In Your Honor and the subsequent Skin and Bones tour hadn’t just allowed the Foos to step off the treadmill, it had shown Dave Grohl that there were different ways of doing things. The Foo Fighters had spent the first decade of their career with their foot on the gas, rocketing down their own sonic highway, learning to fly. But now it was time to head off-map and see where they ended up.
‘After that tour, I finally realised the possibilities hidden in a lot of our songs,’ Dave told Billboard. ‘We had been kind of caged by the fact we were just a four-piece rock band. With additional instrumentation, which we’d never really experimented with before the last album, we could take songs from ground level to soaring heights.’
Grohl’s reputation as the nicest man in rock had been cemented years before, but ever since the demise of Nirvana, he’d been a serious contender for the title of Hardest-Working Man in Showbusiness. The instruments had barely even been packed away after the Skin and Bones dates before the seeds for the Foo Fighters’ sixth album were already being sown in his head. He refused to entertain the thought of going back to the heads-down, arms-aloft arena rock with which his band had made their name, but neither could they repeat In Your Honor’s binary electric/acoustic split.
‘We’ve been a band for thirteen years,’ Dave explained. ‘Album after album, we’ve tried to redesign what we do. Not reinvent, but just make it all a little prettier. We wanted to experiment and go deeper melodically. The first record to me sounds like it could have been a garage hardcore band. The idea now is to step it up and make Odessey and Oracle.’ He was joking, but only just. He was referring to the 1968 album by British band The Zombies. A work of peculiarly English psychedelia made by men who looked like they’d never touched a psychedelic drug in their lives, Odessey and Oracle was destined to remain little more than a footnote in rock’s history books before a turn-of-the-millennium reappraisal rubber-stamped it as a bona fide cult classic. Re-creating an album along the hazy lines of Odessey and Oracle might have been a big ask even for Dave, but the point remained: the Foo Fighters’ horizons had opened up. Some said they had opened up a little far, perhaps, put off by the sheer overindulgent weight of the double In Your Honor set, but for Dave Grohl it was now anything goes.
Part of the challenge was simply to stave off boredom. What does the rock star who has seemingly achieved everything do next? He’d spent the last decade and more playing the part of the textbook rock star, ‘running around a stage with a beer in my hand, singing my fucking throat out … You do get to the point where you think, “Man, there’s got to be more than just that, so let’s explore a little bit more.”’
But there was another reason for his burning desire to keep moving forward. In April 2006, Dave became a father for the first time when his wife, Jordyn, gave birth to a daughter, Violet Maye. While most new dads find themselves locked in a hellish cycle of sleepless nights and nappy changing, fatherhood only seemed to amp up his already irrepressible energy levels. More importantly, it flicked a switch in his brain. Suddenly, he found that having a daughter fed into his songwriting in new and entirely unexpected ways.
‘It made me feel like the big picture had opened up so wide that I wasn’t afraid of anything any more, to try things I’ve never done and to say things I’ve never said before,’ he gushed to Kerrang!. ‘It changed everything about the way I write. Now when I get fucking angry or defensive or something, I just want to rip someone’s fucking head off. When I feel love, I feel it in fucking every cell of my body. So it just makes me fucking more alive. So when you’re writing music with that in mind or that in your heart, everything just blooms into this fucking incredibly colourful feeling.’
This newfound energy could instantly be heard in the new ultra-vivid songs he was writing. Abandoning the laboured electric-or-acoustic approach of In Your Honor, early demos for the prospective album featured songs that ranged from what the frontman described as ‘wall of noise hard shit’ to ‘fucking mellow piano ballads.’ Unlike its predecessors, however, there was no over-arching concept or philosophy behind the process. ‘The only philosophy that Dave had for this record was anything goes,’ said Taylor Hawkins. ‘After playing that acoustic tour we shed some of the fear of incorporating mellower stuff with the heavy stuff.’
The process of actually writing the album was no different to the way the band had worked before. Dave always kept an acoustic guitar to hand whether he was in his studio or his lounge watching TV on the couch. Ideas would be sketched out; if they worked, he would bring them to the band’s practice space to turn into ‘big loud rock songs’ – or, in some cases, quite the opposite. After the turf wars and near implosion of the early 2000s, these days the rest of the band were just happy for their fully acknowledged leader to shoulder the songwriting burden. But if it was now crystal clear who was in charge, they weren’t unaware of the scale of his responsibilities.
‘We have a lot of people that work for us,’ the newly sober Taylor said. ‘Every time Dave puts a pen to paper or picks up the guitar, it’s a big deal. I don’t think he thinks about it like that, but every time we’re due for a new Foo Fighters record it’s like, “Okay, Dave, what do you got?”’
