Foo Fighters

by Mick Wall

  ‘What changed, of course, was that the [first album] did better than anyone expected. Better, I’m almost certain, than Dave expected. That record got a lot of attention. Now he’s obviously become something entirely different but my sense, truly, was that what he wanted [originally] with this band was to kind of wash his mouth out of all the bad taste of what Nirvana had become. How bloated, how gigantic, how unable to escape these demands on them … Dave wanted a band where he didn’t have to play any Nirvana songs again. Where he could do something entirely different. And he had that for a very brief window of time. But early on, I’m absolutely convinced, from talking to Dave, from witnessing those first shows, from seeing the state of their van or their rehearsal studio, I’m absolutely convinced there was no idea that anyone had that they were gonna be this big. Nobody. Nobody thought that.’

  Not for long, anyway. Released on 4 July 1995, Foo Fighters sold over 40,000 copies in the United States in the first week of release, lifting it to a debut position of No. 23. In the UK it did even better, rising almost immediately to No. 3. While around the world the album would reach the charts in half a dozen other countries. Boosted by the success of ‘This is a Call’, the first single proper released from the album, which made the Top 10 in nine countries, including the UK, where it reached No. 5 and America, where it went to No. 2 on the influential Billboard Alternative chart, the Foo Fighters didn’t have long to be an underground band. They may still have been playing clubs by the time they’d begun their headline tour of the US, but they had also headlined their own much-hyped London show, at King’s College, on 3 June, to which the entire London music scene appeared to show up, and made their first appearance on Late Show with David Letterman, then the hippest, most prestigious showcase on American television.

  Watching the Letterman performance now, it’s striking how much the Foos really do come across as a band, as opposed to how they would appear in years to come, as members came and went and Dave’s confidence as a bandleader grew. The Mandel– Goldsmith combo looks on fire, locked together as closely as cogs in a wheel. Pat Smear is also at the top of his game, his hair dyed blond again, rocking on the balls of his feet as he blasts out the song. It’s suddenly easy to see why Dave was so relieved to get Pat in the band. Yes, he’s got the punk-cred and the grungecool, but he’s got something else too. Pat’s got glam. So that while the rest of the band – including Dave, in his nondescript white T-shirt and face hidden behind that curtain of hair – are workmanlike and sweaty, Pat is effortlessly cool. Just the hint of a smirk on his face, like this is all just too fucking easy, dude, you get me? Oh, yeah …

  Everywhere the Foo Fighters went that first year they made friends, influenced people. Not least when they appeared at the Reading Festival in August, headlining the smaller Melody Maker stage, the day after Hole had opened beneath the Smashing Pumpkins on the larger main stage, and the setting three years before for Nirvana’s last British concert. So much had changed since then, yet the ghost of Kurt hung heavy in the air. Many of the fans gathered in front of the stage for the Foos were in Nirvana T-shirts, some even yelled for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, others not knowing what to yell for yet, just yelled anyway. The ones that came away most impressed, though, it seemed, were the ones merely curious to see what Nirvana’s drummer was doing now – and were amazed to see how well he was doing it. Not just fans, but other bands, other media folk, other you-name-its attracted initially, no doubt, by the prospect of entertaining an actual living member of the sacred Nirvana, but just as easily hooked on the goofy-smiles of Dave and Pat and the happy-talk their music made, no matter how concentrated Nate and Will’s grimacing became.

  And this was important. In a year that saw big, multi-platinum album releases from other hot-right-now American acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers (One Hot Minute), Alanis Morissette (Jagged Little Pill), Green Day (Insomniac), Pearl Jam (Vitalogy) and Smashing Pumpkins (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness), Dave knew he could take nothing for granted. When Foo Fighters somehow found itself listed in both the Rolling Stone and Spin end-of-year best-of albums list, Dave couldn’t believe it, wondered if it might ever happen again.

