PARANORMAL ACTIVITY
In a spooky old house – believed to be haunted – the Foo Fighters channeled the spirit of David Bowie on their “weird” new album. Guitarists Pat Smear and Chris Shiflett discuss the making of Medicine at midnight and the inner workings of the Foos’ three-
How a record sounds is a product of the time, the place and the people who made it. And few appreciate this symbiotic relationship between place and sound as much as Dave Grohl. The Foo Fighters frontman and guitarist directed the 2013 documentary Sound City about the LA studio of the same name. A year later, he created the HBO series Sonic Highways, which explored the cities, venues and stories behind America’s music culture. And this sense of place has played a key role in Foo Fighters’ career.
In 1995, for the Foos’ self-titled debut – a solo project in all but name – the location was Seattle’s Robert Lang Studios, a home venue to get Grohl back in the game after the death of Kurt Cobain brought Nirvana to a tragic end. In 2001, when the Foos were coming apart at the seams, with the sessions for One By One stuttering to a halt, Grohl taking leave to play drums on tour with Queens Of The Stone Age, what saved the record – and perhaps the future of the Foo Fighters – was taking the whole production back to Grohl’s home studio in Alexandria, Virginia. In Studio 606, they got their groove back, thrashing it out in a week, those pent-up tensions turned into the white light and cleansing heat of rock ’n’ roll.
But for the making of the band’s new album, Medicine At Midnight, they chose a most unusual setting – in Encino, Los Angeles, a 1940s house that is said to be haunted, and where Grohl even set up a baby monitor to find evidence of the paranormal.
“You’ve seen Poltergeist, right? It was exactly like that!” laughs Chris Shiflett, one of the band’s three guitarists alongside Grohl and Pat Smear. “One night, a weird little Southern lady came in, quoted the bible, and I got spit out into the living room covered in goo!”
But as Smear adds, a little more seriously: “It was definitely weird and creepy. I’ll tell you that much.”
And along with those strange vibes, the place also offered amazing acoustics. Grohl had rented the house in the summer of 2019, a home from home for the band to work out some ideas on how best to follow 2017’s Concrete And Gold. “Dave just wanted to throw a little demo rig in there and make some demos, write some song ideas,” says Shiflett. “I think he just liked the sound – of the drums or whatever – and we ended up moving in the real recording gear and setting up shop in there, and it was great.”
Taylor Hawkins’ drum kit was set up in the living room. Grohl’s vocals were tracked in the bathroom. An upstairs bedroom was converted into a studio space, another requisitioned for guitars. Vans full of guitars, amps and equipment came and went. Tracking started in September 2019. By January 2020, Medicine At Midnight was in the can. For a band who have become the box office blue-bloods of their generation, that’s pretty quick – but that throw ’n’ go approach is most probably an impulse reflex for a bunch of musicians who, no matter how blue chip they are now, cut their teeth in the American punk and hardcore scenes. Some habits die hard, no matter how many toys you have to play with in the studio.
“It is all done very fast,” explains Smear. “From picking what we are going to play instrument-wise, amp-wise, to actually writing and recording the song, it is all done very quickly. We don’t like to overdo, over
rehearse, overwrite anything. We don’t like to labour over things. If something starts going that way, it gets abandoned. Dave has this slogan for the band which is, ‘If it gets any better it’s gonna get worse,’ so we just get it, get it fresh, and do it.”
Having brought Grohl’s pop sensibility to the fore on Concrete And Gold, producer Greg Kurstin returned for the Medicine At Midnight sessions. His influence on the recording can’t be underplayed. It’s part of the reason why this album has its share of curveballs, secondly, why they work, and thirdly how the Foos cultivated a sound that Grohl likens to David Bowie’s monster hit 1983 album Let’s Dance. Shame Shame, the first single from the album, which was released in November and performed on Saturday Night Live, showed where the material might be headed, or at least how much distance the band could put between the foundational alt-rock of Monkey Wrench and their most outré 2020 compositions. The words ‘Justin’ and ‘Timberlake’ don’t readily come to mind when talking about Grohl’s writing – even at his most Fm-minded, the guitars typically serve as a prophylactic, keeping Foos on-message. But as Shiflett says of Shame Shame: “That is like a looped drum thing, and that is definitely one of Dave’s. He loves that style of music and certainly Greg Kurstin knows it well. When you talk about a pop sensibility, that’s totally his wheelhouse. That song is definitely pretty sparse. It’s kinda different dynamically to anything that we have done before.”
“Greg is always there to nudge you, to help you into a new direction,” says Smear. “It was the same thing with the last record. We worked on all the songs and thought we have to go out of the box sometimes.”
It didn’t start out like that. Medicine At Midnight was shaping up as a straight-ahead hard rock record. A number of songs were written then scrapped as the recording progressed. No Son Of Mine was one of the first, all big physical guitar and bass thump. As Smear saw it, Medicine At Midnight was going to be “a regular Foo Fighters record” when the wind changed.
“Dave started making the songs weird,” he laughs. “It went in another direction. And y’know? It was all part of the house! There was the effect on the songs that you were alluding to earlier, about the environment having an effect on us. It just kinda got all weird. And we chose some songs from the first half, which was like the Foo Fighters, and the other half which was like, ‘Wow! That’s weird.’”
What Smear calls weird, Grohl calls danceable, a descriptor that calls to mind The Cars, Badfinger, The Guess Who, The Knack, all those Friday night FM radio rock artists. Opener Making A Fire has a groove that’s like the Steve Miller Band under a glitterball, complete with hand-claps. “I always think of that as the Michael Jackson song,” chuckles Smear. “That was my first take and I am sticking with it.”