That said, Dave’s determinedly unconventional approach to the new album needed an equally unconventional producer. Various names were bandied around, but there was one the frontman kept returning to: Gil Norton. Of course, the Foos had history with Norton – both good and bad, in Dave’s eyes. He hadn’t forgotten what a hard taskmaster the producer had been on The Colour and the Shape, with the scorchingly honest approach of a drill sergeant. Yet for many that remained still one of the best Foo Fighters albums and Dave was equally mindful of how effectively Norton had elevated the songs to another level, giving the Foos’ sound the extra punch it needed while sharpening its sleek pop appeal.
The one consistent criticism of every Foo Fighters album since then had been that they had never really reached outside their comfort zone. Gil Norton, Dave decided, would be the perfect man to help push them up a gear. Norton, who had been involved in numerous critically acclaimed projects with artists like Patti Smith and Feeder, had nevertheless not enjoyed a huge international hit since he’d last worked with the Foos a decade before. He was more than happy to work with them again. The first step was to spend two weeks sitting at a table, alone with Dave, deconstructing everything he had written so far, focusing on the minutiae of what made a song work: arrangements, structure, melody, dynamics, harmony … As they progressed, they whittled the songs down from 40 to 20 to, finally, just 12, stripping things back and then painstakingly rebuilding them, piecing things together, said Dave, ‘like a little Lego fire truck’.
This ultra-methodical approach chimed with the singer’s own determined streak – an aspect of his character that he no longer tried to conceal from the public. It seemed the more of his working methods he revealed the more his fans liked it. Liked it that it was Dave in charge. Liked it that it was Dave’s band, Dave’s direction; Dave’s full attention they were getting every time they played one of his songs or bought one of his tickets.
‘We went and sat in a rehearsal space for about four weeks,’ Grohl recalled. ‘We got deep. We’d play a song a day, and I mean a song a day, from noon to midnight. By the time we got to tracking, we were like the fucking Bad Brains – the tightest band in the world.’ Of course, Dave had absolutely no intention whatsoever of turning the Foo Fighters into Bad Brains. His gaze was now firmly on claiming the same territory huge international mainstream rock acts like U2 and Coldplay occupied. He just liked to throw names like Bad Brains into the conversation to somehow make him feel more real. Like he was still one of us. When in fact he had not been that for too long now.
For the volatile Taylor Hawkins, who had yet to join the band when they recorded The Colour and the Shape with Norton, it was an eye-opener – albeit one he actually came to enjoy. ‘We basically played each of these songs a hundred different times, trying every little thing every different way,’ he recalled with a smile. ‘With him we took each song down to the studs and remodelled it completely. Gil’s whole philosophy is to stretch things out as far and wide as possible to see where these songs could go.’
Having decided which tracks made the grade, the band entered Studio 606 West – ‘our fortress’, as Dave now called it – in March 2007 to start recording. It wasn’t all work and no play, though. Dave and Taylor embarked on a competition to see who could go longest without shaving. The result, after nearly four months’ recording, was a pair of luxuriant beards. ‘I was looking like [late Beach Boys drummer] Dennis Wilson in his homeless period, hitching on the Pacific Coast Highway with a bottle of orange juice and vodka in his hand,’ Taylor boasted, while Dave compared himself to heroically hirsute ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons.
Mid-recording, the band descended en masse on the LA Forum to see Black Sabbath spin-off band Heaven or Hell, featuring Dave’s friend and sometime collaborator, Tony Iommi. The trip was one part team-bonding experience, one part frat boys’ night out. A tour bus was duly hired, and someone thought to supply beer bongs – a typically American device to aid consumption of vast quantities of booze at a rapid rate. Unsurprisingly, Dave’s recollections of the gig were hazy, though he woke up the next morning with a painful reminder of the evening’s hijinks: a cracked rib.
But the most surreal moment occurred during the Superbowl on 4 February. The pinnacle of the American football season, this battle royale between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts was watched by an estimated 90 million people in the US alone, plus millions more worldwide. By 2007, the half-time show had become an integral part of the glitzy, garish spectacle – every A-list superstar from Michael Jackson to U2 had played this 15-minute musical interlude in front of a huge TV audience. In 2007, it was Prince’s turn. Coming off the back of a decade-long cold streak, the Purple One’s career was on the up again and he was determined to put on a half-time show to remember. And, despite torrential rain, that’s what he did, serving up his Eighties hits ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and ‘Baby I’m A Star’, before launching into electrifying covers of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Proud Mary’… and the Foo Fighters’ ‘Best of You’.
