Foo Fighters

by Mick Wall

  Nate was freaking out, knowing how William would be when he finally found out what was going on behind his back. William, meanwhile, sensing something was up, had decided to fly down and join his buddies. But Dave caught him first, on the phone, told him not to come, that he was redoing ‘a couple of the drum tracks’. Upset, bewildered, out of the loop, William phoned Nate. Told him what Dave had said on the phone. That he was redoing the drums on a couple of tracks. Then according to William, the pain still evident in his voice more than 15 years later: ‘Nate goes, “He redid ’em all.”’

  Speaking about the incident in the 2011 Foo Fighters’ Back and Forth documentary, Dave claimed that in the ‘conversation I eventually had with William’, he told him that he still very much wanted him to stay in the band and be the drummer. But that Dave would be the one playing drums on the album; maybe all the albums. In the same film, William insisted he was still unclear whether it was management, the record company, the producer, Dave, ‘or all of the above’ that had gone over his head and decided Dave should play the drums on the album. That in the 16 years that had passed since he walked out of the band, the decision that he would not play drums on the second Foo Fighters album ‘has never been explained to me’.

  He recalled straight-faced how when Dave put forward the proposition that William continue as the band’s touring drummer, he baulked. ‘I said, “Dude, I mean, as it is now I have to rebuild my soul. Or re-find it. If I do that [continue as just the touring drummer] it’s like, see ya! Thanks but no thanks.”’

  William looks sad and bitter in the documentary. Dave, for his part, concedes that he knows William will never forgive him for redoing the drum parts on The Colour and the Shape. But it’s clear that isn’t the main reason William felt he couldn’t go on. It was the manner in which the thing went down, the secrecy, the deception, the copping out of just letting him know what was going on, rather than fudging the issue.

  But then Dave was still just a kid too.

  10. Big High Heels to Fill

  Finding a replacement for William Goldsmith was easy. When Will had joined the Foo Fighters it had been a gamble. Not for him, as he had nothing to lose. Sunny Day Real Estate had never really got off the grid and now they were gone anyway. Joining the drummer from Nirvana in his new venture was a no-brainer. Two years on, though, with a multi-platinum album behind them and a growing worldwide reputation, Dave virtually had his pick of brilliant drummers to take Will’s place. What he was looking for though was someone who could really play, someone who, unlike Will, had already been around some, but not someone so well known – or old – Dave wouldn’t feel able to ‘direct’.

  He found what he was looking for first time of asking in a 25-year-old blond kickass dude from Laguna Beach named Taylor Hawkins. Taylor had just come off a high-profile world tour as drummer in Alanis Morissette’s live band, promoting her 33-million-selling breakthrough album, Jagged Little Pill. He wasn’t on the album but he could be seen in the videos for two of the album’s biggest singles: ‘You Oughta Know’ and ‘You Learn’. Before that he had worked in the backing band for the Canadian actress-singer Sass Jordan, and before that as the wild-eyed skin-beater in Sylvia, an acid rock beach band from Orange County.

  Born Oliver Taylor Hawkins, in Fort Worth Texas, in 1972, Taylor – as he preferred to be known – had moved to California with his family when he was four. He’d grown up with the SoCal heat in his veins, the beach in his brains and the sand in his hair. That didn’t mean he was dumb. Not all the time anyway. As well as drums, he could play guitar and piano, and he could sing – really sing. Which meant that when he joined the Foos he did for Dave what Dave had done for Kurt all those years before – added a touch of good-humoured class to the act, providing better live drums than they’d had before, and much better backing vocals. And, like Dave, he could also write – a bonus that Dave, like Kurt, would seek to augment into his own songwriting, but strictly on the singer’s own well-defined terms, obviously.

  Like the rest of the floating cast of session musicians living in LA, Taylor had zeroed in on news of Foo Fighters looking for a new drummer. Unlike the others, though, Taylor had an unlikely in: a cousin, Kevin Harrell, who’d already introduced him to Dave Grohl after meeting him on a camping vacation in the Ozark mountains that spring. Dave had also seen Taylor with Alanis and as a connoisseur of tight-wrapped drums played with the force and speed of a jackhammer, had taken note of his ability on the drums. When Dave phoned Taylor out of the blue, in May 1997, asking whether he could recommend a drummer for the Foos, he did so disingenuously, knowing full well that Taylor was then out of a gig. (Morissette had journeyed to India and would not begin making a new album for another year.) Dave was calling more to see if Taylor would take the bait and offer himself for the gig.

