Foo Fighters

by Mick Wall

  He knew what he had to do; it was just finding a way to actually do it. The easiest – and hardest and stupidest – thing to do would have been to simply get a new singer in. The way Van Halen had done, for example, just a few years before, replacing the until then ‘irreplaceable’ David Lee Roth with the on paper more staid but ultimately much more popular and, for Van Halen, even more successful Sammy Hagar. Or, closer to home, the way Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament had replaced their original singer, Andrew Wood, in their hotly tipped-forsuccess previous Seattle outfit, Mother Love Bone – going on to even greater success with Eddie Vedder. Or the way so many earlier classic rock acts from the Seventies had done, like Deep Purple, Black Sabbath or Bad Company.

  But that would have been a joke, and one in very poor taste. The thought of forming a band with Krist and getting a new frontman in was something they never even tried to talk about. That would have been ‘way too heavy’, Dave said. ‘We’ve never talked about that. Ever. It’s twenty years and we still haven’t talked about it.’ In fact, Dave and Krist had explored the possibilities of at least playing together again, jamming together in secret. ‘Yeah, we thought about it,’ Dave admitted a few months later. ‘But when it came to actually making Foo Fighters a band, I’m just not sure that Krist wanted to start up and be a bass player right away again. It just fizzled and we forgot about it.’ He added, ‘There weren’t any harsh feelings or anything at all. I think we were both really happy to do our own things.’

  There was another reason, though, why Dave didn’t want to become involved in trying to build something new with Krist: his absolute need to move as far away from the Nirvana narrative as possible. He knew he would never be able to step out of the shadow of the band completely, but he was damned if he was going to willingly allow himself to be trapped there for ever. Dave also knew, though he would never come right out and say it, that any group he might put together with Krist would be a partnership, at best, and that in any partnership with his former Nirvana band mate there would be only one real equal and that sure as shit wasn’t going to be Dave. Krist, four years older and several lifetimes deeper, had always been Dave’s senior in Nirvana. That would not change now just because Nirvana had gone. Dave may not have known yet exactly what he was going to do, but one thing he was sure of, it would have to be something that was all about him. No one else.

  In the end he simply told himself he would have no plan, just go into the studio with his old pal Barrett Jones and make some music, just like the old days. He had enough songs, nearly 40, he reckoned, if you included all the scraps and half-starts. Swearing everyone to secrecy, he discreetly booked a week at Robert Lang studios in October. Didn’t even bother to bring in any extra musicians, would just lay down a demo, playing and singing everything himself. Just to see. Just to know. Just to do … something.

  The previous month he and Krist had been involved in overseeing the mix of Nirvana’s live Unplugged sessions, which DGC were preparing to release as a stand-alone album. ‘I remember … that was extremely difficult,’ he said. ‘That’s the album that it’s most difficult for me to listen to. Just because it’s so eerie and stark … It’s just so bare-boned.’

  He told himself that going in with Barrett would be different, that he was doing this ‘for fun’, not as his attempt to build a bridge to a future without Kurt and Nirvana. Yet he recorded the tracks in exactly the order they would later appear on the first Foo Fighters album, beginning with ‘This is a Call’, a symbolic choice with its chorus of, ‘This is a call to all my past resignations…’ Dave would later tell journalists that ‘This is a Call’ was a song ‘just basically thanking and paying respects to everybody that I have ever been close to … Whether it was friends, or previous bands.’ But everyone knew that was a lie. That it was about Kurt and Krist and the life they had now been denied, and that Dave was free to now look back on and allow the distance to grow and be felt properly.

  As if to prevent him from overthinking what he was doing, Dave raced through the recording process. ‘This is a Call’ set the pace: two takes, total playing time just under 45 minutes. ‘It became this little game,’ he later told Alternative Press, ‘I was running from room to room, still sweating and shaking from playing drums and pick up the guitar and put down a track, do the bass, maybe do another guitar part, have a sip of coffee and then go in and do the next song. We were done with the music in the first two days.’