Taylor was watching the Superbowl on TV with the Foos’ former producer Nick Raskulinecz and members of Rush, who were working with Raskulinecz on their latest album, and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. ‘I’m outside smoking a cigarette with [Rush drummer] Neil Peart and someone sticks their head outside and goes, “Uh, dude, Prince is doing your song,”’ he told MTV.
There was no small degree of irony in Prince’s cover. Just five years earlier, Prince had blocked the Foos from releasing their version of his gloriously sleazy 1984 funk rock classic ‘Darling Nikki’ in the US, pompously proclaiming that bands should ‘write their own song’. Whether his own take on ‘Best of You’ was a heartfelt tribute or belated dig wasn’t immediately clear. ‘Dude, I have no idea why he did it, but I’d love to find out,’ Taylor told MTV. ‘The thought went through my head that maybe he was doing it as a sort of “Fuck you” to us, or maybe he really likes the song. Either way, it was pretty amazing to have a guy like Prince covering one of our songs – and actually doing it better than we did.’
As the beard-growing competitions, drunken hijinks and unexpected superstar tributes indicated, there was an optimism and energy to the sessions that had been absent just a few years before. The studio buzzed with the confidence of a band truly hitting their stride. The end result of this hot streak was both the most focused yet musically diverse record the Foos had made in years. While it had its share of ready-made arena rock anthems in the shape of ‘The Pretender’ – its compelling ‘What if I say I’m not like the others’ refrain the mission statement of the whole album – and the assuredly breezy ‘Long Road to Ruin’, elsewhere Dave boldly attempted to mix things up. He cited Metallica as an influence on the gnarly ‘Erase/Replace’ (‘I still listen to Kill ’Em All at least once a week,’ he claimed), while ‘Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up is Running)’ was effortless thrash-pop that Grohl only half-jokingly compared to R.E.M. and their 1989 mainstream breakthrough album, Green. At the other end of the spectrum was the stripped-back ‘Stranger Things Have Happened’, a song whose hushed tension wouldn’t have been out of place on Nirvana’s Unplugged album, and acoustic instrumental ‘The Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners’, a song featuring virtuoso acoustic guitarist Kaki King and a tribute to the 17 men who narrowly escaped death during the collapse of Tasmania’s Beaconsfield mine in April 2006.
There were some unexpected left turns as well. The piano-led ‘Statues’ was Dave unashamedly tapping into his inner Paul McCartney; the result wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a 1970s Wings album. ‘I was quite nervous about putting it on the record because it’s a big departure,’ he confessed. ‘Then I thought, “What the fuck? That’s exactly why we should put it on the record.”’
The new album also found Dave finally accepting his role as a serious lyricist in a way that he’d never allowed himself to before. Long gone was the guy who rubbished his own lyrics, getting in his excuses early, claiming he only wrote them quickly, almost as an afterthought. It had never been true, only now he no longer felt the need to apologise for voicing his increasingly mature emotions. A large part of this was down to the changes in his domestic circumstances. ‘I used to be scared,’ he told Clash magazine. ‘I used to be afraid to say certain things, but after becoming a father, the big picture really does open up a lot and you realise that life’s too short to hold back those things that you’ve always wanted to do or always wanted to say.’
No Foo Fighters album would be complete, of course, without speculation that at least one song was about Kurt Cobain. In this case, it was ‘Let It Die’. In fairness to the critics, the lines ‘A simple man and his blushing bride / Intravenous, intertwined’ seemed to point in only one obvious direction. The fact that it echoed the same quiet/loud dynamics as Grohl’s old band only amplified the probable connection. This time, though, he didn’t bother to deny it. ‘[It’s] a song that’s written about feeling helpless to someone else’s demise,’ he told the Mail on Sunday. ‘I’ve seen people lose it all to drugs and heartbreak and death. It’s happened more than once in my life, but the one that’s most noted is Kurt. And there are a lot of people that I’ve been angry with in my life, but the one that’s most noted is Courtney. So it’s pretty obvious to me that those correlations are gonna pop up every now and again.’
The song that was emblematic of what the Foo Fighters were doing with the album though was the closing track, ‘Home’. A stark, startling pared-down piano ballad, it was as far from ‘This is a Call’ or even ‘Learn to Fly’ as it was possible to get. This is Dave Grohl, 38-year-old husband and father, baring his soul.
