On 12 December 2012, the biggest concert of the decade so far took place at New York’s fabled Madison Square Garden. More than 18,000 people had crammed into this cavernous venue to witness an all-star benefit gig dubbed 12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy Relief, designed to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Sandy, which had ripped through the northeastern states of America, leaving $65 million worth of damage in its wake. Like Live Aid and Live Earth before it, the bill featured a line-up of A-list stars, among them the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, The Who and Kanye West. Closing the show was Sir Paul McCartney, who, as an ex-member of the Beatles, was the biggest star of them all.
Five songs into his eight-song set, McCartney introduced three guest musicians to the stage: Krist Novoselic, Pat Smear and, of course, Dave Grohl. With Grohl behind the drum kit and McCartney on a cigar box guitar, this ad hoc supergroup launched into a song McCartney announced they’d recently written together.
The song itself, titled ‘Cut Me Some Slack’, was a heavied-up garage rock jam that channelled the Beatles’ proto-heavy metal anthem ‘Helter Skelter’ and the kind of raucous noise with which Grohl and Novoselic made their name. While the song might have been unfamiliar, no one watching could fail to note the significance of the occasion: it wasn’t the first time Dave and Krist had shared a stage, but it was the first time they had done it while Dave sat behind a drum kit since the crazy daze of you know when. For the 18,000 people in Madison Square Garden, and the millions watching the live broadcast on TV at home, this was the closest they’d come to a Nirvana reunion – and a Nirvana reunion with a Beatle standing in for Kurt Cobain at that.
Charles Cross, who witnessed a later performance from the same line-up in Seattle, has a typically unique perspective on the occasion. ‘When Dave and Krist played with Paul McCartney, everybody thought that was the greatest. More people cite that as the greatest show that ever happened in Seattle than they cite any of the Nirvana concerts. The idea of suddenly you have a linkage between the Beatles and these other two guys … it was the rawest Paul McCartney ever has been. It’s by far and away the greatest show Paul McCartney ever gave, short of any show he ever gave next to John Lennon. You could literally witness Paul as just kind of like, “Where the hell are we going next?” It kind of brought Paul back to the club in Hamburg. And it brought Nirvana back to these early kinds of things where nothing was planned. They had rehearsed it but it seemed as though it was being created in that moment. And that was one of the keys to great Nirvana.
‘If I were going to say something negative about the Foo Fighters, I guess it would be, sometimes in concert, that aspect of it was there early on but I’m not sure if it’s always there now. In the early Foo Fighters shows, when you saw them, you felt like what you were witnessing was being created at that moment. Who they were, where it was gonna go, whether it was gonna be chaotic or fun or focused, you could see that all happening.
‘One of the problems when you become a superstar band playing festivals to 100,000 people – how do you manage to do that? How do you manage to keep that alive? That’s quite a challenge. But Dave had that onstage with Paul McCartney and Krist Novoselic. There is a special connection between Novoselic and Dave. When those two guys are together it truly is better than any other rhythm section that Dave has been in. And it’s not because Krist is the world’s greatest bass player. It’s because they have a musical intuitiveness that is there. And that gets lost when people talk about Nirvana or even when they talk about the Foo Fighters.’
But Dave, as usual, had another surprise up his sleeve. Taking to Twitter after the New York performance, he revealed that ‘Cut Me Some Slack’ would be the first song from the soundtrack album to an upcoming documentary he was directing, Sound City. Not content with the Foo Fighters becoming one of the biggest rock groups on the planet, the man at the centre of that empire was now moving into film. Why not? He’d been everywhere else.
It had been only a matter of time before Dave made the transition from musician to filmmaker. His career had been marked by a combination of fierce ambition and restless drive. The Foo Fighters always had fun with their promo videos, but it was Back and Forth – the career-spanning documentary that accompanied the Foo Fighters’ seventh album, Wasting Light – that truly sparked his interest in making his own films, one that would plug into his love of music and its history.
In May 2012, six months before his historical onstage collaboration with McCartney and his old Nirvana colleagues, Dave had announced that he was producing and directing a film about what he described as ‘America’s greatest unsung recording studio’. The film would take its name from the studio in question: Sound City, a legendary facility in Van Nuys, California, where such illustrious artists as Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and dozens more had made their breakthrough records.
For Dave, there was a personal connection to the ramshackle Sound City. It was there, in the summer of 1991, that Nirvana had recorded Nevermind with the producer Butch Vig. Dave had long been impressed by the studio’s analogue mixing console, a vintage Neve 8028. The Neve was utterly out of step with twenty-first-century digital recording techniques, but Dave just loved its warm sound and the fact that it provided a link with both the studio’s past and the history of American music from the late Sixties right up to the present day. When it came to recording Wasting Light in his studio, Dave contacted Sound City to see if they could buy the Neve board.
