Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters and 20 years of playing it by ear
The drummer who plays guitar admits he doesn’t do planning, but it seems he doesn’t need to
Twenty years ago, in the wake of Nirvana’s sudden end after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Dave Grohl took some music that he’d recorded and prepared it for release. “I needed a name for it,” recalled Grohl, who wanted a band identity rather than to be a solo artist. The name he came up with was Foo Fighters — which, in retrospect, he called “the worst name ever”.
“It was kind of a joke,” he admitted. “If I’d known it was going to be around this long, I’d probably have spent more time thinking about it.”
In the course of eight albums, Grohl’s Foo Fighters not only have survived but also have thrived. The group has sold more than 11 million albums, and five of its records have debuted in the Top 5 of the Billboard 200 albums chart. It has launched 20 Top 10 rock-radio hits and won 11 Grammy Awards. It also has been part of extended Grohl projects such as the recording-studio documentary Sound City (2013) and the acclaimed HBO series Sonic Highways (2014), which chronicled the making of the Foos’ album of the same name in historic studios around the country.
Moreover the Foos have earned a reputation as a prototypical, even iconic rock band in an age when rock is considered all but dead or, at the least, second-fiddle to genres such as pop, R&B and rap. Guided by Grohl’s exuberance, however, the group turns nearly everything it does into some form of celebration, from three-hour-plus live shows to surprise club performances in each of the eight cities documented in Sonic Highways to his 46th-birthday party in early January, at which the Foos were joined on stage by Alice Cooper, Van Halen’s David Lee Roth, Paul Stanley of Kiss, Tenacious D and others.
“I really like Dave and those guys,” said John Fogerty, who also was part of the Sound City project and worked with the Foos on his album Wrote A Song For Everyone (2013), in a separate interview. “He’s a happy guy. His music is happy, a very upbeat kind of thing. He’s serious about what he’s doing, and he’s a thoughtful guy.
“The stuff he’s doing doesn’t just happen,” Fogerty continued, “but he’s having fun doing it. It’s fun to let loose and really not worry about anything and play with all the joy that’s in us.”
For his part, Grohl has reached the band’s 20th anniversary wondering where all the time went.
“It’s hard to imagine that it’s really been 20 years,” he said, speaking by telephone from New York before the final Sonic Highways episode aired. “It doesn’t feel like it’s been too long, and it doesn’t feel like it’s been long enough.”
Grohl came to music as a rock fan from Springfield, Virginia, and played guitar since the summer of 1982, when his cousin Tracy turned the 12-year-old on to punk rock at a Naked Raygun show in Chicago. He switched to drums, self-taught, in a band called Freak Baby, and in 1986 hit the road with a hardcore group called Scream.
He was asked to join Nirvana in 1990, coming aboard in time for the group’s breakthrough album Nevermind (1991) and the group’s ascent to multiplatinum fame.
When Cobain’s suicide brought the group to an abrupt end in 1994, Grohl didn’t know where to turn. “I was lost, man,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know if I wanted to keep playing music. It was pretty dark for awhile.”
He was offered the drum chair in Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers and was considered for Pearl Jam, but instead Grohl decided to focus on songs he had been writing, some of which had gotten Cobain’s seal of approval before his death. A 15-track demo tape led to a major-label deal and the album Foo Fighters (1995), a chain of events that still seems like a blur to Grohl.
“As with almost everything I’ve done, it just happened,” the twice-married father of three says with a laugh. “I never aspired to be the lead singer of a rock band. I was a drummer who played guitar. I was perfectly happy doing those things.
“I don’t really put too much thought into scheduling the next five years of my life,” Grohl continued. “I just kind of go to places that feel right.
“I mean, the first Foo Fighters record was a demo tape that I made because I felt like I needed to get off the couch after Nirvana and do something with my life that would make me feel like there was something to look forward to,” he said, “and it was as simple as that. They were simple songs I had written and recorded in my basement for fun, and that’s what felt right at the time.
“And then, as the tape got around, I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll try and stand up and sing with a guitar in my hands’, and I found some friends to play with and we did that first tour,” Grohl said. “When we got home from that first tour, that was one of my life’s biggest victories. I was so happy and so proud of myself — so I bought a Corvette!”
Grohl has maintained that same seat-ofthe-pants attitude ever since, guiding the Foos through a few membership changes — bassist Nate Mendel is the only other original member still left, though the current line-up has been together since 2005 — and through any musical fancy that strikes them.
“After Foo Fighters I thought, ‘Well, let’s try to make another one’,” Grohl said.
“And then we made The Colour And The Shape (1997) and then, after that, I thought, ‘OK, if that’s the last one, right on. Look what we’ve done’. And then we thought, ‘OK then, let’s try it one more time’.”
“We try not to overthink things,” he said. “We just start playing and, when it sounds like the Foo Fighters, then we have a song. There’s never really too much forced decision, because then it seems contrived or maybe not real. And I think that’s what keeps it going, rather than having some big, strategic kind of plan.”
Grohl’s philosophy is the same for his other work. “I never aspired to direct a documentary movie,” he said. “Sound City just fell into my lap, and I had so much fun doing it. And I never imagined that I’d have an HBO series, but it happened and I had a blast. I just kind of go to the places that feel right.”
That instinct has led him to form side bands such as Probot and Them Crooked Vultures, the latter with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and Queens of the Stone Age singer Josh Homme, as well as to a temporary membership in Homme’s band.
Grohl has jammed with a Who’s Who of fellow rockers, including Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen. He was part of The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute To The Beatles (2014) and performed in support of US President Barack Obama at the 2013 Democratic National Convention.
The Foos will spend most of this year on the road, but the group knows that it won’t be long until Grohl figures out what’s next.
“Dave’s always thinking of cool stuff for us to do,” drummer Taylor Hawkins said in a separate interview. “He’s been right about everything so far, so we just trust him and go with it.”
Chances are, Grohl said, what’s next will be something different.
“I’m not going to say that I’m addicted to the challenge,” he said, “but I’m addicted to the challenge! I keep thinking, ‘Well, I can’t just do the same thing again. I can’t go make something I’ve already done again’. I have a couple ideas now that are totally crazy, honestly. This time I’m going pretty large. You’ll hear about it.
“At this point I just want to see how much I can pull off, you know? That’s the turn-on.”