Flea’s bass ran the whole neck, then the words fit
The riff existed before the album. After the Mother’s Milk tour, John Frusciante and Flea spent time in a side band called H.A.T.E. with players from Fishbone. In those jams they built the guitar figure and the bass line that became Give It Away. When that project folded, they brought the part back to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Anthony Kiedis heard Flea run nearly the whole neck of the bass and went to the microphone with a notebook. He already had the sentence. He had been saving it.
The sentence came from Nina Hagen, years earlier, in the early 1980s, when Kiedis was young and using heroin and Hagen was older and not interested in preaching. He was looking through her closet, said a jacket was cool, and she told him to take it. Her reason was practical: a closet you refuse to empty makes a life smaller. Give the thing away and the room gets larger. Kiedis writes in Scar Tissue that the idea stuck, and that it lined up later with something he heard in meetings, that you keep your own sobriety by giving it to someone else. The bass line was the first music that could carry that lecture without turning it into a lecture. He chanted “give it away, give it away, give it away now” and the track had a chorus.
Rick Rubin recorded the song between April and June 1991 at The Mansion in Los Angeles, the same house that held the rest of Blood Sugar Sex Magik. He wanted the guitars dry. Mother’s Milk had been layered and bright. This record was closer to a 1960s session: what you hear is what was played, vintage pedals if any, not a wall of reverb. Frusciante’s solo was cut backwards over the track. Flea said John would play a solo once, and if it failed, once more, completely different, and that was the take. Pete Weiss added a jaw harp. Brendan O’Brien played Hammond B3. The bridge came from a method the band started calling a face-off: Flea and Frusciante wrote parts separately, then picked one.
If you have a closet full of clothes and you try to keep them all, your life will get very small. But if you have a full closet and someone sees something they like, if you give it to them, the world is a better place.
(Nina Hagen, recalled by Anthony Kiedis in Scar Tissue)
Warner Bros. wanted a rock station in Texas to premiere the single. The station told them to come back when the song had a melody. KROQ in Los Angeles put it on heavy rotation instead, and Kiedis later marked that as the moment the songs entered a wider room. The video, directed by Stéphane Sednaoui, was finished for 4 September 1991: black and white, a desert, the four of them painted silver, Frusciante in mirror pants with a silver Stratocaster, a backwards shot of him with an aluminum ribbon. It cost about 140,000 dollars. The label worried it was too odd. It won Breakthrough Video and Best Art Direction at the 1992 MTV awards. The album itself arrived on 24 September 1991.
On Billboard’s Modern Rock chart it was the band’s first number one. The Hot 100 only took it to number 73, in 1992, after Under the Bridge had opened the door. Britain made it a top ten in February 1994, on a reissue, almost two and a half years late. At the 1993 Grammys it won Best Hard Rock Performance. Live, it became the closer. The band has played it more than a thousand times, including Saturday Night Live in 2006 and the Super Bowl XLVIII halftime show in 2014. The jacket is long gone. The chant is the part that stayed.