‘They were like, “I’d sell my grandmother before I’d sell that board,”’ he recalled. ‘I was like, “Okay, just saying.” [But] it was only a matter of time before they closed, and they asked me if I was serious about buying [the console]. It didn’t cost as much as you think.”
The Neve board became the seed of the story for Grohl’s subsequent film. It provided a springboard for him to look at the studio and many of the bands that recorded there. But it was also an opportunity for Grohl to celebrate what he called ‘that feeling you get when you put five guys in a room, hit “record” and the hair on the back of your neck stands up’.
‘When Sound City closed [in 2011], it was a very sad day,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘That place was like a church. The list of people that recorded there reads like a virtual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Cheap Trick, Slayer, Rage Against the Machine, Weezer, Metallica – and Nirvana … That funky old place had the best drum room in the world. The drum sound at the beginning of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – that’s Sound City.’
For Grohl, the film was a labour of love. Initially conceived as a YouTube clip, it grew into a year-long project that involved him taking responsibility for interviewing many of the bands and artists who had recorded there, from Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich to easy listening kingpin Barry Manilow. As a first-time producer and director, it was a baptism of fire. ‘When I did the first Foo Fighters record, I did it in six days and played all the instruments,’ Dave reminisced. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing. I like that record because it’s so naïve and it is what it is. It’s not the greatest record in the world, but to me, it’s, like, cool. Same thing goes for the movie. I don’t know how to make movies, but I could tell you the story of Sound City like that’ – he snapped his fingers. ‘So why would I need anyone’s help? We rounded up the coolest people we knew and it was fucking great.’
Dave’s hands-on involvement gave the film an extra dimension that separated it from every other music documentary. As part of the film, Dave would also write songs with various collaborators, which would then appear both in the finished movie and on a subsequent soundtrack album. Among the people he worked with were the Eighties AOR pin-up Rick Springfield, Slipknot’s frontman Corey Taylor, and Fleetwood Mac’s singer Stevie Nicks, the latter of whom sang on ‘You Fix Me’.
‘I’m still a nerdy rock fan and these were huge experiences to me,’ Dave told Kerrang!. ‘But logistically, the project was nuts! That’s when I needed help! The Stevie Nicks song was something I wrote for In Your Honor, but we didn’t use it because the music sounded too much like Fleetwood Mac. The song was just sitting there, so I sent it to her and asked what she thought. She said, “I love it!”’
But the biggest coup of course was the involvement of Paul McCartney. The Foo Fighters had played onstage with McCartney during the celebrations for Liverpool’s year as the European Capital of Culture, while Dave had also joined the legendary Beatles star at the 2009 Grammys. Nearly 20 years earlier, Dave had also been part of the band who re-created the Beatles’ music for the biopic Backbeat. But McCartney’s involvement in the Sound City documentary would be the first time the two parties had ever been in the studio together.
It was Grohl who invited McCartney to jam at Sound City Studios when he was next in Los Angeles. In the mind of the Foos frontman, they would blast through some classic rock’n’roll staples like ‘Long Tall Sally’. ‘He was the one that said, “No, no, no, no – let’s write a song. Let’s write and record a new song in the three hours we have there,”’ Dave recalled. He had also invited Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear along to the clandestine session. Inspired move, lucky break, opportunistic wheeler-dealing, looking back on it a few months later, Dave still couldn’t believe it had actually happened.
‘I love Paul so much,’ he told The Times. ‘Not only because he is a great person, but because he is a fearless musician. He walked in here with the bass and the Les Paul: two of the most iconic instruments in music history. And he decides to play a cigar-box guitar in front of everyone, to record a song. Not a lot of people would do that. To sit down and start from scratch and three and a half hours later have this raucous fucking jam come together – it was huge. It really was a huge, full-circle moment.’
The result of this superstar jam session was ‘Cut Me Some Slack’, which echoed both the Beatles and Nirvana. Yet it wasn’t until halfway through the session that McCartney realised the history of the people in the studio with him. ‘It was magic for me, playing with these guys,’ said McCartney. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t kind of know who they were … Then, during the session, I hear them talking: “Wow, we haven’t played that since Nirvana.” So I found myself in the middle of a Nirvana reunion, and I was very happy.’
The events surrounding the ‘Cut Me Some Slack’ session made up the climactic final quarter of the Sound City documentary. The rest of it told the story of the studio through the artists who recorded there and the staff who worked there. Grohl spoke to more than 150 people in total (though not all made it into the finished movie). There were archival appearances from Johnny Cash and, naturally, Kurt Cobain. The end result was more than just the story of the vintage Neve 8028 soundboard – it was a loving tribute to the cradle of so much great American music, and also a tantalising glimpse of a creative process that normally remains hidden from the general public.
Sound City premiered at the Sundance Festival in Utah on 18 January 2013. It was during Sundance, at the Park City Live venue, that Dave unveiled the Sound City Players, a band-come-collective featuring a rotating cast of musicians who appeared in the film. Among them were Stevie Nicks, Rick Springfield, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty, Lee Ving of punk rock band Fear, and Krist Novoselic. The Foo Fighters themselves were the core band – a task that entailed them having to learn 50 songs in just ten days.
