The song is about front man Anthony Kiedis and the period in his life when he walked around Los Angeles sad and very alone, finding solace in the streets and hills and the wind…. thinking about his dead friend and Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak, and the heroin overdose that claimed him. They both had smack habits and used to score – and sometimes shoot up – “under a traffic bridge” in a seedy part of the city.

Originally a poem by Anthony Kiedis, this was written during a time when Anthony felt that his sobriety was distancing him from the rest of the band. He arrived at rehearsal during one of his sober periods and found Flea and John smoking pot. When John first joined the band, he and Anthony were inseparable, but in this period, he knew they weren’t even really friends anymore. He wrote these lyrics as a poem while driving home from rehearsal on LA’s 101 freeway.

This leads to the themes of isolation, and made him feel as if Los Angeles was his only friend he could trust.

This song almost never happened, Kiedis was reluctant to express what he felt and didn’t feel it would fit the band’s style. But Rick Rubin discovered it along with the rest of Kiedis’s poetry and demanded that he make it into a song. It peaked at number 2 on the Billboard charts, and helped send the Chili Peppers into the mainstream.