Taken from JRE #1884 w/Anthony Kiedis:
https://open.spotify.com/show/4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk

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 low rider and it is the toughest, scariest, most, you know, loked out looking dudes, just melting with Under the Bridge.

That was a day well spent in writing that song.

When you guys closed 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.

So we were writing Blood Sugar Sex Magic.

And I was, At the time, we would just spend our days together.

And I showed him all my sexy songs, heavy, funky songs.

I mean, it has a melody, but I don't think it's for us.

It was Rick, because Rick knows, like, there's no rules.

So I sang him Under the Bridge, and he was like, that's your best song.

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.

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, and you can tell when you talk 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'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.

Like, he got fed the raw materials as a kid and it opened up his dream.

And 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.

He would get on a bus and go 200 miles to see James Brown when James Brown was still on tour by himself.

They were like, you gotta wait in the parking lot because doors don't open for 5 hours.

As a kid by himself to go see James Brown.

Just out of appreciation, not even thinking there was a career involved in that.

Call us back when you have some music, they would say.

He was telling me the whole story of the connection between Aerosmith and Run-DMC Mm-hmm about people like what the fuck are you doing?

You're like ruining Aerosmith and then the hip-hop people like what the fuck are you doing?

You're putting hip-hop together with rock the fuck is that and then meanwhile, it's like oh my god, you just united 2 worlds Yeah, he united 2 worlds and opened up a whole new realm of possibility for music And he just did it by following magic.

Yeah Yeah so I met him and maybe 1985 and we were flailing I was lost in a retarded sea of drug addiction just Today no

I'll tell you, but first I gotta show 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.

There is still something exciting about us that caught people'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 recording or 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 stood up and said, we're gonna go now.

Eventually I got clean and he came back and said, let's make a record.

You came and we played and you disappeared and I never talked to you again.

He's like, I thought somebody was gonna get murdered in that rehearsal space.

That's how dark I had become, is he was afraid someone was gonna die, and it was time to leave.

He's like, you guys were terrifying, you were scary, it felt like somebody was gonna 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 a, instead of a magical energy, there's a very discernible dark energy.

But I didn't realize it was that dangerous.

How did you get on the road, the drug road?

Well, I think the road was already in me from birth.

Combination of predisposed to addiction physically and then emotionally I developed the tendencies that I needed to squash some of the noise.

It was a very fun and at the time, subversive thing to be a part of.

But then it was very outlaw as a young teenage boy.

And years went by and there was no problem.

And 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.

It was just like, in the end, this is a life of suffering.

Fortunately, my destiny was meant to survive that and, you know, it isn't really events or advice or anything that gives you the window to step out of that, but it's a little gift from the cosmos that just makes you look at yourself and say, I'm gonna give you a chance, I'm gonna give you an opportunity to put in the work to get better, if you so choose.

Of choice, I would have to say the combination of heroin and cocaine was at that moment, at that point in time.

I probably did the cocaine shortly before the heroin, but right around the same time, very young age.

And did you do it because it was the thing that people around you did?

It had nothing to do with rock and roll or trying to impress or put on a pretense.

You know, I think I'll do that thing that just the word scares people.

In the same way that 1 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 felt whole by putting these things in me until I had to pay the toll.

You know, it's like you steal from Peter, you got to pay Paul the next day, and it's a terrible paycheck to write.

It was finding the thing that I thought was gonna make me well, but really it was just killing me.

I think I was 27 the first time that I was able to put in the work and get sober.

And then I went to my young 30s and kind of forgot where I came from and forgot the process of maintaining.

It's like you get physically fit, it's not gonna be for life.

So I had 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 5 years, which was even worse, because now I knew that there was a solution, and I was just ignoring 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.

So in a way, my best friend died, which did not instigate sobriety.

But it definitely destroyed me emotionally.

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.

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?

He's like, the only 1 I know of is very expensive, 10 grand.

Which in the 80s for a struggling musician was a lot.

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, 1 of you is gonna get sober out of here.

And I was like, get out the way, because I'm taking that spot.

Please, the rest of you can go back to where you came from.

And there was a guy from the SWAT team, there was a professional athlete, there was just every variety of person in there.

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.


Speaker 0: The Jorogun Experience. 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 low rider and it is the toughest, scariest, most, you know, loked out looking dudes, just melting with Under the Bridge. I'm like, okay. That was a day well spent in writing that song.

Speaker 1: Do you always close with that song? Or do you guys mix it up?

Speaker 0: We mix it up. But yeah, it's a meaningful tune. It has stood the test of time.

Speaker 1: When you guys closed with it the other night, I was like, yeah, you kind of have to.

Speaker 0: I owe a lot of that to Rick Rubin, that song.

Speaker 1: He's amazing, isn't he?