  Or as Anton Brookes puts it: ‘I think everything the Foo Fighters is, is everything Nirvana wasn’t. And I think that’s deliberate. Okay, as many doors opened for Dave because he was in Nirvana, as many doors closed for him too. He had to earn the right to be on stage. He was given a chance with the Foo Fighters, people gave him enough rope to literally hang himself – and Dave went on to prove his worth. Dave could have gone on to just drum every so often with someone, produce someone. Live off Nirvana royalties. Live off his Foo royalties and have a very comfortable life. But he chose not to.’

  In Britain, he found himself having to fight a different battle, though. With the nation then in thrall to a new music phenomenon called Britpop and anything remotely grunge-oriented relegated to what Oasis’s singer, Liam Gallagher, had deemed ‘the smelly shorts and beards brigade – not having it!’ Dave worried that the Foo Fighters would not be able to find a place at the top table in the way Nirvana once had. Somehow, though, in the middle of a year dominated by game-changing album releases from newly dominant British acts like Oasis (What’s the Story Morning Glory?), Blur (The Great Escape), PJ Harvey (To Bring You My Love), Tricky (Maxinquaye), Radiohead (The Bends) and Pulp (Different Class), the Foo Fighters were still deemed worthy enough to get the music press, unlike today still a force of nature in the British media, in a lather over them and what it all meant now Kurt was gone.

  Anton Brookes recalls early discussions with Dave about how to try and control the overflow of interview requests, knowing the main reason so many writers wanted to talk to him would be to ask about Kurt. Neither Dave nor Krist had given any interviews at all since Kurt’s suicide, this would be the first opportunity the press had to try and get their hands on what was still the most burning question in rock: why did Kurt kill himself?

  ‘Dave knew what the score was as soon as he put his head above the parapet and decided to do the Foo Fighters,’ says Anton now. ‘Obviously you try between management and yourself to protect him as much as you can. You know they’ve got to ask Nirvana questions. But it was always done with the proviso that they talk about the Foo Fighters too. And the best way to talk about Nirvana with Dave was not to talk about Nirvana, because every experience Dave Grohl had for the first three years of his Foo Fighters career, all roads lead to Nirvana.

  ‘Virtually every experience he’d ever had as a successful musician was about Nirvana. But if you asked a question about Nirvana he was never gonna answer it. You don’t ask about Nirvana. But he’ll talk about Nirvana all day in a roundabout way. You’ve just got to be bright enough to see through that, because all his experiences were with Nirvana. What else is he going to talk about? What else has he got as a reference point?’

  Fortunately, says Anton, ‘Dave’s never been anybody’s fool. Dave’s a very shrewd, very intelligent man. He’s very driven. He’s ultra-loyal to people. People say he’s the nicest man in rock and he is! But the thing is, he’s had to work at that. He’s not … It’s probably more by default than design but that’s just the way Dave is. The smile and the cheeky goofiness and campness … There’s a lot of that and Dave doing interviews … he gives the people what they want. Dave always knows what they want and he knows what to give, and where he’s comfortable. He’s never prostituted himself and chased after press. It’s always come to him. But after Nirvana it wasn’t an easy ride. Stepping out of the shadow of Nirvana under the guise of Foo Fighters, a lot of people were like, okay, impress us. A lot of people had the knives drawn for him too. Like, how dare you?’

  One wag dubbed him the ‘grunge Ringo’. Sooner or later everyone that came, ostensibly, to interview Dave about the Foo Fighters got around to Nirvana and Kurt’s death, and Dave would wave them away like a bad smell. ‘I don’t talk about it and I don’t want to talk about it because I feel like I have s
o much respect for that situation that I don’t really want to share it with anybody’ was his typically brusque response in the NME. ‘It’s like meeting someone for the first time and within the first fifteen minutes of meeting them you ask them how their father died and what was it like. You don’t do that, that’s fucking rude.’

  What he did feel the need to try and explain were the next two most burning questions in 1995. The first – was the toy space gun pictured on the front sleeve of the Foo Fighters album some kind of warped reference to Kurt’s suicide? – was easy to brush off. It was simply a play on the fact he’d named the band Foo Fighters – the nickname given to UFO sightings by fighter pilots in the Second World War, he explained over and over. This wasn’t a picture of a smoking shotgun, for chrissakes, this was a ray gun. ‘To me it’s a toy,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘It has nothing to do with anything. I love kitschy forties and fifties space toys. I thought it would be a nice, plain cover, nothing fancy [but] people have read so much into it. Give me a fucking break.’

