"This big guy comes in like he owns the place, and we all hate him immediately": the truth about Chad Smith's audition for the Red Hot Chili Peppers

Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1990 — (Image credit: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images)

In the winter of 1988, during the recording sessions for their fourth studio album Mother's Milk, the Red Hot Chili Peppers recruited Chad Smith as their new drummer. Doing so, as the band's former producer Michael Beinhorn reveals in a new interview, went against Anthony Kiedis and Flea's every instinct, but it would be a decision which changed the band's fortunes forever.

By his own admission, as he tells podcast Rick Beato, Beinhorn's first response to hearing the Red Hot Chili Peppers was "this sucks". And working with the group wasn't always easy, to the extent that Beinhorn actually [briefly] fired Kiedis from his own band during the recording of 1987's The Uplift Mofo Party Plan. But together the band and their new producer had chemistry, and the success of the Fight Like A Brave single meant that, as Beinhorn recalls, there was a new-found "grudging acceptance" of the group: "People stopped looking at them as being like the red-headed stepchildren of the record company".

The LA band retained Beinhorn's services to record their fourth studio album, but by 1989, the quartet had been reduced to a duo, with guitarist Hillel Slovak suffering a fatal heroin overdose in 1989, and Kiedis and Flea firing drummer D.H. Peligro, whose most significant contribution to the band would turn out to be introducing Flea to teenage guitarist John Frusciante. After recruiting Frusciante for the vacant guitar position, the group decided to hold open auditions for a new drummer, which proved much more trying than they had anticipated.

"I thought, Oh this is the Chili Peppers, you know, we're not going to have any problem at all getting a new drummer," Beinhorn tells Beato, "this is going to a fait accompli. [But] I have never seen a more lacklustre group of drummers under one roof in my entire life. I was so, like, let down... I'm thinking to myself, Jesus Christ, D.H. was better than all these guys put together!"

As Beinhorn recalls, on the final day of the try-outs, he and the band were sitting around "in a malaise", just wanting the painful process to be over. The last drummer to walk through the door that afternoon was Chad Smith, who the producer remembers strutting into the room "like he owns the place."

"And we all hate him immediately," he recalls. "Everyone just looks at him and goes like, this fucking guy... what a prick! He looks like he belongs in a metal band, he's got la bandana around his head and stuff like that, just so, like, not right. And I'm just thinking to myself, I just want this guy to go, you know? What's your name? 'Chad'. Perfect name. Play your drums, get the fuck out."

"The guy sits down at the drum kit, and from the first hit I was like, Oh my God. He's so comical, but he was so good, so good. And something happened in that room that I've only experienced a few times in my life, like it literally felt like some energy portal had opened... It literally felt like a whole bunch of doors had opened, like a a magic incantation had been recited and everything just [fell into a place] like that in a movie... everything shifted. It was incredible."

As Beinhorn recalls, Kiedis, Flea and Frusciante were stifling giggles while Smith played, "because they hate this guy so much but at the same time he's not only the best drummer that they've auditioned, he's probably the best drummer they've ever played with in their entire lives. They knew what they were dealing with and the vibe was so incredible, it was so good, you know you couldn't deny it."

With Smith installed in the band, the resulting album, Mother's Milk, released on August 16, 1989, sold over 500,000 copies in America, and became the quartet's first stepping stone towards international superstardom.

Watch Michael Beinhorn's interview with Rick Beato below:

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.