Such was the demand for the gig that tickets changed hands for $1500 a piece. The crowd certainly got their money’s worth – the band played for more than three hours, making it through 35 songs. Dave would subsequently take the Sound City Players on the road with him to New York, Los Angeles and London. Despite the all-star line-up, there was one band whose songs he was conscious to avoid: Nirvana. ‘You know, that’s hallowed ground,’ he explained to The Times. ‘We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right. And we did have an idea for the London gig that maybe we would do a Nirvana song, but it didn’t pan out. The person we wanted to do it with wasn’t available.’
The film, the Sound City Players shows and the subsequent album of collaborations recorded for the documentary, Sound City – Real to Reel, were all rapturously received. This was Dave Grohl the music fan in his element, his love for his chosen subject – music, in all its forms – shining through. ‘I consider this to be the most important thing I’ve ever done, artistically, of all the albums I’ve made, of all the bands I’ve had the pleasure of being in,’ Dave told the audience at the film’s premiere. ‘I really feel like the Sound City movie, its intention is to inspire the next generation of kids to fall in love with music as much as I did.’
Despite the effort involved getting his documentary to the screen, Dave’s adventures in filmmaking hadn’t taken him away from his day job. On 20 February 2012 – the day that would have been Kurt’s forty-sixth birthday – Dave appeared at the Brit Awards in London to present an award to The Black Keys. During an interview with the radio station XFM, he was asked when the Foo Fighters would start work on their next album. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, we have been in our studio writing, and in the past few weeks we’ve written an album,’ he said. ‘And we are going to make this album in a way that no one’s ever done before, and we’re pretty excited about it … It’s a little ways off – it’s not ready to happen right now – but I think next year is going to be a really big year for the Foo Fighters, without question.’
Dave’s promise that his band would make an album ‘in a way that no one’s ever done before’ would eventually prove to be just that. But before that, the Busiest Man in Rock had a full calendar. In April, Dave and Taylor inducted the veteran Canadian prog rock trio Rush into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The young, pre-punk Grohl had his mind blown by Rush’s 1976 concept album, 2112 – not least by the drummer Neil Peart’s hyper-technical approach. ‘It fucking changed the direction of my life,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘It made me want to become a drummer.’ Of course, he’d said similar things in the past about John Bonham, Keith Moon, Ringo Starr and Rat Scabies, but that didn’t make it any less true in Dave’s starry eyes.
His and Taylor’s appearance at the ceremony was characteristically funny. After officially inducting Rush with an effusive, heartfelt and hilarious speech, the pair returned to the stage dressed in white silk kimonos – and, in Dave’s case, a blond wig – in honour of the band photo from the back sleeve of 2112. They then proceeded to blast through that album’s opening track, ‘Overture’, before being joined by the three members of Rush themselves. ‘It’s terrifying to play your favourite band’s song in front of your favourite band,’ Dave gushed afterwards. ‘It’s one thing to sit in the basement and woodshed 2112, and its another to stand in front of Rush in a fucking kimono and a wig and try to use a wah-wah pedal in your platform shoes.’
Rush weren’t the only band whose orbit the Foo Fighters found themselves in during the summer of 2012. In May, Dave joined the Rolling Stones onstage in Anaheim, California, to add guitar and trade vocal lines with Mick Jagger on their 1971 classic ‘Bitch’. A month later, the whole band appeared as John Fogerty’s backing band on a turbocharged update of his old Creedence Clearwater Revival hit ‘Fortunate Son’, from his album Wrote a Song for Everyone. ‘It was palpable, the air,’ Fogerty said of the sessions. ‘You could tell a band was in there. It was a unique group of people.’ There was also a return appointment with Paul McCartney for Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear, this time at Safeco Field in Nirvana’s hometown of Seattle. As well as playing ‘Cut Me Some Slack’, this time they joined McCartney on the Beatles classics ‘Get Back’, ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘The End’, plus a romping version of Little Richard’s old rock’n’roll staple ‘Long Tall Sally’.
Amid all these high-profile hook-ups, Dave didn’t stop writing. He collaborated with Joan Jett on a song for her new album, Any Weather, and produced an EP by a country outfit, the Zac Brown Band, appropriately titled The Dave Grohl Sessions Vol. 1. ‘They’re unbelievable,’ he said. ‘The band is so good … we didn’t fuck with computers, we tracked live, four-part harmonies around one microphone. It’s rocking.’
There were also tantalising hints of what the Foo Fighters’ eighth album might be about. In August 2013, Butch Vig confirmed that he would be producing the new record. ‘It was a very short hiatus,’ Vig said of the band’s break. ‘We’re going to start recording the new Foo Fighters record at the beginning of next year.’ A few weeks later, Chris Shiflett posted an Instagram photo revealing that the band had already completed 13 new songs. In an interview with Rolling Stone in November, Dave ramped up anticipation about the new record even further. ‘It’s badass,’ he said. ‘We’re doing something that nobody knows about, it’s fucking rad. We begin recording soon, but we’re doing it in a way that no one’s done before and we’re writing the album in a way that I don’t think has been done before.’