  Much harder to deny, though, was that one of the album’s pivotal tracks, ‘I’ll Stick Around’, dealt directly with Dave’s feelings about Kurt’s death, Courtney’s own mental state, and his determination to ride out the calamitous fallout and somehow make good again. Feelings all borne out in fierce relief by the repeated snarling stanza, ‘I don’t owe you anything!’ As if to rub it in, ‘I’ll Stick Around’ is the most obviously Nirvana-influenced track on the album, and made even more of a statement when it was released as the next single from the album, becoming their second UK hit and another mainstream US radio hit.

  When questioned on the subject, though, Dave repeatedly denied the song had anything to do with Kurt, going so far as to tell Rolling Stone that the only reason he’d agreed to speak to them was in order to deny that ‘I’ll Stick Around’ had anything to do with his lost friend, Kurt. ‘It would fucking break my heart to think that people are under that impression. That was my biggest fear. Beside that, anything else is trivial and stupid. And I knew while I was recording it that it was probably the strongest song I’ve ever written, because it was the one song that I actually meant and felt emotionally.’

  Little by little though, his guard dropped. The more successful the Foo Fighters grew in their own right, the less inclined Dave was to sugarcoat his true feelings about anything. ‘By no means am I a lyricist,’ he said in an early 1996 interview with Alternative Press. ‘But a lot of times, the things you write down spur of the moment are most revealing. Now I look at [the songs on Foo Fighters] and some of them seem to actually have meaning.’

  Asked directly by Richard Kingsmill if ‘Stick Around’ ‘might have had something to do with Kurt’s death?’ Dave replied: ‘Well, when you feel like you’ve been deprived or you’ve lost something you just want to move on. You just want to be here to prove that you’re not gonna let whatever it is bring you down. So in a way it could be about that, but more than anything it’s a song about feeling like you’re lost but you’re not gonna quit.’ Unlike Kurt, who was never allowed to quit, despite begging to, until finally he took things into his own hands.

  What Dave was about to discover though was that with control came responsibility – for everything: the good, the bad and, as the other three members of the Foo Fighters were about to find out, the ugly.

  The trouble started when they came to record the second Foo Fighters album – Dave’s first with the actual band. That first tour had gone on and on – and on. Nine months, a year, eventually over 16 months. Pat would keep score. Tell the others. Nate and William had never known anything like it. This was roller-coaster time for the newbies – but without the brakes or handholds. By the end of it though the band was a super-tight live act. They still hadn’t found out yet, however, how they would work together once they were all in a recording studio.

  Nor how the songwriting aspect was supposed to work. Out on the road they had begun to jam on some riffs at soundchecks that had already turned into fully formed Foo Fighters songs. Notably, ‘My Hero’, which would later become the third of four hit singles from the new album, and which nicely epitomised the everyman spirit Dave was starting to patent as part of the Foos charm; and ‘Monkey Wrench’, already slated to be the lead single from the album, with its edgy juxtaposition of jaunty, grunge-lite riff and emotionally poleaxing lyrics inspired by the breakup of Dave’s marriage to Jennifer. His voice breaking as he almost spits the words about remembering every single word she said, ‘… and all the shit that somehow comes along with it…’

  Most of the key songs on the new album, though, would be written solely by Dave, starting with the number he had written specifically as the band’s new live show opener, ‘Enough Space’. Dave had picked up on how the audiences in Britain and Europe would literally begin bouncing as the band played its most exciting songs. Somewhere along the line, he had decided to write a song that helped them do exactly that; brought it into soundcheck the next day and they did it live for the first time that night, opening the show with it, making people … bounce.