  Although Dave would later employ the production team of Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, who’d recently hit the big time with their work on Beck’s Mellow Gold album, to mix the tapes – to lift them out of that sludgy home-recording vibe and onto a level where college radio, at least, would be comfortable playing them – the finished cassettes that he now started fanning out to anyone who wanted one was the template for everything the Foo Fighters would become famous for over the next three years. Twelve mainly rifftastic songs that got in, did their thing, and got out again – fast. There were no guitar solos, few real lyrics, and lead vocals so low down in the mix they effectively became another texture to the overall sound. The fist-tight rhythms were as brutal and as inventive as anything from the Nevermind period of Nirvana, but it was the sugar-shocked vocals that really did the job, where all the melody lay, all the catchiness. So that when tracks like ‘I’ll Stick Around’ – one of four major highlights alongside ‘This is a Call’, ‘Big Me’ and ‘For All the Cows’ – were pilloried in the rock press for sounding too much like Nirvana, it hardly mattered. This was punk done with a bright pop sheen, unencumbered by the bloodied tendrils that had trapped so much of Nirvana’s latter-stage material.

  As Anton Brookes puts it, ‘To an extent the Foo Fighters are Nirvana-lite, aren’t they? It’s not as intense. It’s not as dark … Foo Fighters songs are not ugly-beautiful. But they have passion. It’s just that the Foo Fighters [music] is sleek and it’s well drilled and it’s got diversity and everything. But the Foos’ songs are completely different [to Nirvana’s]. I think, to an extent, a lot of Nirvana’s songs can be a little too heavy, mentally, for people to digest. It’s like listening to Joy Division or something. Where the Foo Fighters is … and I’m not dumbing down here or anything … but you can put the Foos Fighters on and it’s more enjoyable. It’s more of a good time. Nirvana was never a good time…’

  Buoyed by the good reactions his cassettes were getting from friends like Krist Novoselic and Alex Macleod, Nirvana’s tour manager, Dave now sent a copy to Gary Gersh, Nirvana’s A&R guru at DGC, now running the ship at Capitol Records, along with a hope-ya-like-it-no-biggie note. Leaving as little as possible to chance, though, he also sent a copy to Gersh’s successor at DGC, Mark Kates. ‘That’s when things started getting a little crazy,’ Dave later remarked disingenuously.

  It’s since become part of the Foo Fighters orthodoxy that Dave Grohl more or less fell accidentally into starting his own ‘band’. That he’d made this tape ‘for fun’ that he’d really never intended releasing, slapping the made-up name ‘Foo Fighters’ onto it to disguise the fact it was actually the new thing from the drummer in Nirvana. That as the goofy smiley one of the group he simply didn’t have that kind of shrewd, street-level suss to really know what he was doing.

  In fact, the ‘craziness’ he spoke of was exactly what Dave had been banking on. His timing, as ever, was impeccable. It was no coincidence that the same month Dave began talking to both Capitol and DGC about a solo deal, the final ‘real time’ Nirvana album, MTV Unplugged in New York, was released, going straight to No. 1 simultaneously in Britain and America and topping the charts in six other countries. Less than three weeks later, on 19 November, Dave appeared with Tom Petty on Saturday Night Live. With his profile sky-high again and the most commercial-sounding album Nirvana never made under his belt, he was not short of offers to start again, but this time entirely on his own terms.

  But this is where he really showed his hard-won street smarts. Instead of signing directly to eit
her Capitol or DGC, or indeed any other major label, Dave Grohl, on the advice of the same Gold Mountain management team behind Nirvana, as well as the same lawyers, formed his own label, Roswell, and fashioned a production deal for himself, whereby he would retain control of all decisions pertaining to the Foo Fighters, while at the same time receiving the not inconsiderable benefit of the distribution, marketing and promotion that only a major label could provide. He also rightly decided to eschew renewing his business relationship with DGC in favour of sticking with Gary Gersh, the man who not only signed Nirvana but also helped steer it through its greatest commercial success with Nevermind.

