Grohl’s HBO doc hits the end of its musical highway
Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways
Finale airs tonight on HBO Canada
The road trip has reached the end of the road. Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways, Dave Grohl’s absorbing documentary series about music in America, ends Friday where for so many it all began: New York City, home to indie rock bands The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and lesser- known but no less influential garage- rock acts of the early 2000s like The Walkmen, The Mooney Suzuki, These Are Powers and The Rapture.
In a previous music life, New York was home to the earliest documented punk rock scene in the U. S. The Velvet Underground, Blondie, Patti Smith, The Fleshtones, Talking Heads and the New York Dolls played clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City.
For Grohl, who cut his music teeth on the front lines of the grunge music scene in Seattle as the drummer for Nirvana, New York is both a natural starting point and natural end point. His film series Sonic Highways has hit a nerve with both music devotees and reviewers.
It’s too early to tell whether Sonic Highways will stand the test of time the way D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night survived past 1967, but the early signs are encouraging. Even by the standards of today’s new golden age of documentary filmmaking, Sonic Highways has been a heady — and often revealing — look at how the local music scene, in any city, can affect music on the world stage and put it in a global context.
LL Cool J is just one of the artists who sat down with Grohl during the last stop in the road, in New York. Grohl’s affinity for music doesn’t begin and end with the grunge heyday of the early ’ 90s, LL Cool J affirmed; it encompasses the American classics, from Ray Charles, Fats Domino and Louis Armstrong to Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Guns N’ Roses and Van Halen.
Grohl’s simple idea for a rock documentary — a look at the hardscrabble, grungy recording studios where music was performed and recorded in near secrecy, as opposed to the thrill and glamour of sold- out stadiums and music arenas — took on a life of its own.
“The idea was to tell the stories of these unsung studios and these unsung musicians, and that’s when people start feeling inspired,” Grohl said earlier this year in Los Angeles. “That’s when you get a kid in his basement watching the guitar player in Naked Raygun say you shouldn’t feel intimidated by your heroes. You should be inspired by them. The idea was to inspire the next generation of musicians to fall in love with music, just as we did.”
Grohl is dismissive — contemptuous, even — of TV music competitions as a road to stardom. Real talent, he says, comes from within — playing music on your own, discovering what works for you, how you find a distinctive style and voice you can call your own, and how you go on to express yourself as a creative artist.
“I don’t want my kid to think the only way you can become a musician is if you stand in line at a song- contest audition and then wind up having a bazillionaire tell you you’re not a good singer,” Grohl said, an edge in his voice. “That — don’t get me started.
“There’s a longer, bigger conversation out there that has to do with why I do this,” Grohl said. “I would rather a kid pick up a guitar and become the Ramones, because they changed the world. It’s important for people to realize that the simple pleasure of playing music is what’s most important. Again, it’s easy for me to say, I know. I didn’t think this shit was going to happen. But at the beginning of every day I wake up and I still want to play. It doesn’t matter for what or with whom.”