Aside from a pair of shows of in Mexico in December (announced with a hilarious YouTube video featuring the actor Erik Estrada from the Seventies TV show CHiPs as a leather-clad biker, and a cameo appearance from Dave’s bare buttocks), the Foos were suspiciously quiet as 2013 gave way to 2014. For Dave Grohl, his attentions were at least partly on his imminent second visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This time, though, it wouldn’t be to induct another band – in 2014, it was Nirvana’s turn to be inducted.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had been set up in 1983, by the Atlantic Records mogul, Ahmet Ertegün, and a team that included Rolling Stone’s founder, Jann Wenner. With a museum in Cleveland and an annual induction ceremony, it was the closest thing the music world got to the Oscars. The list of stars already inducted read like a Who’s Who of music – everyone from rock’n’roll pioneers such as Elvis Presley and Little Richard to contemporary stars like the Rolling Stones, U2 and Bruce Springsteen. According to the organisation’s rules, artists were only eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first record. 2014 was the first year Nirvana were eligible – their debut album, Bleach, having been released in 1989 – and, unsurprisingly, they were a shoo-in.
Although Dave hadn’t played on Bleach, he was still an integral part of the band. ‘For once … I’m speechless,’ he said in a statement. ‘From the basements to the dingy clubs, to the broken-down vans to … the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’d like to thank the committee not only for this induction, but also for recognising Nirvana for what we were: pure rock’n’roll. Most of all, thank you to all of the fans that have supported rock’n’roll throughout the years, and to Kurt and Krist, without whom I would not be here today.’
But there was one potential issue lurking in the wings: Courtney Love. The relationship between Kurt’s widow and the two surviving members of the band had gone beyond fractiousness and descended into outright war. In November 2011, onstage at a festival in Brazil, Courtney had publicly accused Dave of ‘[taking] money off my kid’s table’, referring to her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. Worse was to come. In 2012, in an increasingly venomous series of Twitter postings, Courtney accused Dave of trying to seduce Frances. Dave immediately shot down the accusations with a statement: ‘Unfortunately, Courtney is on another hateful Twitter rant. These new accusations are upsetting, offensive and absolutely untrue.’
More tellingly, Frances Bean herself denied her mother’s claims. ‘While I’m generally silent on the affairs of my biological mother, her recent tirade has taken a gross turn,’ she said in a statement. ‘I have never been approached by Dave Grohl in more than a platonic way. I’m in a monogamous relationship and very happy.’ Courtney later withdrew the allegation.
In the build-up to the show, which was held on 10 April 2014, at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, onlookers began to wonder what the night might hold. Given that both Dave and Courtney wouldn’t just be onstage for the induction but sharing a table as well, there was the strong possibility of some very public fireworks. Incredibly, the exact opposite happened. Nirvana’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was moving, celebratory and, ultimately, a chance for the two warring parties to rebuild bridges. On the night, it was R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe – a longtime admirer of the band, and a friend and mentor’s of Kurt’s – who introduced the band, before Dave, Krist Novoselic and Kurt Cobain’s mother, Wendy O’Connor, gave their own emotional speeches. Dave also paid tribute to the four drummers who preceded him in the band, and talked about the punk rock spirit that inspired them all.
And then it was Courtney’s turn. Approaching the microphone to a mixture of cheers and boos, she was in uncharacteristically concise mode. ‘I have a big speech,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going to say it. This is my family I’m looking at, all of you. Brother Michael, Brother Krist, Grandma Wendy, Mr Grohl … David.’ She then walked over to Dave and gave him a very public and heartfelt hug. ‘That’s it,’ she added. ‘I just wish Kurt was here to see this.’
For Dave, making up with his old enemy was almost as much of a triumph as the actual induction. ‘You know, the wonderful thing about that night was the personal side of it,’ he told the Hollywood Reporter afterwards. ‘It was the Hall of Fame ceremony, but it meant so much to all of us personally that sometimes you forgot about the other stuff – like the arena and the trophy – and focused on real, personal things. I saw Courtney walking past [earlier in the night], and I just tapped her on the shoulder and we looked each other in the eyes and that was it – we’re just family. We’ve had a rocky road. We’ve had a bumpy past, but at the end of the day we’re a big family and when we hugged each other it was a real hug.’
As was tradition, the surviving members of Nirvana – including Pat Smear – played a brief set for the crowd. Just as Kurt Cobain had rejected the macho stereotypes of rock 25 years before, so his band mates chose to do the same by recruiting a quartet of female singers to take his place at the Hall of Fame: Grohl’s sometime collaborator Joan Jett came on to sing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth tackled ‘Aneurysm’, the indie rock singer-guitarist St Vincent covered ‘Lithium’, and most startling of all, the 17-year-old New Zealander Lorde – who wasn’t even born when Kurt Cobain died – turned in a spine-tingling performance of ‘All Apologies’, with Krist on accordion.