  Having spent his whole career, until then, prey to the whims of others as the last to join groups whose destinies already seemed, in some way, preordained, having spent, most perniciously, the past two years being the victim of a singer whose horrendous personal life had eventually nearly destroyed his own, Dave Grohl was determined never to be put in that position again – by anybody, friend or foe.

  ‘One of the key things about the Foo Fighters that so few bands have got is that they own their own masters,’ says Paul Brannigan. ‘Roswell is Dave’s record label and they license the records to a major. Dave’s attitude is, I am the record company, so I never have to take orders from anyone else again about how things work. I don’t think he’s got an axe to grind against the major-label world, because of what happened with Nirvana. But his upbringing was in DIY punk rock and that was how things operated among all his friends in Washington, so it wasn’t a unique concept to him, either.

  ‘So when the opportunity presented itself, I think, basically, he sat down with his lawyer, and his lawyer said, you can sign to a record label, or you can be the record label and you can just license these records. It was probably the smartest decision he ever made. It allowed him autonomy over everything. It allowed him never to have to answer to anybody’s whims but his own, particularly as things became so successful from the start.’

  Quite so, but there were still more moves for Dave to make, the small stuff that he knew from experience would make the big difference. Like recruiting the right band. Now that he had his new record deal in place, Dave was ready to think about that. Secure in the knowledge that he would be in charge this time, that he already had an album in the can awaiting release, and that he had his own label, lawyers and heavy-duty management behind him, he switched back into simple-muso mode and went about persuading people it was a real band he was looking to put together.

  That was how he put it anyway when he first spoke to Nate Mendel and William Goldsmith. Nate and Will had been the bassist and drummer, respectively, in Sunny Day Real Estate, a good-not-great, second-rung Seattle band that had conveniently just split up when Dave first called. Dave had caught them live a couple of times as they toured promoting their debut Sub Pop album, Diary. It’s hard to believe he found anything much to like about the songs – although Sunny Day Real Estate would posthumously be tagged as one of the seminal ‘second wave’ Emo acts, with their single ‘Seven’ receiving generous after-hours MTV play, their whole mien was so earnest they were a tough act to really love – he was impressed enough by the rhythm section of Mendel and Goldsmith to make a move when he found out they were available.

  Once again, his timing was spot on. Will and Nate were at a ‘low point’, the former told Alternative Press. ‘I was just thinking, “What the hell am I going to do?” That was all I had pretty much been doing. I had finally focused on one band and now that was over.’ Then a friend of Dave’s wife Jenny passed on the cassette and told them to wait for a call. ‘We listened to the tape and we liked it a lot, but we didn’t know what would happen next,’ said Will. But to their relief and surprise, ‘It was a great phone call. He was like, “Oh, so your band’s in the shitter?” I told him yes. He said, “All right. Let’s play.”’

  Getting Nate in too was just a bonus, to begin with. Finding a competent bass player was never going to be that hard among the overflowing gene pool of Seattle talent. At first, Nate admits, he had a problem ‘playing in front of people’. When he told Dave and suggested that maybe he shouldn’t do it, Dave told him that was exactly the reason he should do it. Neither man really knew what that was supposed to mean, but it sounded non-judgemental enough to placate nervous Nate and he went ahead with the job.

  Dave’s main focus now though was on finding someone he felt comfortable with to play the drums – almost mission impossible, given how Dave was now regarded as one of the best drummers in the world. He did his best to play down the role, though.

  ‘I went into it with the attitude that I’m not going to hand someone this tape that I just recorded and say, “Learn all these drum parts backwards.” I want them perfect but there is no way I’m going to go to someone and say that because the record is just the way I would have done it. I tried to find a drummer that had enough feeling to go and put himself into it. William can do everything that I can do.’ Dave told him, ‘Just learn the arrangement of the song and then I don’t give a fuck what you do with it after that.’ Will, he insisted, ‘is an amazing drummer. When I saw him play with Sunny Day Real Estate, then heard that they were breaking up, it was like I had won the lottery.’

