THROW AWAY YOUR TELEVISION

Recorded during: By the Way sessions
Length: 3:44
Performers: Anthony Kiedis (vocals), Flea (bass), John Frusciante (guitar), Chad Smith (drums)
Live performances.

Anthony had this to say about the song in a track-by-track commentary of the album recorded in 2002:

Throw Away Your Television. Another one of those quirky jam sessions where Chad and Flea were just banging it out and I heard words in my head and went up to the mic and started screaming about throwing away your television which, you know, is kind of a hypocritical statement because I watch television, but sometimes it's good to be hypocritical. Sometimes that works. So it's really kind of a metaphor for throwing away anything in your life that's taking away your imagination or stealing your energy or telling you how to behave instead of you finding and figuring out you know, what you want to look like, how you want to act, who you want to be and you've got this television set deciding those things for you and that's not a good thing.

John added this:

There's the sample and hold filter effect that I use. When I was a little kid it was something that I used to hear Frank Zappa using on his records. He had a thing called Oberheim voltage control filter effect and I really wanted one but it's a very, not a very common effect. It's not something you would see very often. So I would read about him using it in the magazines and I would hear it sounding so incredible and I never owned one. And then recently Line 6 put out this filter, the virtual sort of filter thing where it sort of simulates the sounds of like 15 different kinds of filter effects that you can get and one of the things that they're simulating is the Oberheim voltage control filter. So I used it on that song. When I first got it I was back to like playing the way I did when I was a teenager, like imitating Frank Zappa and stuff. Pretty much just imitating his guitar playing was the only thing I knew how to do on it and I thought I've got to do something different with this and do something new so I can use it on a record in some kind of a way that doesn't sound like an imitation of Frank Zappa. I figured, you know, I ended up using it on Throw Away Your Television and everybody liked it a lot.