25
RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
UNDER THE BRIDGE (1991)
DON’T DO DRUGS, WARN THE KINGS OF CALIFORNICATION

It wasn’t the first time Anthony Kiedis had gotten clean—and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. But the temporarily sober Chili Peppers singer, inspired by the downtown drug lair where he used to shoot up, penned this lyrical, elegiac love letter to L.A, seedy underbelly. “I sensed there was a nonhuman entity, maybe the spirit of the hills and the city … who was looking after me,” he later wrote. Duuude.

MOST LA THING ABOUT THEM: Bassist Flea played Nihilist No. 2 in that hilarious paean to Angeleno slaekerdom, The Big Lebowski, and was in another ur-L.A. flick, Less Than Zero.