‘We thought, “Wait, it has to be all women,”’ Dave told Rolling Stone. ‘“Don’t even ask anyone else. If we can fill the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance with these incredible women singing Nirvana songs, then we’ll have achieved our own revolution.” It also added a whole other dimension to the show. It added substance and depth, so it didn’t turn into a eulogy. It was more about the future. I haven’t played those drum parts since I was twenty-five,’ he continued. ‘I’m forty-five now. We played for ten fucking hours each day. After the first night of rehearsals, I limped home, had two glasses of wine, three Advil, took a hot shower and slept for ten fucking hours. That’s a coma for me, because I never sleep.’
There was a second, unpublicised show later that same night at the 250-capacity St Vitus club in Brooklyn. As well as Joan Jett and St Vincent, Dave and Krist also recruited Dinosaur Jr’s mainman, J Mascis, and John McCauley, singer with the indie rock outfit Deertick, a band that sometimes play sets of Nirvana covers under the name Deervana. McCauley had received an email from Dave asking if he wanted to sing on ‘Serve the Servants’ and ‘Scentless Apprentice’ at the show. McCauley initially thought it was an April Fool’s joke by one of his friends. It was only when Dave’s manager, John Silva, followed it up that he realised the offer was serious.
‘It felt like when you’re a kid and you sleep over at a friend’s house and you become part of your friend’s family for the night,’ McCauley said. ‘When I got up onstage, it was a lull, because we were trying to figure out what song to do next and there was just feedback and us yelling at each other and Dave was like, “Wow, this is like a real Nirvana show!” I’m having a hard time believing it ever happened.’
Dave’s high-profile presence at the Hall of Fame ceremony momentarily drew attention away from the new Foo Fighters record. His claim that this would be a revolutionary new record, one done ‘in a way that no one’s ever done before’ was a huge promise to try and keep. But the mystery was soon resolved when it was announced that he was making a TV series for the US channel HBO that would pick up where Sound City left off. It would see the frontman visiting eight studios around America: Chicago’s Electrical Audio, Rancho De La Luna in California and Inner Ear in Washington, as well as similarly legendary facilities in New York, Austin and New Orleans. As with Sound City, Grohl would speak to artists who had worked in each studio and, with the Foo Fighters, record a new song in each. There would be the series and an accompanying album, both to be called Sonic Highways.
The album would feature songs from each episode, each with a different guest musician. This would be ‘a love letter to American music’, said Dave. ‘We’ve been recording at some different locations, but we’re almost halfway done with the recording and it’s going well,’ said Butch Vig, who had been enlisted once again to produce the album. ‘It sounds different – we’ve thrown a few things into the mix, in the recording process, that are going to give the record a different sound and a different feel. It’s been a challenge, but it’s also been exciting.’
In May alone, Grohl and the Foos appeared in two different cities as part of the ongoing recording-sessions-cum-musical-travelogue. There was a surprise Foo Fighters gig at the legendary Washington, DC venue the 9.30 Club. Ostensibly a birthday party for Big Tony Fisher, bassist with local ‘go-go’ heroes Trouble Funk, it found Dave teaming up with members of Bad Brains and his old band Scream – including Franz Stahl – before capping out the night with an unannounced Foo Fighters set. A few days later, the band appeared at New Orleans’ prestigious Preservation Hall, where they were joined by local musicians, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. By mid-August, both the Sonic Highways album and the TV series were finished. The title reflected the Foo Fighters’ sense of musical wanderlust and their attempt to document the indigenous American music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Yet, as Dave revealed, it could all have been very different. ‘At one point I thought, “You know what would be really funny? To re-record the first Foo Fighters record as the band we are now,”’ he told the NME. ‘Cos the first record isn’t the Foo Fighters; it’s just me. So what if, for the twentieth anniversary, we went in and re-recorded the first record – same songs, same arrangements, in sequence – but as the Foo Fighters 2014? Taylor was like, “Are you out of your fucking mind?! That’s the worst idea ever! People would fucking hate it!” And Pat said, “That’s exactly why we should do it!”’
In the event, Dave ditched the idea and instead focused on Sonic Highways. Picking up where Sound City left off, it would be the most ambitious project he’d ever put his name to – musically and personally. Pulling it together had taken 18 months – the majority of which had taken place in secret. ‘After making the Sound City movie, I realised that the pairing of music and documentary worked so well because the stories give substance and depth to the song, which makes a stronger emotional connection to it,’ he told the Hollywood Reporter. ‘If you know the story behind the artist, or the story behind the studio, or the song, it widens your appreciation for the music. The four-minute-long video is a blessed thing but sometimes it can be just an image. And these stories and these people give so much more depth to the music.’
