Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith will be behind the kit tonight (May 15) to back Paul McCartney for one of his Saturday Night Live performances, SPIN has learned. He’ll fill in for Abe Laboriel Jr., who has drummed with McCartney since October 2001 and whose absence has yet to be explained. The musician is believed to have never previously missed a McCartney performance in the time since.
For his part, Smith is no stranger to the nearly 84-year-old Beatles legend, who made a surprise appearance during his 2024 covers set with producer/musician Andrew Watt at the tiny Stephen Talkhouse in New York’s Hamptons. “The people there were losing their minds,” Smith later told Q104.3 about the experience in front of 200 lucky attendees. “It’s a real once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
In 2020, Smith and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme teamed to remake McCartney’s “Lavatory Lil” for the album McCartney III Imagined. And, as previously reported, Watt produced McCartney’s first album in six years, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, which is due May 29.
Smith also guests on the Watt-produced forthcoming Rolling Stones album, Foreign Tongues. Earlier this week, he was spotted at New York’s Gramercy Theatre with Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, who was in town to check out a set from U.K. rock trio Tigercub (the group is signed to Gossard’s long-running record label, Loosegroove).
McCartney’s SNL band lineup for tonight begs numerous questions. Could Smith’s performance be more than a one-off? Is Laboriel Jr. simply unavailable for this specific booking but still a member of McCartney’s live group? Could Smith and SNL host Will Ferrell reprise their vintage lookalike feud, which famously ended in a comedic drum-off on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon?
SPIN will update this story as new details become available.