‘I sat and wrote the lyrics in about ten minutes, sang it once, listened to it, and just felt overwhelmed by how revealing it was,’ he said, simply. ‘It made me feel quite vulnerable, so much so that it’s hard to listen to. I get really choked up thinking about all the time I spend away from the things that are important to me. It’s tough being away on tour; it’s even tough just to be talking about how much I wish I was with my family.’
‘Home’ also gave the album its name. Whereas in the past Dave had agonised over album titles, favouring the direct and to the point, here he wanted something that summed up the album’s breadth and diversity; something that gave it the weight it deserved. There was a line in ‘Home’ that fitted perfectly: ‘Echoes, silence, patience and grace, all of these moments I’ll never replace.’ Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace … The sixth Foo Fighters album had its name.
‘I thought it was nice because it’s open to interpretation and it’s a beautiful title,’ Grohl told Clash. ‘I think the album is beautiful in its diversity and its melody and its musicality.’ Not all of his band mates were on quite the same page, though. Taylor, as usual, for one, led the charge, declaring the album far too polished for his taste. ‘It’s pristine,’ he complained to Drummer magazine, ‘a Steely Dan version of the Foo Fighters.’
But Dave had learned to take such utterances with a pinch of salt. If Taylor wanted to play boss in an interview with a drumming magazine that was fine by Dave, who now had bigger fish to fry. ‘At the end of the day, I wanna jump up onstage in front of 80,000 people and make ’em kick up dirt for a few hours,’ he informed Q magazine in yet another cover feature. ‘But the quality and craft of what we’ve done is far above anything we’ve ever done before.’
That desire to ‘jump up in front of 80,000 people’ was now closer to being fulfilled than he knew. The Foo Fighters finished work on Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace in June 2007, and the album was set for release three months later, in September. But before that there was the matter of the biggest performance of the Foo Fighters’ career so far: Live Earth.
On 21 January 2007, the unlikely team of former US Vice President-turned-environmental-crusader Al Gore and A-list hip hop producer and singer Pharrell Williams had announced a series of seven simultaneous benefit concerts taking place on 7 July under the banner of Live Earth. These shows would be held on each of the seven continents, and were collectively designed as a consciousness-raising exercise for global warming and climate change issues – a hot-button topic ever since the release of Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, the previous year.
Live Earth stuck closely to the template laid out by the landmark Live Aid concert more than 20 years earlier: every A-list band and superstar under one roof – or, in this case, seven roofs – where the eyes of the world could focus on them. The European Live Earth show, where Dave and the Foos would be high on the bill, was the biggest of all. Held at London’s enormous, 86,000-capacity Wembley Stadium, the bill brought together the biggest names in pop (Madonna, The Black Eyed Peas, Pussycat Dolls), alternative rock (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snow Patrol, Razorlight) and hip hop and R&B (Beastie Boys, John Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae). There were high-profile reunions (Genesis, Duran Duran and, to the delight of Dave and the rest of the Foos, spoof Eighties rockers Spinal Tap), housewives’ favourites (James Blunt, Paolo Nutini) and even a lone representative from the world of heavy metal (Metallica, dude!).
It was into this billion-dollar line-up that the Foo Fighters found themselves parachuted. For Dave Grohl, it was an opportunity to engage with politics for the first time since his days on the Washington, DC, hardcore punk scene – though, this time, it would be in front of an audience that ran into the billions. ‘I grew up in Virginia, where we had beautiful seasons, summer, winter, spring and fall,’ he said ahead of the show. ‘In LA you don’t get that, you get heat, and in the last six years I’ve lived here every summer has gotten hotter than the one before. My priority is to look out for my daughter’s future, not to mention the wellbeing of the human race.’
On the day of the show, London was bathed in sunshine – ironic, given the cause behind the show. For Taylor, it really was a baptism of fire. The day’s entertainment kicked off with the SOS Allstars, an all-drumming supergroup featuring Hawkins alongside his hero, Queen sticksman Roger Taylor, and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, plus more than 40 back-up drummers from backgrounds as diverse as the British Army and East London bhangra institute The Dhol Foundation. Watching from the side of the stage, Dave was suddenly made ecstatically aware of the sheer scale of the day. ‘You see Wembley Stadium with all of those people and it’s like jumping into a cold lake, like “Holy fucking shit this is HUGE!” Not to mention two billion people watching it on television!’
The Foo Fighters found themselves in the slightly surreal position of being the night’s penultimate act. Even more surreally, they were sandwiched between burlesque-themed girl band Pussycat Dolls and the Queen of Pop herself, Madonna. ‘I thought it was kind of funny,’ Dave told the NME. ‘I just thought, “All right, let’s do this!”’