For Dave, the Sonic Highways project was both ‘the history of American music broken down to the cultural roots of each place’ and a look at the Foo Fighters’ own place in it all, as they approached their twentieth anniversary. His original plan had been to visit studios all over the world. Logistics prevented that, so they focused instead on eight studios in the US, some of which he had a personal connection with. Inner Ear Studio in Arlington, Virginia, where Dave recorded with Scream, was the cradle of Washington, DC’s hardcore punk scene, though arguably the place with the most personal connection for him was Robert Lang Studios in Seattle, where he had recorded his last tracks with Nirvana a few months before Kurt Cobain’s death – and all of the first Foos album.
Other studios, such as New Orleans’ Preservation Hall, Austin’s Studio 6A and The Magic Shop in New York, were chosen purely on account of Dave’s curiosity for his subject. ‘We get to spend a week in each city, and by the time we leave each place, I feel like I know the people, I know the food, the music,’ he explained. ‘Seven days is enough to get a little bit of each city under your skin. And New Orleans is just so deep – there’s not only a musical community but it’s a community of families where generations of musicians have been playing music in the city for hundreds of years … It was just fuckin’ magical.’
In each city, Dave spent time interviewing the key players who had helped shape its music scene – and by extension, the music of America. In the episode centred on Washington he spoke to Big Tony Fisher of Trouble Funk and Fugazi’s singer and DC hardcore punk linchpin Ian MacKaye, whom Dave knew from his days on the city’s punk scene. In Nashville, his interviewees spanned several generations of country icons, from Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson to latter-day stars such as Zac Brown. In New York he bridged the worlds of rock, avant-garde and hip hop with help from Kiss’s Paul Stanley, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and LL Cool J.
One of the most insightful interviewees was Steve Albini, owner of Chicago’s Electrical Audio studio and the guy who had produced In Utero. Speaking now, two decades after they last worked together, Albini notes that Grohl is ‘still basically the same dude – way more money and obviously comfortable with his station in life, but still goofy and gregarious, still sick with talent’. Albini’s work with everyone from the Pixies to Jimmy Page and Robert Plant has seen him build a reputation as the most no-nonsense producer operating today. Not for him the extravagance or egos of the modern music industry – Albini famously views major labels as an unnecessary evil, and the bands who sign for them as little more than puppets. Foo Fighters, however, he says, are one of the few exceptions.
‘It’s pretty clear the Foo Fighters as a project is Dave Grohl expressing himself rather than anybody else pushing him around,’ says Albini. ‘His music may or may not be to your tastes, but it’s genuinely his, he’s going to pursue it his way and he doesn’t seem to care if other people get it. I don’t know what more you can ask of an artist.’
For Dave, pulling together the Sonic Highways project involved a superhuman effort of will. This was more than just roping in a few mates to play a gig. By taking on the role of TV producer, Dave stepped far outside his own comfort zone. ‘I was on the phone conferencing with agencies and corporations, trying to round up money to do this,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘Part of me felt sick inside. But I justified it: “I’m doing something good. I’m doing something people will appreciate.”’
The TV series made its debut on 17 October in the US and was an instant critical success. It certainly fulfilled Dave’s promise of being ‘a love letter to American music’. Effectively an eight-part musical travelogue, each episode featured multiple interviews, done by Dave himself, and culminated in the recording of a song with a musician associated with the studio – in Chicago, it was Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen; in Austin it was the rising bluesman Gary Clark Jr; in Los Angeles it was the Eagles’ guitarist Joe Walsh. Other guests included Dave’s former Scream band mates on the raucous ‘The Feast and the Famine’ (recorded in Washington, DC), the Nashville-based country singer Zac Brown, who added vocals and ‘devil-picking’ to the sleek ‘Congregation’, and David Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Visconti, who arranged the strings on the seven-minute epic, ‘I am a River’.
The Sonic Highways album followed less than a month later. Despite the multitude of guests, it sounded undeniably like a Foo Fighters record, even if it smoothed out the rough edges of the wilfully raw Wasting Light. For Dave it was both the logical culmination of his lifelong obsession with music and definitive proof that even though he was the leader of one of the most successful rock bands of his generation, he was still a fan at heart – albeit one with a huge amount of pulling power and clout.
‘He absolutely calls the shots now,’ says Paul Brannigan. ‘He can obviously do whatever he wants. He’s just done an HBO series. He’s not gonna be short on offers to direct other music documentaries. He’s already making videos, he did one for Soundgarden [2013’s ‘By Crooked Steps’]. He can pretty much flick through the Rolodex of popular culture at the moment and pick out anybody in the musical world and say, “Do you fancy doing something?” There are no barriers absolutely now to whatever he chooses to do. Whether that’s a good thing for the Foo Fighters remains to be seen, but certainly from Dave Grohl’s perspective, you’ve got to think you’re in a pretty sweet position right now, however you choose to move on from this. It really does seem like a pretty limitless horizon at this point, whatever he should choose to do.’
