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".