At precisely 9.17 p.m., following an introduction by comedian-lately-turned-political commentator Russell Brand, the Foo Fighters took to the Live Earth stage and launched straight into a ferocious ‘All My Life’. The MO for their 20-minute set was exactly the same as Taylor’s latest heroes Queen’s had famously been at their now-legendary Live Aid show: get on, play the hits, knock ’em dead. As well as ‘All My Life’, their five-song set featured ‘My Hero’, ‘Times Like These’, ‘Best of You’ and a startling, stripped-down ‘Everlong’. The response from the crowd was uninhibited euphoria. ‘Once we got to the middle of “My Hero”,’ said Dave afterwards, ‘I was like, “Ah, I think I’ve got these fuckers in the palm of my hand!”’
Dave was charm itself, his Every Dude persona utterly in keeping with the serious-but-celebratory tone of the day. The Foos themselves looked like a band that had finally come to terms with the idea of being an arena rock act – or, in this case, a fully fledged stadium rock act. The show might have been called Live Earth, but this was the Foo Fighters’ own Live Aid moment. Speaking to Kerrang!, Dave said as much. ‘I realised that we could jump into a stadium like that, somewhere that size, and feel like we owned the place for the time that we were onstage.’
‘They were a big band in Kerrang!’s world, a big band in NME’s world,’ says Paul Brannigan, editor of Kerrang!. ‘But they were still a level below that of Metallica and U2, the Stones and Springsteen. They weren’t anywhere near that kind of plateau. The big turning point seemed to be Live Earth. That was the first time you thought, “Oh, hang on, wait a minute…”’
The only question now was: when would Foo Fighters play Wembley on their own? Dave neatly sidestepped the question by joking about returning for a five-night stand, only to politely shoot down the idea. ‘I don’t think that’s feasible. For that moment it felt like that massive stadium had shrunk into a tiny room, and when that happens it’s the greatest feeling in the world! If we could do that again it would be good,’ he added almost as an afterthought, albeit a prescient one given that little over a year later the Foos would return to Wembley, ‘that massive stadium’, this time strictly on their own terms.
For now, though, there was a more pressing matter: the release of Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace. The Live Earth show and a subsequent ‘secret’ appearance on the second stage at the popular British V Festival had only served to ratchet up anticipation for the new album. Things were taken up several notches further with the release of the barrelling first single, ‘The Pretender’, which became their biggest hit in America and Britain since ‘Best of You’ two years before. The album hadn’t even been released yet, but Foo Fighters had become one of the most talked-about bands on the planet again.
When Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace arrived in September, however, it did so to mixed sales reactions. Unlike In Your Honor, it entered the UK album chart at No. 1. In America, though, it only got as high as No. 3 and would become the first Foos album not to achieve platinum status for over a million sales. Partly, this was due to the rapidly collapsing state of the record industry as downloads took over from hard-copy CD sales. Mostly, this was simply due to the fact that the Foo Fighters’ career had now plateaued in America. They were about to become one of an increasing number of high-profile rock acts whose albums would still enjoy full-spectrum publicity campaigns by an adoring media, but whose actual sales initially took them high into the charts, only for them to descend just as rapidly soon after.
Most of the reviews were lukewarm. In America, Rolling Stone made nice noises but only gave it three and a half stars. Spin yawned pleasantly and gave it 6/10, insisting that ‘two-thirds of these tracks sound a lot like songs Grohl has done before’. In Britain, the Observer damned it with more faint praise, describing it as ‘undemanding arena rock that’s just leftfield enough not to jar alongside Grohl’s previous incarnation’. This was not the reaction Dave had been hoping for. By this stage in their career, the Foo Fighters may have been virtually critic-proof – but Dave wasn’t. It was now he decided he would simply bypass the critics and take his message straight to the fans.
On 5 September, nearly three weeks before the album’s release, the Foo Fighters played a short, six-song set at Studio 606 West, four of which were brand-new songs: ‘The Pretender’, ‘Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up is Running)’, ‘Long Road to Ruin’ and, as an all-too-earnest finale, ‘Home’. It would be the first step on a touring treadmill that would run through to the end of 2008 and see them play more than 110 shows in venues ranging from tiny clubs to huge stadiums. This was no longer about building his empire; for Dave, this was now a pilgrimage to the faithful. The road to rock’n’roll Damascus.