  He did. Dave was overjoyed. Taylor was a dude, backing a chick was not the same as being a full-blooded member of this generation’s The Who. Tall, tanned, rangy, experienced, super-confident – on the surface, at least – Taylor was, in Dave’s eyes, everything that William had not been. He also had much more in common with Taylor – big band success, major world acclaim – than he did Nate or even Pat. Plus they were both drummers with big cheesy grins. They were both ‘spazzes’, in Taylor’s words.

  When Pat got the news, he was sanguine. Took it all in his stride the way Dave was used to Pat doing with almost everything. Nate, though, was a different story. Still raw from the loss of his buddy Will, Nate feared the worst: that Taylor would be another guy, like Pat and Dave, who was more LA than Seattle. More big-time; more demanding. As the bassist, Nate was the one who would be expected to work closest with Taylor onstage, too. Nate, who had all the charisma of a schoolteacher, locked into a musical partnership with a guy who was better looking than most of the chicks Nate had been with, how was that meant to work? Taylor was simply not the kind of guy Nate had ever envisaged being in a band with. ‘No way.’

  In the end though, Nate would do what was expected of him and find a way to help make it work. Taylor was more then the sum of his parts. He was a good kid, going out of his way to make friends with everybody. Including Nate, who initially flinched at the idea of having the kind of cars-cash-cool Californian kid Taylor represented.

  The real trouble, though no one knew it yet, was Pat Smear. Three days before the next Foo Fighters tour was due to begin in May, Pat casually mentioned that he thought the band should continue as a three-piece. When everybody had stopped pretending to laugh, he filled in the blanks. He was leaving, with immediate effect.

  ‘We said, “Pat, please stay,”’ Dave later recalled. ‘I went over to his apartment and cried to him for hours. I was on his floor in tears. But he just wasn’t into it any more. We’re always working, and it can get to you. I think Pat wanted to do other things. He wanted to do MTV’s House of Style. He always wanted to do a record on his own. He wanted to do something else, which I totally understand.’ Speaking about his decision in 2011, Pat told a similar story. ‘I was just so sick of the whole thing. I didn’t want to go out on another bazillion-show tour. I don’t care. I just don’t want to do this any more.’

  Taylor wondered if it was him that made Pat jump. Maybe that had something to do with it. The band was becoming very butch and boorish, not Pat’s scene. But that wasn’t really it, either. Others wondered if it was to do with Courtney Love. Pat and Courtney had always been close, travelling together on Nirvana’s tours on Kurt’s bus while Dave and Krist shared another bus. Courtney had recently begun a very public campaign accusing Dave of everything from ‘stealing’ publishing money he was not entitled to from Nirvana to, as the years went by, even trying to seduce her daughter, Frances. (Something which Frances strenuously denied, forcing her mother to publically apologise.) A verbal hate campaign that would roll on for years. Insiders claimed Courtney now forced any mutual friends to choose sides. And that Pat, in leaving Dave and the Foos, had chosen which side he wished to be on.

  In realit
y, however, Pat’s disillusion was more to do with feeling compromised by Dave then divorcing his wife, Jennifer, who Pat really was still close to. This had triggered a John Lennon-style ‘lost weekend’. ‘I moved to Los Angeles for one year in 1997. That was post-divorce,’ Dave would recall years later. Unlike Lennon, Dave didn’t immerse himself in booze and drugs, he said, ‘but I did all of the other things’. Banging anything that moved. Waking up in the wrong bed, on the wrong floor. ‘And that’s it. That was enough for me, that one year. Because how could that possibly make you feel fulfilled? That momentary reward isn’t enough.’

  Again, though, it’s hard to believe that the androgynous Pat Smear would find Dave’s sexual shenanigans so distasteful that he felt compelled to leave the band. In fact, it was all of the above and, more crucially, simply the way The Colour and the Shape had been recorded – then re-recorded – that put Pat’s nose out of joint. He felt for Will. But not as much as he felt for himself, being asked to redo what he felt were perfectly good guitar parts over and over while Dave and Gil Norton plotted in private, after everyone else had gone home. Pat had known it was Dave’s band when he agreed to join Foo Fighters. He hadn’t realised though quite how much it would never be Pat’s band too. He had assumed he’d at least have a say in his own musical contributions. He did not.

