expensive, 10 grand, which in the 80s for a struggling musician was like, I have 10 grand. That's exactly how much money I have. And I spent it. I gave my last 10 grand, my only 10 grand ever to a rehab. And I went and I checked in and there was 30 dope fiends in the room of all walks of life, but all with a common sickness. And the counselor said, I'm looking at 30 of you and stats wise, one of you is going to get sober out of here. And I was like, get out the way because I'm taking that spot. I was such a little competitive. Yeah, it's an egomaniac. You're just like, I am taking that. Please, you know, the rest of you can go back to where you came from. Only one out of 30. That's what he said to us. And there was like a guy from the SWAT team. There was professional athlete. There was just every variety of person in there. I was like, I'll take it. But then I realized there's a process to it and there's a being of service aspect to it. And there's a becoming humble aspect to it all. And that was the beginning of me taking many years to go from being a complete idiot to only a partial idiot.