In early November, just five weeks after the album’s release, the band opened the MTV Europe Awards show at the Olympiahalle in Munich, playing a medley of ‘The Pretender’ and an arena-rocked-up version of the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ (whether the latter was in ‘honour’ of the British monarchy’s German roots is unclear). Although the Foos eventually went home empty-handed, losing out on the Video Star and Headliner awards to French dance duo Justice and Brit-rock titans Muse respectively, Dave happily accepted the job of hosting the so-called VIP ‘Glamour Pit’, interviewing assorted winners and celebrities. It was a mark of his own increasing celebrity, as well as his studied nice-guy reputation, that he’d been tasked with the job in the first place. The band were also given their own ‘Fantasy Suite’, where they played a separate set featuring guest stars ranging from Josh Homme to rapper CeeLo Green.
Less than two months later, the MTV Awards would be overshadowed by the biggest music event of the year – one which Grohl was only involved in as a spectator. On 10 December 2007, the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin – guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones – reunited onstage at the 12,000-capacity O2 arena in London to play their first full show since the legendary band split up following the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980.
The clamour for a Zeppelin reunion had grown exponentially louder as the years passed, though the band themselves had consistently turned down increasingly ridiculous sums of money to get back together. But this was different. It was a tribute to the late founder of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegün, the man who had signed and mentored Led Zeppelin way back in 1968. This was no cash-grab – the O2 show was a true one-off, and a comparatively intimate one at that.
Given the size of the band and the uniqueness of the occasion, it was the must-attend show of not just the year, but of the entire decade. The VIP guest list read like a celebrity Who’s Who: rock legends such as Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Jeff Beck rubbed shoulders with the supermodels Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. While the newer generation of music stars were represented by the likes of Noel Gallagher, Marilyn Manson and, of course, Dave Grohl.
The Foo Fighters’ frontman had never made a secret of his love of Led Zeppelin, even when he was a 16-year-old punk rock brat. John Bonham was his idol. Less well known at the time was that Dave was now a prime candidate to replace the late Bonham at the O2 show. His own drumming style was directly inspired by Bonham’s hard-hitting but percussive approach. ‘I am at their beck and call,’ he had told the NME after the Zeppelin show was announced in July 2007. ‘But Jason [Bonham, son of John] should be the one … everyone knows that. He’s a fucking phenomenal drummer. But if I got that call, what the fuck do you think I’d be saying? “Hey, Chris and Taylor, let’s take a little break for a few days. I’ll see ya later!” But I don’t expect that to happen.’
In the event, it was Jason Bonham who rightly took his father’s place on the Zeppelin drum stool. The O2 show was a simple triumph, with Grohl declaring it one of the best nights of his life. It was in the rosy afterglow of the Zeppelin reunion that he looked back over 2007 and proclaimed it the band’s best yet. ‘I can’t imagine how this year could have been any better. But, at the same time, I can’t believe that this will be the best year of my life because they just keep on getting better.’
The end of the year, though, brought a new reality check to the situation Dave and the Foos now found themselves in. ‘I remember at one point thinking, “God, I wish our band was as big in America as it is in Britain,”’ he confided to Kerrang!. ‘[In the UK] we’re treated like this world-class rock band. Then we go home and we’re playing in theatres, much smaller places.’ He was being disingenuous, but only slightly. While his band were festival headliners in the UK and across Europe, they were still capable of pulling large crowds in the US.
On 14 January 2008, the Foo Fighters launched the US leg of the Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace tour with a show for LA’s KROQ radio station at a Hollywood sweatbox, The Troubadour. Coincidentally, it was also Dave’s thirty-ninth birthday, and the band were joined onstage by their old friend Lemmy, bearing a cake for the birthday boy. The tour proper kicked off two days later at the decidedly less-fabled Frank Sinatra Theater at Bank Atlantic Center in Sunrise, Florida, and continued through such venues as the Fed-Ex Forum in Memphis and the Jobing.com Arena in Glendale, Arizona.
As the corporate nomenclature of the venues they were playing suggested, this was the Foo Fighters’ biggest and most extensive US trek yet, with a touring infrastructure to match. To get this particular show on the road involved eight musicians (including touring musicians Rami Jaffee, Drew Hester, Jessy Greene and their old friend Pat Smear), 35 crew members, six tour buses and nine trucks. More importantly, it also represented the point where Grohl had to reconcile his view of arena rock as a teenage punk with the realities of the position the Foo Fighters now found themselves in – namely, their status as an arena rock band. ‘I was a cynical pothead,’ he told Q in early 2008. ‘Like, “This is stupid, this place is so big.” It made no sense. But now, I guess it does.’