  And there was another, never openly discussed reason why Pat was suddenly ready to bail out. Something he would never admit to Dave in a million years but which surely crossed his mind more than once in the latter months of 1997. The possibility of joining another, even bigger band than Foo Fighters. Two, in particular, both based in LA. The first, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who had cancelled their summer US tour that year while the guitarist Dave Navarro and singer Anthony Keidis reportedly went into rehab after relapsing into drug addiction. Word behind the scenes was that Navarro, a brilliant but wayward star who had only made one album with the Chili Peppers, had played his last show with the band. Although his departure wouldn’t be made public until early 1998, the feeling was that Pat was the obvious replacement. Indeed, the band had offered Pat the chance to join the band in 1993, only going to Navarro after Pat, who had already agreed to join Nirvana, turned them down.

  The second band there was much speculation behind the scenes that Pat might be about to join was Guns N’ Roses. In a typically tangled LA-only scenario, when the original GN’R rhythm guitarist, Izzy Stradlin, had left the band in 1991, the singer, Axl Rose, had sounded out Dave Navarro – then of Jane’s Addiction – to replace him. But Navarro never turned up for any of the rehearsals set up for him with Slash and the offer was eventually withdrawn. In the meantime, however, the Guns N’ Roses line-up had become so volatile that by 1997 no one was really sure who was in the band, other than Rose. Slash had quit in October 1996, Izzy’s replacement, Gilby Clarke, had gone long before that. Now Axl was looking for new guitarists. Did Pat fancy his chances filling one of those slots? He certainly had the cred, and Axl at that point was all about the cred. (He eventually hired Nine Inch Nails’ former guitarist Robin Fink.)

  Certainly, the suggestion that Pat was about to give up a career as a rock star to appear on an MTV fashion show he had already left behind once before, seems disingenuous, at best. In the event, Dave was able to persuade Pat to stay on for another six weeks, while he frantically searched for a replacement. But this would not be easy. It was one thing to bring in a drummer to a band where few had heard of the guy leaving, quite another to bring in a replacement for Pat Smear, the other ex-Nirvana guy in the Foo Fighters and the only other compelling onstage presence in the band. (Nate, with his crablike gait onstage and head-down lost-in-his-own-world demeanour, was hardly Mr Charisma.) In the end, it would be six months before Dave felt at ease enough to announce Pat’s replacement – his old friend and ‘mentor’ from Scream, Franz Stahl!

  On paper it looked like an inspired idea. Franz had known Dave back before he was Dave. They’d grown up in the same places. Dreamed the same dreams. Having Franz come in for Pat would be instant karma, man. Bros back together. The fact that Pete Stahl was already back in the fold working as the Foos’ tour manager just made it even more perfect. Full circle, dude. Right on.

  Franz was on tour in Osaka playing with a Japanese superstar named J, originally the bassist in his band Lunacy, aka Luna Sea, who were huge in Japan. His friend Scott Garrett, drummer in the DC punk band Dag Nasty, later of The Cult, had brought Franz into the fold just months before. Franz thought he had landed on his feet. Then he got the phone call from Dave and everything changed again – instantly. Within 24 hours he was standing on the roof of Radio City Music Hall in New York, at the MTV Music Video Awards – the Vammys – being unveiled as the new guitarist in the Foo Fighters. What a trip, man! Like it was always somehow meant to be, man. Pat played first, the band pumping through ‘Monkey Wrench’. Then Franz played second, grooving through ‘Everlong’. Phew, what a scoop! What a great PR stunt. What a way to begin something that was born to die even as it was being born.

  Franz barely knew where he was, he was still so jetlagged from the flight. Everything was suddenly moving so fast. Pat actually did the introductions. ‘That last song we played was my last with the band. I’d like to introduce you to Franz Stahl, who will be taking over. Thank you. Rock on, guys. Foo Fighters!’