Dave certainly pulled in the big names to a gig held to celebrate his forty-sixth birthday party at the Los Angeles Forum in January 2015. The band were joined by Kiss’s singer, Paul Stanley, Van Halen’s frontman, Dave Lee Roth, the Tenacious D duo of Jack Black and Kyle Gass, Jane’s Addiction’s singer, Perry Farrell, and, for a climactic cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Let It Roll’, the Motörhead mainman, Lemmy, ex-Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash and Ozzy Osbourne’s six-stringer, Zakk Wylde.
Rita Haney, widow of the late Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell, suggests that Grohl relishes the role of bringing people together. ‘He’s like David Lee Roth,’ says Haney from her home in LA. ‘He’s just got that grin. He hit me up to see if I could put him in touch with Zakk Wylde to see if Zakk would do that birthday thing he was doing. It was like a day or so before and we were texting and I said, “What are you up to?” and he said, “I’m bored in the studio, just messing around with the Charlie Brown theme.” I was like, “I need to hear this.” He immediately sent me this audio. It was really funny. He’s a character – always positive. He’s not one of those energy vampires. Just a positive guy.’
For Paul Brannigan, Dave Grohl remains the same person he first met in the Nineties, just less available. ‘It’s harder to get to him. I remember running into Dave at other gigs in London, or in America, where he wasn’t playing but he would just be there, watching some other band. That still happens, but not quite so often as it would have done in the late Nineties. And he’s got a family now and whatever. But when you sit in front of Dave it doesn’t seem that anything has particularly changed. It doesn’t seem that different from sitting in the pub getting drunk with one of your friends, talking about some obscure seven-inch records or AC/DC albums or whatever. You almost have to remind yourself that this is somebody that is going to be headlining Glastonbury, and doing two nights at Wembley.’
Dave’s own journey from gawky punk rock kid through personal tragedy into bona fide rock god is one of the more unlikely success stories of the last 20 years. If nothing else, it does show that sometimes nice guys do finish first. ‘Out of the fires, phoenixes rise, and that’s exactly what Dave’s done,’ says Anton Brookes. ‘And he’s done it in a dignified way. He hasn’t raped the carcass of Nirvana. He’s not used that golden ticket to fulfil his career. He was given opportunities because he was Dave Grohl from Nirvana but he had to earn that right. People were waiting sharpening the knives in the wing, waiting for him to fall so they could launch into him.’
Anton draws a parallel between Dave’s own fandom and the levels of devotion he inspires in his band’s following. ‘The fans love them. With every new record that came out, the fan base grew and grew. [To the point now where] it’s dads and sons, mothers and daughters. They can enjoy them on almost a spiritual plateau together. Both get the same yet something different from the band.’
It’s no surprise that 2015 has seen the Foo Fighters play to more people than ever before. The summer was to have seen the Foo Fighters undertaking another two-night stand at Wembley Stadium as well as an even more prestigious debut headlining slot at the iconic Glastonbury Festival, the five-day celebration of music that takes place in the southwest of Britain and regularly attracts audiences of upwards of 150,000 people. As Metallica’s 2014 appearance at Glastonbury proved, headlining the festival has the power to take a band to an entirely new audience.
Unfortunately, though, when Dave Grohl broke his leg when he fell from the stage during a show in Sweden in June, it put all those plans in abeyance. A downer for Foos fans but an even bigger blow to the band. At the time of writing, Grohl has just told Rolling Stone that he’s making progress in his recovery, saying, ‘I’m starting to do a little bit of rehab exercise and the cast is off. The swelling’s down. The pain’s gone. It’s just a matter of getting those kick-drum muscles back, man. I can’t fucking lose those. That’s important to me. So I’m sitting here, moving it around, doing my exercise as we speak.’
In the meantime he is using a removable boot and points out that his accident could have been much worse. ‘I could have done some real damage. This is pretty gnarly, but it could have been a lot worse.’ He said his physical therapist told him, ‘It was basically like my ankle got into a forty-mile-per-hour car crash.’ Ouch!
* * *
Having been forced to cancel seven dates, including those huge UK shows, the Foos are now back on tour in the US, with Dave singing while seated on a giant throne, his leg raised in front of him on a chair. He joked that the ‘easiest part of my whole day’ are the shows, ‘the rest of the time, I’m hobbling around trying to brush my teeth and pack my bags and walk down the street and get a cup of coffee. The challenge is the other twenty-one hours of the day.’
They will be back, possibly as soon as next summer when Glastonbury will be simply the latest staging post on a career that, 20 years ago, would have been unthinkable by everyone up to and including Dave Grohl himself. But while he has achieved so much in his career thus far, the future has endless possibilities. There is now talk of a follow-up album and series to Sonic Highways, this time based in Britain. Meanwhile, Dave Grohl has become the rock superstar it’s now against the law not to love.