It wasn’t just the size of the venues that had changed. It was Dave himself. The snotty punk rock kid would have barely recognised the grinning, audience-conducting ringmaster he had become. The middle-aged man Dave now was knew that the people who made up a typical Foo Fighters crowd didn’t come for political reasons or to find answers to The Big Questions. They came for a good night out. Playing arenas wasn’t a case of them selling out. It was just a case of Dave being honest about what people loved about his band, and their place in the scheme of things. ‘I think people should be entertained. The last thing in the world I want to do is challenge someone with our concert. I want people to feel included in what’s going on. I don’t want them to think I’m anything that I’m not, so I try my best to feel completely at ease. I would like for the audience to look at the band and feel like they’re looking back at themselves.’
If Dave had any niggling doubts about his band’s status in America, they were at least partly banished by the 50th Grammy Awards, held this year at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The Foos were nominated for five awards, two of which they went home with: Best Hard Rock Performance for ‘The Pretender’ (which they performed on the night in front of a roomful of sedate, suited-and-booted invitees) and Best Rock Album for Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, beating such heavyweights as Bruce Springsteen and John Fogerty in the latter category.
There was very little time for celebration, however. The day after the Grammys, the Foo Fighters’ tour machine was already rolling on to the next date. As the effective CEO of the whole operation, the success of the tour, and of the band, fell on Dave’s shoulders. While he was never one to complain about the heavy workload, he had become aware that, as a father, there was more to life than just being in a rock’n’roll band. For the first time in his life, Dave mused on the idea of taking time away from the band for domestic reasons.
‘The key to longevity is balance,’ he explained to Spin. ‘And I love the band like a family. But I’ve realised that the most important thing is my life outside the band. Without this, everything else would fall apart.’ Family was now all to Daddy Dave. Speaking again to Q, he talked of how being a husband and a father had ‘centred’ him. ‘Personally and honestly, it’s something that I’d always imagined happening,’ he said. ‘I grew up with a tight family. I’m probably one of the few rock musicians that didn’t have a fucked-up life. I mean, my parents divorced when I was seven years old and we grew up with no money. But we got by with very little and we were still the happiest people in the world.’
But then, as Anton Brookes points out, Dave Grohl was always more grounded than your average rock star – and more private. Fatherhood may have altered his perspective on the rock’n’roll industry in particular and the world in general, but his family weren’t there to be paraded as tabloid bait.
‘Dave is very closeted actually when it comes to his private life and his family,’ says Anton. ‘You never see him in the tabloids. You never read about him doing something silly or involved in something. You occasionally see snaps of him with his wife and kids where they’ve gone out somewhere. But it’s very few and far between.’
He may have been out of reach for the tabloids, but Dave always seemed to have time for pretty much everyone else, not least his fans. ‘Sometimes I’ve been with Dave and we’ve gone out just to grab a sandwich or something in between interviews, or just get out of the hotel or the record company,’ says Anton. ‘But as soon as he walks into somewhere, it’s all, “Ah, Dave Grohl!” Dave just plays along with it, and he gives the people what they want. He knows what to do. He’s a seasoned pro. He’s very intelligent. He knows how to play the game. For that twenty seconds people are in his face trying to connect with him, he’ll give them what they want. Then they’ll walk away feeling like a million dollars. Which then allows Dave just to get on with his life.’
Of course, part of the reason for this is that Dave was – and is – still a fan boy at heart. This was put beyond doubt in May 2008, when he wrote an open letter to Metallica via the pages of Metal Hammer magazine. The heavy metal band were working on their latest album with the producer Rick Rubin, and as a long-time fan, said Dave, he wanted to show them some love. The letter opened with the gushings of a star-struck fan.
‘Hey, it’s Dave!’ he began. ‘Remember me? Yeah, I’m the guy that’s been listening to your band faithfully since 1983.’ He talked about buying the first Metallica album, Kill ’Em All, from a mail order catalogue, and how that record ‘changed my life’. Then he offered some characteristically enthusiastic support: ‘I can’t wait to hear the new shit, and no matter what you guys do I’ll always be the first one at the shop waiting to hear it. I’m sure you’ll come out and blow everybody’s fucking minds, because you’re fucking Metallica! Good luck. And don’t release it until it’s kickass. PS Have you finished recording the drums yet?’
It was a letter that reaffirmed his nice-guy credentials, though there was an interesting subtext. Dave may have been a true-life Metallica fan, but it was also written by someone who was now their equal. For, in 2008, Dave Grohl had every reason to be brimming with confidence. Just four weeks after the open letter was printed, the Foo Fighters returned to the scene of their greatest triumph yet: Wembley Stadium. And this time they were the main attraction. The Foos’ two Wembley shows, on Friday, 6 June, and Saturday the 7th, had been announced a few months earlier. For Grohl’s biographer Paul Brannigan, who had followed the band since their inception, the step up to a stadium took a lot of people by surprise.