  The other two tracks that Dave wrote alone – the beautiful, ethereal ‘Walking After You’ and the powerful, haunting ‘Everlong’, both again almost certainly inspired by his painful break with Jennifer – were the stand-out moments of an album overcrowded with sonic jewels. The eerie ‘Doll’, which opened the album in a completely unexpected way; the quirky ‘Hey, Johnny Park!’, with its reverse slant on Nirvana’s old quiet/loud/quiet thing; the smoky acoustic trails of ‘My Poor Brain’, one minute black nail-polished Velvet Underground, the next just pure Black Sabbath; others like the mid-period Beatles of ‘See You’, the unselfconsciously fist-pumping ‘My Hero’, the teasing happy ending that isn’t, ‘New Way Home’, with its promise to ‘never tell you the secrets I’m holding’… this is an album so clearly better arranged and produced, so obviously more thought out and less fraught, than its hurried predecessor, it still comes as a jolt to recall that it was also the album where Dave Grohl, nicest man in rock, first showed his fangs.

  The album was eventually titled The Colour and the Shape, which seemed as good a way as any of describing in words the unsayable qualities the music evoked. But it could as easily have been called Dave’s Colour and Dave’s Shape.

  The other difference between the first and second Foo Fighters albums was that this one had a real-life, true-grit producer in Gil Norton. Gil was a tough-talking British guy who had made his name making albums for the Pixies, who had eventually made their name because Kurt Cobain liked them so much he stole their sound for Nirvana. Now Dave was doing … what? Looking for a little of that same juice? Well, Gil was happy to oblige, but strictly on his terms. Gil played no favours and would have Dave doing take after take, push Pat into recording so many of the same parts in so many different ways he couldn’t keep check on what he had and what he hadn’t done. Gil would call Nate and William ‘the rhythmless section,’ according to William. Nate was made painfully aware that he was at best a glorified amateur. That this was his first time trying to make it in the big leagues. It was not easy for him. Years later, Nate would cheerfully admit he was ‘fucking terrible’.

  But it was William who was struggling most of all. He was overwhelmed with the conviction that whatever track they were working on, Dave already had the drum track he wanted ‘figured out in his head’. It was true, as Dave would be the first to agree. But then he was one of the best drummers of his time: of course he knew how the drums should go. William was a kid who knew Dave in Nirvana was a much better drummer than he, William, in the Foo Fighters was. But what had been a hang-up on the road, now, in the studio, turned into a major trauma.

  As Pat said: ‘You’re the drummer in a band where the singer is the greatest rock’n’roll drummer in the world, looking over his shoulder waiting for you to be as good as him. All right. That’s just fucked-up pressure – and remember, William was a kid.’

  It wasn’t just the drums. This was Dave’s baby, D
ave’s dream, Dave’s deal. He hadn’t worked this hard, come this far, to not see it through exactly the way he wanted it. This was the second album but the first on which the Foo Fighters would be judged as a real band. Nothing was going to be allowed to be less than it could be, in Dave’s eyes. William was a good drummer. But good, for Dave, would never be enough any more. So he decided that if he wanted the job done properly he would have to do it himself. And he did. When the original sessions at Washington Farm studio in Beat Creek failed to meet Dave’s soaring expectations, he took things into his own hands and – group or no group – unilaterally decided to scrap the album and start again, relocating the sessions to Grandmaster Recordings studio in West Hollywood. He simply couldn’t live with William’s commendable but – by Dave’s standards – under-par drumming. He would be better off doing them himself, he decided

  At the end of the day, Dave was the guy with the big management and record deal, with the biggest songs and ideas, with the whole map to the treasure already drawn in his head; he had every right to make such a decision. The only thing he did wrong was to not tell William. Instead, William was left to find out the hard way – by accident. The last to know, it broke his fucking heart. It broke him.

  Even Nate didn’t know what was going on until they got to the studio; neither did Pat. It wasn’t just the drums they ended up re-recording, it was the whole album. Meanwhile, while it was happening, Dave tried to keep the whole thing under wraps, unable or unwilling to just come out and tell William. It was his first big decision as a bandleader and he only got it half right. Musically, he was on the button. Personally, he made a bad situation infinitely worse. He made William’s place in the band untenable. The kid had not only lost his place on the finished album, he had been robbed of his dignity. His self-esteem, already shaky, took a fatal hit. There was, as he saw it, no way back.