But what of the city that first made him famous – Seattle? I end by asking Charles Cross what the word on the street in Seattle is these days about Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters? If anyone is qualified to judge, it is he. Typically, he pulls no punches in his assessment.
‘Well, it’s complicated,’ he says. ‘You know, a lot of the members of the bands in Seattle that didn’t become super-famous, but even the guys that did, even the guys in Pearl Jam or Soundgarden you run into … they are pretty down to earth. Very little ego. If you acted like you were a big deal in Seattle you’re very quickly going to become isolated from the community of musicians, writers, club owners. If there is a secret to the Seattle ethos, it is that everybody is equal, depending on the quality of the songs they’re writing and the live performance they’re putting on. It didn’t matter how many records you sold. It didn’t matter how famous you were or how many magazine covers you were on. There’s a couple bands that didn’t make it big, like Pure Joy and Love Battery, to name just a couple, that are not as big as the bands that became big, and everybody cares about them just as much in Seattle, that supports their shows. You see superstar musicians at their shows, or you did in the day when they were around.
‘So the Foo Fighters were born out of that. I mean, Sunny Day Real Estate plays a huge role in the Foo Fighters. And though Sunny Day Real Estate is not very known far and wide, everybody when they talked about the Foo Fighters early on, nobody said it’s the guy from Nirvana. Everyone said it’s the guy from Nirvana and the guys from Sunny Day Real Estate. That was in the same sentence. There was no comma between those two. That’s how people in Seattle approached it. And that is a key to understanding Seattle.’
20 years on, however, ‘Dave’s got a very carefully cultivated public image where he’s able to … He has everything that Kurt never could have. He can both be the nicest guy in music and a simple guy who just loves music. And yet he’s also the head of a major corporation and the leader of a huge band. So he has both the capacity to be a huge star and yet also walk through the public as though he is the everyman. Kurt wanted that but he never got that. Kurt was either completely unknown or overnight he was massively famous. He couldn’t have it both ways and if Kurt were alive now, I have to say that’s probably what he would most admire about Dave, more than the music. He would be, “Dude, how on earth did you manage to pull this off? How can you have these two personalities in the public?”’
Anton Brookes, who was there with Kurt and Krist long before they had ever heard of Dave Grohl, and who was also there when the latter made his seemingly impossible transition to global superstar on his own terms, has the final word.
‘A lot of people like rock’n’roll to be straightforward,’ he says. ‘They put music on and it’s escapism. They don’t want music that is a refection of your life; you want something that is happy, jolly with a bit of meaning to get you through the day. And that’s what the Foo Fighters is. Where Nirvana was the crutch for a generation. It was propping up people. Even today, the disenfranchised youth around the world, teenagers are still finding angst within that message of Kurt’s angst.
‘I think Dave, deliberately, from the get-go, was like: that’s what Nirvana did, I’m going [the other] way. Because, can you imagine, if Dave even attempted playing a Nirvana song live? Can you imagine what the media would have done to him? Can you imagine what Courtney’s reaction would be? It’s been hard enough for Dave to stand up to a lot of unfair slings and arrows and accusations without that.’
Instead, Dave set his sights high. Impossibly so, it seemed at so many junctures. Nonetheless here he still is, higher up in the clouds than ever.
Anton smiles. ‘You look at him from playing to small crowds to arenas and now stadiums, and he pulls out all the stops. It’s really funny. When Dave goes onstage, he’s always been a performer. As a drummer, he was your archetypal sarcastic joke-telling drummer who made everybody laugh. That was part of his character and part of his charm and appeal. I always thought with Dave, though, that was a bit of a smokescreen that he used to keep people away. I always thought Dave used that as a gauge to get to know people. And as you got to know him and he got to know you, then the real Dave came out. But if you didn’t get to know Dave, all you got was like, “Hey,” and a slap on the back. All smiles and teeth and goofiness.
‘I think that’s probably something he learned from being in Nirvana, which kept his sanity and kept him safe and kept a lot of the trappings that come with rock’n’roll away. Especially the parasites; the people that latch on to bands and performers. I think Dave learned the hard way from seeing what happened with Nirvana, and used to that to his own devices.
‘I think also as a songwriter, as a musician, he just blossomed and got better with everything he’s done. I always marvelled and laughed at Dave when he was onstage because he’d come running out … As soon as he beamed onstage, as soon as he came onstage and he smiled, the audience just smiled back. They loved him. And he camps it up. He’s a rock’n’roll star but he’s Benny Hill! He’ll be running and pretend to trip or something, and laugh and point at the crowd. He smiles and he talks to them and he tells jokes and he burps and he farts and whistles. To be fair to Dave, after a couple of years he was no longer Dave from Nirvana. He became Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters who was in Nirvana. Where some of the media dubbed him the Grunge Ringo, he quickly outgrew that and he blossomed into one of the greatest songwriters and musicians that the planet has had to offer for a long, long time.’
And his story is not even half over yet.