Song 68: Under the Bridge

I hated Red Hot Chili Peppers. It feels ludicrous now to look back on how much we hated inconsequential and relatively harmless entities like Red Hot Chili Peppers and John Terry a decade or so ago, compared to the manifold monsters we have to endure every day now, but, for what it was worth, I hated them a lot.

The cruelly perfect Nick Cave quote -  “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” - chimed exactly with me, and, yes, it was the fact they were on the radio so much around the turn of the century, when XFM was about the best you could hope for, and amidst the solid indie bangers you could guarantee that at least once an hour they'd be some of that  all-too-imitable funky bassline and fucking gibberish lyrics.
I could put up perfectly well with the landfill indie of the era, but there was something really disturbing to me about the sound of rap-rock-gone-mature California.

So it was that I walked into my local Co-op last week and a song of theirs called, I think, 'Zephyr Song' was on the in-store radio, and what struck me was not how much I hated it, but that I hadn't, mercifully, heard this band for ages, and that once they didn't impose themselves on your every waking thought, they were a lot more tolerable.

The lyrics were still gibberish though.

And yet, through all the years of loathing, there remained a RHCP song I had a soft spot for- probably their most famous song, you know the one ...

I'm reminded of Regina Spektor's 'On the Radio', for some reason;

"On the radio, we heard November Rain, the solo's awful long, but it's a pretty song"

... "but it's a pretty song" is the truth that covers so many sins ...

"On the radio, I heard Under the Bridge, he sings just like a goon, but it's a pretty tune ..."

or something.

It was never not a pretty tune, and would, singularly in their cannon, escape my disgust when it appeared on the radio.

But it's more than that with me.

I'm going to take you back to, of all places and times and settings, a minibus in the Cotswolds in summer 1993.

Music mainly passed me by in the early 90s. Certainly music for young people. I watched 'Top of the Pops', listened to Capital Radio, and hoped something better would eventually come along, which it did a year or two later.

But I missed out on a lot. Kids at school would be talking about NWA, Public Enemy, Pearl Jam, Anthrax, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Cypress Hill, Nirvana obviously, and though I heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' and 'Insane in the Brain', I don't think I went much further than that if it wasn't on Capital or Top of the Pops.

And also, naturally, like most early teenagers, I didn't go out much, thought everyone else was always out getting drunk and having fun, and envied all of those that did, even though it actually turned out it was a small and mouthy minority.

I know the first three times I got drunk. It was the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of August 1993. Drunk-drunk, you know, not "aah right this is alcohol" slightly tipsy.

I remember because 1st August 1993 was my 15th birthday, and I was the youngest participant in a cricket tour to the Cotswolds.

It was, you can imagine, such a thrill. The tour's reputation for permitted underage drinking went ahead of it - though a school teacher was in charge, he relaxed his authority for these three days of the year ... with only-slightly-disastrous results.

How did the drinking go, you're wondering.... I think I travelled with the expectation I'd be throwing back 10 pints a night (based on the outlandish boasts of boys in my year), but, once that target had been reduced, the first two nights were a remarkable success. I think I managed 4 or 5 bottles or pints each time and managed to hold it together, no hangover, no disastrous behaviour, I think I even managed to play some late night football.

I mean, when I say "no disastrous behaviour" I believe I was being an enormously precocious pain-in-the-arse, so with the age range of the rest of the squad being 16 to 18, was no one's favourite companion.

Still, I was having fun and wasn't going to let a little gentle bullying dampen my spirits. I was hanging out. With the lads. Drunk and boisterous in the beautiful English summertime.

And what I remember is the drives back to the B'n'B after the cricket match and the evening drinking in the clubhouse, the singing in the minibus, and the sense of these boys, 17 or 18, trying to capture, or recapture something, and singing songs they'd clearly already sung together, as boys do, in a different setting. And the two songs I remember were, funnily enough, 'Summertime' by Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince, and 'Under the Bridge'.

The thing is, I didn't know it was 'Under the Bridge' ... someone would just start up with "Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner ..." and everyone else would join in for a while, then it would peter out a bit, and then someone would go "I don't ever want to feel like I did that day ..." and I don't think I even realised they were two parts of the same song, but still, clearly, they both made an impression.

Nostalgia, I always think, is a funny thing. These older boys were operating with some sense of nostalgia in the singing, like the songs were already classics of their repertoire, and I was latching on to the nostalgia and the sense of time and place, the feeling of being, albeit grudgingly, part of something.

As I was saying, the drinking went well on the first two nights ...what's all the fuss about. I guess I'm just the kind of guy who can hold his liquor, I thought. After the 3rd match of the tour, we had our traditional dinner in the Berni Inn in Stratford-upon-Avon, and I only remember telling people how many doors one had to go through to get from the table to the toilet, where I went several times, indeed, I think, where I ended up for the night, disabused of the notion that I was a natural and bulletproof bon viveur.

There we go then,  that's 'Under the Bridge'. Those first, tame, drunken nights, that vague sense of togetherness that singing pop songs can bring, even with people you're not really together with.

I know the song's about a lot, and, listening it today, it still stands up as a really pretty good song. I don't think the self-destructive behaviour I associate with it quite stands up to Anthony Kiedis's, but we've all got to start somewhere.