  Dave, of course, had already won the lottery when he joined Nirvana. He would leave very little to chance in the Foo Fighters. That said, even Lucky Dave felt like the cat who’d got the cream with his next move – getting Pat Smear to agree to sign on. ‘I didn’t expect Pat would want to play with me,’ he insisted. Nevertheless, it didn’t stop him slipping Pat a copy of the by now much-vaunted cassette while having a drink with him one night in LA.

  When Pat got back to say he’d been listening to the tape and really liked ‘For All the Cows’, Dave got up the courage to ask him if he might be interested in … maybe … if he had nothing else to do … maybe …

  Pat said he’d think about it.

  ‘For the next couple of weeks I thought he was just being nice and wasn’t really one hundred per cent into it,’ said Dave. ‘Until I called him and said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m getting my guitars ready for the tour.” I said, “Who are you going on tour with?” And he said, “Us, man!” I swear to God, I thought he was too cool for it.’

  The fact that Pat lived in LA – and not Seattle, like the other three – made him exotic, suspicious, ‘other’. Definitely outside the comfort zone of Nate and William. But Dave needed Pat the most, the only one who really knew what he’d been through with Kurt and Nirvana, who could really relate to Dave’s own outsider status in that band, which got worse and worse as Kurt’s heroin habit did. Then once Pat started to play and the other two saw how easy Dave was around him, how much Dave needed someone who was more on his been-there level, the quicker they got used to it.

  Still insisting to his new recruits that the Foo Fighters, though the first album was essentially a Dave Grohl solo production, was in every other respect a band of equals, Dave gave the go-ahead for his management to light the fire. A ‘limited edition’ 12-inch vinyl single of the album’s closing track, ‘Exhausted’, was issued to college and alternative radio stations in January, and half a dozen tiny club dates were booked as warm-ups for a tour in late February and March. At close to six minutes, ‘Exhausted’ was the longest, least obviously commercial track on the album. It was also one of the songs that Kurt had expressed a liking for before his death. Therefore a strong choice as the track to introduce the Foo Fighters to what Dave implicitly understood would be largely the Nirvana audience, at least to begin with.

  Sure enough, its bones-into-dust riff, wilfully distorted guitars and spaced-out vocals convinced enough to start a buzz about the new band, though the vibe was kept deliberately low-key, at least for now. ‘I drove to a couple of their rehearsals with Dave,’ says Charles Cross, ‘and we’re talking about a van loaded with crap. It’s not only a van, it’s Nirvana’s van that Dave has kind of inherited.’

  Their first show had been at
a friend’s house in Seattle. ‘We bought a keg so everyone would get drunk and be like, “You guys are really good”,’ he later recollected with a smile. Their first officially billed show came a few days later at a small venue in Seattle’s centre called the Velvet Elvis. Charles Cross was there for that one. ‘There’s no roadies. There’s nobody else other than the members of the band. So their first show they had some other guy come in and help plug some guitars in while they weren’t onstage. But there really wasn’t a stage. We’re talking a quad where you have to walk in front of the audience to get to the stage. It’s a tiny, tiny place that literally held forty people. Dave very, very consciously at that point was trying not to make this a big deal. He wanted it to be an underground thing.’

  Cross goes as far as to say he believes Dave ‘didn’t want it to be a big success’. He explains: ‘I think it was a reaction to Nirvana. He wanted it small and he wanted it, ultimately, to be more of a democracy than it ended up. You have Pat Smear, you have the two guys from Sunny Day Real Estate, and I think his conception initially would be beyond his solo project, the idea of the band. Like this superstar group where these four guys are gonna play and everybody in the band has done something notable before. This is in Seattle, where egos don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that you’re Dave Grohl and you’re the drummer in Nirvana, you’re still gonna be one of the members of this band early on. And that was the ethos of that first few months of the Foo Fighters.