  It was 4 September 1997. Franz played 62 shows with the Foos in 101 days virtually back to back from then until the final show of the year at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London on 13 December. Then a further 77 shows from January 1998 to early August, with just a couple of weeks off at the end of May. The shows were getting bigger and bigger. The Colour and the Shape went to No. 10 in the US, and again reached No. 3 in the UK, making the charts in seven other major countries.

  ‘Everlong’ became the band’s next hit single, after ‘This is a Call’, the video on heavy rotation on MTV, this still in the days when MTV mattered, when it still bossed the singles and videos charts. Dave: ‘It was happening to us. That thing that happens to new bands as they start to get popular.’

  Franz wasn’t in any of the videos, of course, wasn’t part of the promotion, all of that had been done before he joined. But he did get to mime to ‘Everlong’ on Top of the Pops in London, and he did get to play ‘Everlong’ live on Letterman in the US, giving what was perhaps his most electric performance with the Foos. Franz had never been happier. After a lifetime of shitty punk rock gigs with a band no one outside of Seattle (or wherever) had really heard of, here he was, finally high in the charts. He’d have taken the gig even if he’d only half liked the songs, but he actually dug the music, thought both Foos albums were very cool. Couldn’t wait to be part of their third album. What could possibly go wrong?

  Taylor and Franz buddied up on the road. But when Dave and the band began rehearsing and writing, coming up with ideas for the third album, things … changed. Dave felt he and Taylor and Nate were ‘on the same page’ – but that Franz wasn’t. In Scream, when it came to writing new music, Franz was in control, the leader. Now he wasn’t. Not even close. It made Franz nervous about pushing himself too far forward. He just couldn’t figure out when to come on strong and when to back off. In the end he just pulled away and waited to be told what to do.

  Not cool. The result was the four of them couldn’t fly. It was one thing onstage, powering away at well-established songs. Coming up with that vibe from scratch in the cold light of night, it just … would … not … work.

  Nate says Dave was the last to acknowledge the situation. In a different but weirdly samey sort of way to the deal with William, the fact that Dave was a friend of the guitarist’s made it more difficult for him to try and fix what was happening. Dave had known Franz since he was 18. Firing him was ‘tough, man’. According to Nate, ‘there was a lot of sadness and drama’ surrounding the decision to look for a new guitarist. ‘It was ugly.’

  But what about Franz? What did he have to say on the subject? Apart from a few brief, tight-lipped
quotes here and there, Franz would simply refuse to comment, to open up and say what really went down. For years he just buried his feelings, kept the hurt hidden. Understandably. Until now …

  It took several months of emails to persuade Franz Stahl to talk openly about his experience in the Foo Fighters. I’d just about given up when he finally agreed. We spoke over Skype, and he was warm, friendly, intelligent – and still hurt by his experience of being fired from the band. ‘There’s never been any sort of closure on any of it,’ he said. ‘And we’re going on twenty years now.’

  He began by reminiscing about joining the band. The thrill of getting the phone call from Dave. ‘He was like, “Do you wanna join the band?” I was like, “Twist my arm, you know? You fucking kidding?”’ After that, it was ‘fly straight to LA, gather some shit. This was all over one weekend. Then fly straight to New York, meet these guys, go to a rehearsal place. Run over one song – then the next day I’m introduced as the new member of Foo Fighters.’

  Introduced to the rock press, ‘My famous quote for replacing Pat was, “I got some big high heels to fill.”’ Everybody, including Dave, laughed. It looked like Franz was going to fit right in. Two weeks of intense rehearsals later he was back in LA, performing with the band at the 16,000-capacity Irvine Meadows amphitheatre and the sheer scale of the job he had so glibly taken on began to sink in – and how much things had changed for Dave since their days together in Scream.

  ‘There are so many different variables and aspects to the whole thing. I mean, obviously, him going from the original Dave Grohl from Washington, DC, and then turning into the Nirvana Dave Grohl, we’re talking leaps and bounds in terms of how it changes somebody and how your whole life changes. His whole life, it was just a completely different thing … I also came into the band when it was really starting to kick off. The shows were getting bigger. There wasn’t much time to be [friends] … Once I joined the band I was on a plane or on a bus. And my whole time in the band was basically working The Colour and the Shape, so it seemed like for a year we were just on tour.’