Foo Fighters

Dave Grohl took his one-man project to one of the world’s most commercially successful bands while retaining credibility.

Dave Grohl took his one-man project to one of the world’s most successful bands while retaining credibility.

On January 8, 1995, Pearl Jam vocalist Eddie Vedder broadcast two tracks, one a cover of an

Angry Samoans song, from a demo tape by a new rock band, on his Self Pollution Radio show. This was the world’s first exposure to Foo Fighters, a new group led by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.

In truth, at the point at which these songs were recorded, just three months earlier, there was no band; Grohl had played every riff, pounded every beat and sung every note on his new project’s demo tape himself. On February 19, 1995, Foo Fighters – now including ex-Germs guitarist Pat Smear and the former Sunny Day Real Estate rhythm section of bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith – took their first faltering steps in (semi-) public, performing at a party for friends above a shop on Seattle’s Mercer Street. It was weeks before Dave Grohl got around to listening to a recording of his new band’s first show.

“I was fucking mortified!” he told Rolling Stone magazine, 20 years on. “I thought we sounded great… [then] I heard the recording. [I was] like: ‘Oh… that’s the Foo Fighters? We’ve got to practise!’”

Once dismissed as the ‘grunge Ringo’ by a caustic UK music press, Grohl can afford to laugh. In 2021 his band are one of the most successful rock acts in the world. Their path to the top has not been without turbulence, with the easy-going and charmingly charismatic Virginiaborn Grohl not afraid to take bold and sometimes unpopular managerial decisions in pursuit of his dreams, but his band have retained credibility even as their commercial appeal soared.

After Nirvana’s abrupt demise, Grohl was offered a position playing drums with Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. On stage with Foos he shares some of Petty’s everyman charm, helping his group secure a place in the heart of mainstream American rock. Their journey is far from over.

“I remember there were people that really resented me for having the audacity or gall to fucking keep playing music after Nirvana,” Grohl said in 2009. “It was the most ridiculous thing. I was fucking, what, twenty-five years old? I was a kid. I’m sure that the thing I was supposed to do was become this brooding, reclusive dropout of society and that’s it. Nirvana’s done, I’m done, that’s the end of my life. Fuck that… When Nirvana ended, I wasn’t finished.

I’m still not fucking finished.”