The drummer that made Chad Smith feel like “a total hack”
Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith is a force of nature behind the kit. Whilst he might sometimes be overlooked in favour of his bandmates or be regularly mistaken for Will Ferrell, his work speaks for itself. A dynamic rhythmic master, Smith ballasted the Californian band’s frenetic chaos for 35 years, giving Anthony Kiedis, Flea and John Frusciante an unyielding pad from which to launch.
There are many examples of Smith’s eminence. Whilst funk-rock might not be everyone’s cup of tea, very few can doubt the talent that fuels the swaggering pops of his skins on ‘Give It Away’, or the jazz-inflected panache needed to make a more reflective moment like ‘Scar Tissue’ so captivating. It says it all that Smith has been present throughout the band’s most successful period.
“I steal loads of stuff,” the drummer once conceded, noting his wide scope of influences. “So go ahead and steal from me if there’s anything I do that you like. Everyone has their own personality that comes through on the drums. So it’s never going to sound exactly like me when you play it anyway.”
Across his career, Smith has effused about various drumming heroes, ranging from The Who’s Keith Moon to Buddy Rich and even The Clash’s Topper Headon. However, for him, the late Led Zeppelin behemoth John Bonham ranks as his favourite of all time. Demonstrating the extent of his love for Bonham, Smith even made a pilgrimage to the Led Zeppelin man’s grave in Rushock, a tiny village in Worcestershire with a population of 138.
Discussing what specifically attracted him to the sound of Bonham, Smith told Louder Sound: “It was the sheer power of ‘Bonzo’ that appealed to me. And his sound! I’d never heard drums with that sound; Page’s production was important, of course. Bono had depth and air, and he played so musically. The way he played around those Page riffs with such power, musicality and finesse was very impressive.”
Whilst Smith could likely talk all day about the brilliance of John Bonham, there was another who significantly impacted him: Mitch Mitchell. The drummer of The Jimi Hendrix Experience has long been deemed one of the finest in rock history, blending a jazz background with a primal energy that only the best possess. He was so impactful that figures such as Queen’s Roger Taylor and The Police’s Stewart Copeland cite him as an influence.
When speaking with Music Radar in 2015, Smith revealed that 1967’s ‘Fire’ by The Jimi Hendrix Experience was the first song he ever played live on the drums. However, things did not go as planned for the budding drummer, and he came unstuck, playing as he described as “a total hack”.
Smith recalled: “My brother played guitar, and we had a band, and we would play songs of the day, which were ‘Smoke On The Water’, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ by Led Zeppelin and ‘Fire’ by Jimi Hendrix. I didn’t play that like Mitch Mitchell. I played it like a total hack, the same fill every time. A recording of that is on my DVD, from the Elks Club, 1972. It’s so bad. It’s really horrible. I take any feeling out of it.”
Listen to ‘Fire’ by The Jimi Hendrix Experience below.