It is one of the tricks of the trade, however, that the Foo thumbprint is all over each track, whether they’re taking the acoustics out of the case for that pseudo-laurel Canyon vibe they bring on Waiting For A War, or building a complex three-guitar rock song such as Holding Poison that seems free and easy but on closer inspection reveals itself to be more Rush than Ron Asheton. “Well, we are all the summation of our influences,” says Shiflett. “I know most of us, as kids, spent a lot of time listening to Rush’s Permament Waves and Moving Pictures, so it is bound to show up somewhere.”
It is one of the gifts of the Foo Fighters’ writing machine that they can take musically complex arrangements and cook them up in a way that’s easily digestible for their audience.
“Everybody has a free hand to do what they want to do,” says Smear. “It is not uncommon for one of us guitarists to go in and do some wacky track and then everybody in the room will go in and shake their head. ‘Nope. That’s not gonna make it! [Laughs] Get the hell out!’
And then we will come up with something else. There are a lot of happy accidents and surprises.”
That Medicine At Midnight came together without much preproduction helped keep its shape loose right through the process. Songs were sketched out in 30 minutes or less before being jammed and thrown onto tape. “Usually, the things that are working are pretty obvious to everyone in the room,” says Shiflett, “The things that Dave gets excited about, and is motivated to write some words for and finish, that’s what’s going to make it on the record. You have what you want to play and then you bounce that off Dave and Greg, and everybody else in the room, and it evolves and becomes something else. I don’t get too wrapped up in, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta make this sound more like the B-52s or whatever.’ These things just come together.”
Love Dies Young is a case in point. That started out as a joke, with Shiflett’s modulated intro riff – reminiscent of Heart’s Barracuda
– bouncing around the studio before taking flight. “I remember recording that and thinking, ‘Ah, that’s going to be a bitch to play
“THIS ALBUM IS LIKE VAN HALEN IN THAT IT HAS THAT PARTY VIBE”
PAT SMEAR
live!’” laughs Shiflett. Having Kurstin on hand helps with the efficiency. Besides his intimate knowledge of the innermost workings of pop composition, he knows how to find tones on the fly – an invaluable skill for a band with three guitar players in it, each trying to find some space in the mix. Grohl goes first, then Shiflett takes a swing at it, before Smear adds his parts on last. “Well that’s always a challenge,” says Shiflett. “You’ve got the drum track, then Dave throws his guitars on it, then usually it’s me up next, and that is part of the puzzle, y’know, finding the right tone for the right part. Is it just something as simple as drums, guitars and a chorus, or are you coming up with another part that bounces off what the first guitar is doing? It’s different for every song. Greg is so good. You can point to a tone on a record and say, ‘I want to do something like that.’ And he will know how to get there.”
Getting three guitars to work on a rock record requires a little finesse. It’s not necessarily like Lynyrd Skynyrd; the Foos are too tight for that. It was around 2011’s Wasting Light that Smear felt he had it worked out. To find a spot in the mix, they just had to dig deeper into the record collection for inspiration and bring something different to the table. As for finding the tones, it’s a freefor-all, with Kurstin directing traffic. “I used an old Tweed Champ and an old Tweed Vibrolux that I put an old Greeback [Celestion G12M 12” speaker] in,” says Shiflett. “And a bunch of Marshalls, and some weird shit! One of the guys who was working on the record had a bunch of trippy amps, just weird stuff, and I used a lot of that on the record, too.” Up last, Smear used whatever amp would complement Grohl and Shiflett’s parts, and whatever guitar was at hand – typically a Hagstrom. Shiflett was on his signature master-built Fender Telecaster, which is like a Deluxe but with P-90s. A regular Tele, a Strat and his ’57 Les Paul Goldtop also saw some action. “Somebody somewhere down the line took off the gold finish, but that really is what it is,” says Shiflett. “It has got those beautiful original PAFS in it, and it is fucking amazing. I used that a bunch.”
For effects, Shiflett recalls using Kurstin’s Roland Space Echo. “It’s got a very specific sound. you hear it and it is just that Know Your Rights Clash sound. You get that right away, that spooky 80s thing.” As for Grohl, Shiflett says his Gibson Trini Lopez was in the mix – it’s why Shiflett principally uses P-90s, to complement the Trini’s humbuckers – but with everyone running to different rooms, it’s difficult to keep track. And that’s the thing: Medicine In Midnight was done, ready to ship in February 2020. Then the pandemic started and it got put on ice. Now it’s here. Is the timing right? Grohl thinks so. There are no tour dates in the diary but screw it. “We don’t just make it so we can hit the road,” he told New York radio station Q104.3. “We write these songs so people can enjoy them and sing along, whether it is in their kitchen by themselves with a bottle of Crown Royal, or in a stadium bouncing around, singing the choruses. Right now, more than ever, people need something to lift their spirits, to give them some kind of release or escape.”
Smear agrees. When the time comes to party again, he sees those stylistic choices – guided by instinct, made in the moment – finally paying off. “This has nothing to how the way the record sounds, but I would compare it to a Van Halen album,” says Smear. “The thing about Van Halen was that they were a hard rock band, almost a heavy metal band, but every song was a song that you would want to play at a party. People would dance to it. I feel that it is like Van Halen in that it has that party vibe.”
“PART OF THE PUZZLE IS FINDING THE RIGHT TONE FOR THE RIGHT PART”
CHRIS SHIFLETT