‘Things have always grown for the Foo Fighters,’ he says now. ‘But there’s a massive leap between two nights at Brixton Academy and two nights at Wembley Stadium, yet that was done within the space of fifteen years. If you’re watching from outside and hadn’t been paying too much attention, you’d see the Foo Fighters doing Wembley and think: “How the fuck did that happen?” It wasn’t like they were notching up a string of Top 10 singles. It would have been quite easy not to have noticed the curve they were on.’
No one, however, was more surprised than Dave. The frontman admitted he wasn’t convinced the band were big enough to fill the stadium. To his amazement, both shows sold out instantly. ‘Someone said it’s 85,000 tickets and we’re like, “We’ll never sell that out, are you crazy?” And then two nights at Wembley sell out in a fucking day or whatever? Honestly, can you imagine that happening?’
His apprehension was understandable. Headlining two nights at Wembley wasn’t just the biggest achievement of his career so far, it was by far the most prestigious. If they pulled it off, the Foo Fighters would be elevated to rock’s A-list. If they fell flat, then … well, that didn’t bear thinking about.
It was with this in mind that the Foo Fighters pulled out all the stops on those two balmy nights in June. The capacity crowd gazed down on the vast stage in the centre of the Wembley pitch. It wasn’t so much ‘in the round’ as ‘in the square’. The revolving main stage was covered by an illuminated pavilion, while a lengthy runway led down to a smaller stage where the band would perform a semi-acoustic set. This same attention to detail was extended to the backstage area, where a replica of Dave’s favourite London rock dive, the Crobar in Soho, replete with skulls, burning black candles and a permanent soundtrack of sheer heaviosity, had been created to entertain the VIP guests.
The first night’s show was as gloriously memorable as anything they’d yet done. The 20-track set list covered all bases, from the latest album right back to Dave’s Nirvana-era B-side, ‘Marigold’, recalled only by those whose memories were now longer than their hair. After traversing the length of the runway for an extended ‘This is a Call’, the singer offered up a lovingly irreverent tribute to the audience: ‘Hey! Hey! Hey! Wembley fucking Stadium, ladies and gentlemen, I love each and every one of you fucking assholes tonight!’
If the first show was a triumph, it was the second night that truly elevated the Foo Fighters to the next level. ‘We knew from the beginning this wasn’t just going to be an ordinary show,’ a clearly jubilant and emotional Dave announced near the end of gig. ‘We knew that this country, you guys, you made us the band that we are today. So we’d like to invite a couple of very special guests: Mr Jimmy Page and Mr John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin.’
The roar that greeted the appearance of the two musicians could probably be heard across the Atlantic. Just six months after the already-legendary Led Zeppelin comeback show, Dave had managed to pull off what would turn out to be the closest anyone would get to another Zep reunion. At the end of 2007, he had sat in the audience at the O2. Now two of the three surviving members were onstage with him.
Page and Jones played two Zeppelin songs with the Foo Fighters. For the first, the old Zep warhorse, ‘Rock and Roll’, Taylor stepped up to the microphone, allowing Dave to get to finally live out his John Bonham fantasies behind the drum kit. Then the latter stepped back to the front of the stage for a triumphant ‘Ramble On’. ‘Welcome to the greatest day of my whole entire life,’ an emotional Grohl told the crowd as Page and Jones took their bows. This was stadium rock as it should be done: on the grandest of scales. If their Live Earth show was a party in someone else’s house, this was bigger and far more significant. For those two nights in June, Wembley Stadium was The House That Dave Grohl Built.
The significance of the show wasn’t lost on anyone. Fourteen years into their journey, the Foo Fighters had done what no one up to and including Dave Grohl had expected them to do: they had secured a seat at rock’s top table. The two Wembley shows were the moment when the Foo Fighters were admitted to the pantheon of the greats, bigger even perhaps than Nirvana, certainly in terms of mass widespread recognition. The moment when Dave Grohl was anointed as the heir to the Seventies rock gods he had once worshipped. Not that the man himself would ever admit it.
‘Did I enjoy it? Yes and no,’ Dave told Kerrang! in the days after the gig. ‘I mean, I was pretty nervous beforehand, but it was an amazing night. The crowd were great, and come on, having Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones onstage? How could I not be excited about that? The question now, though, is where do we go from here?’
The answer, as would soon become evident, would be right back to the start.