Speaker 0: He's all right. What a trip. He's all right.

Speaker 1: He's such an unusual person.

Speaker 0: For 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 sexy songs, heavy, funky songs.

He's like, OK, 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.

Speaker 1: There's some people in the world that are magic.

Speaker 0: Yeah, I love Rick and he is magic.

Speaker 1: 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, and you can tell when you talk 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 chases it down. Yeah, he's tuned into that.

Speaker 0: 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.

Like, he got fed the raw materials as a kid and it opened up his dream.

Speaker 1: And 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.

Speaker 0: 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 5 hours early. They were like, you gotta wait in the parking lot because doors don't open for 5 hours. As a kid by himself to go see James Brown.

I was like, yeah, you're qualified.

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 0: Nope. No, he invented a career. Yeah. There was no future in hip hop.

Speaker 1: No, people looked down upon it. They thought it wasn't even music.

Speaker 0: Yes. Call us back when you have some music, they would say.

Speaker 1: Isn't that hilarious?

Speaker 0: Yeah.

Speaker 1: He was telling me the whole story of the connection between Aerosmith and Run-DMC Mm-hmm about people like what the fuck are you doing? You're like ruining Aerosmith and then the hip-hop people like what the fuck are you doing? You're putting hip-hop together with rock the fuck is that and then meanwhile, it's like oh my god, you just united 2 worlds Yeah, he united 2 worlds and opened up a whole new realm of possibility for music And he just did it by following magic.

Speaker 0: Yeah Yeah so I met him and maybe 1985 and we were flailing I was lost in a retarded sea of drug addiction just Today no

Speaker 1: way that start. Huh? How'd that start?

Speaker 0: I'll tell you, but first I gotta show 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. And but we are still making a buzz. There is 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 recording or 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 stood up and said, we're gonna go now. 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 gonna get murdered in that rehearsal space. I thought somebody was gonna die. I had to leave. That's how dark we had become. That's how dark I had become, is he was afraid someone was gonna 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 gonna die, we had to go.

Speaker 1: When you look back on those times, do you understand how he thought that?

Speaker 0: Not exactly, but everybody has their own perception and there was darkness in the room when you're following that lifestyle, there's definitely a, instead of a magical energy, there's a very discernible dark energy. Yeah. But I didn't realize it was that dangerous. He was scared.

Speaker 1: How did you get on the road, the drug road?

Speaker 0: Well, I think the road was already in me from birth. 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. So I started smoking weed and loved it. It was a very fun and at the time, subversive thing to be a part of.

Like today it's pretty damn common. But then it was very outlaw as a young teenage boy. And years went by and there was no problem. And 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. It was just like, in the end, this is a life of suffering. Fortunately, my destiny was meant to survive that and, you know, it isn't really events or advice or anything that gives you the window to step out of that, but it's a little gift from the cosmos that just makes you look at yourself and say, I'm gonna give you a chance, I'm gonna give you an opportunity to put in the work to get better, if you so choose. If not,

Speaker 1: carry on. What was the narcotic of choice?

Speaker 0: Of choice, I would have to say the combination of heroin and cocaine was at that moment, at that point in time.

Speaker 1: Do you remember what you started with?

Speaker 0: Of those 2? Yeah. I probably did the cocaine shortly before the heroin, but right around the same time, very young age.

Speaker 1: And did you do it because it was the thing that people around you did? Was it just exciting? Was it rebellious? Like, what was it? Was it a part of

Speaker 0: 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. Like, everyone's afraid of that.

You know, I think I'll do that thing that just the word scares people. But It was also a way of checking out. In the same way that 1 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. You know, 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. Yeah.

Yeah, it was... It was finding the thing that I thought was gonna make me well, but really it was just killing me.

Speaker 1: And how long were you on that road for? Well,

Speaker 0: I think I was 27 the first time that I was able to put in the work and get sober. And then I went to my young 30s and kind of forgot where I came from and forgot the process of maintaining. It's like you get physically fit, it's not gonna be for life. You gotta show up or anything else. You know, your craft.

You put it down, it fades. So I had 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 5 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.

Speaker 1: How'd you get sober the first time?

Speaker 0: So in a way, my best friend died, which did not instigate sobriety.

Speaker 1: Did he die from drugs?

Speaker 0: 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 gotta find 1.

He's like, the only 1 I know of is very expensive, 10 grand. Which in the 80s for a struggling musician was a lot. I 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, 1 of you is gonna get sober out of here. And I was like, get out the way, because I'm taking that spot. I was such a little.

Speaker 1: Competitive.

Speaker 0: Yeah, it's an eagle maniac. You're just like, I am taking that. Please, the rest of you can go back to where you came from. Only 1 out of 30? That's what he said to us.

And there was a guy from the SWAT team, there was a 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. You

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