Foo Fighters

by Mick Wall

  The album’s only major highlight though was ‘Learn to Fly’, a consummate pop-rock song built on twangy guitars, strawberry-smoothy vocal harmonies and pin-sharp lyrics that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a squillion-selling Tom Petty or R.E.M. album. Full of reflections on the past 12 months, from its clear reference to dealing with Franz and the ever-fluctuating Foos line-up (‘Think I need a devil to help me / Get things right’) to his decision to return home to Virginia (‘Make my way back home / When I learn to fly’), this was next-level writing from Dave Grohl, a universe on from the days of meaningless lyrics and slow-fast-slow Nirvana-lite rockers. A true rock classic, ‘Learn to Fly’ would give the Foo Fighters their first major US hit single, reaching No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100, and their biggest-selling hit worldwide.

  The rest of the album, though, is merely pleasant. ‘Breakout’ is a formulaic Foos rocker easily forgotten the moment it ends. ‘Headwires’ and ‘Fraternity’ sound like mediocre mid-period tracks by The Police – the trio Nate, a major Sting fan, hoped the Foos would become after Franz was fired, rather than get another new guitarist in. While the breathy ballad ‘Ain’t It the Life’ is about forsaking the LA neon for the sunlight through the trees, the sluts and empty bottles of Sunset Strip nights for the early-morning couplings of lovers in their bed, it also commits the cardinal sin of actually sounding like a Beatles-era Ringo track, only twice as long. The rest is equally shoulder-shrugging. As a result, There is Nothing Left to Lose was a bitter disappointment commercially, only just breaking the UK Top 10, barely equalling the sales of The Colour and the Shape in the US and other countries where the Foos were now famous. Had it not been for the huge mainstream success of ‘Learn to Fly’ – and the consequent Grammy-award-winning video, directed by former Lemonheads bassist Jesse Peretz; an incongruously literal interpretation set on a plane, only enlivened by cameo appearances from Tenacious D stars Jack Black and Kyle Glass, and Dave in multiple roles as moustachioed pilot, gay air steward, overweight female passenger, bug-eyed female Foos fan and finally himself – the album would have been a commercial disaster.

  In retrospect, the title of the album said it all. It was, said Dave, ‘about when you experience these emotions after you’ve been through a long, difficult period and you finally give in to this feeling that, quite simply, there is nothing left to lose. It can seem … positive, desperate and reckless.’ To emphasise this newfound direction, personal and professional, Dave got the band’s FF logo tattooed on the back of his neck and a black-and-white photo of it for the front cover of the album. He also resolved to ensure that whomever he hired to replace Franz on tour would come with none of the baggage both his previous guitarists had. Dave didn’t need a ‘friend’ standing to his right onstage any more. He was sick of being sick with worry about how the other guy was getting along. He needed a guy who could play, could sing – and would do what he was told without any blowback whatsoever.

  For the first time, Dave agreed to hold open auditions to find the new guy he needed for his band. More than 35 potential guitarists were auditioned at Nate’s rehearsal studio in LA over a two-week period. In the band’s 2011 Before and After documentary, Dave recalls ‘the one guy who came in and hugged everybody’. The other guy who came in looking for their autographs. Then there were the shredders, the guys that thought they were in Metallica and the guys who couldn’t actually play or didn’t even know any Foo Fighters songs. The guys who could really play, knew every note of every song, yet just didn’t really ‘fit in’.

  Finally, Dave found what he was looking for in the 28-year-old Chris Shiflett, whose previous claim to fame had been as the guitarist in No Use for a Name, a punk band out of San Francisco. New in town, Chris had actually been asked if he’d be up for auditioning for Guns N’ Roses – who were looking, yet again, for a new guitarist. But Chris was young and smart enough to flinch from the prospect of joining a band that thanks to the madness of King Axl hadn’t toured or released a new album for nearly seven years. Instead, he glibly mentioned how he’d rather audition for a real working band like the Foo Fighters. Two weeks later, he did – and got the gig.

  As Chris would recall in one of his first interviews just months after he joined: ‘I’d read ages ago that Franz had left and I was talking to an old friend who knew someone who works with them so he gave them a call to see what’s up. Turns out they were just about to schedule auditions. I auditioned and then went home. I was camped out by the phone for the next week. Finally they did call and we played together a second time. After, I went back to their hotel, got drunk and Dave was like, “I’ve got to go to bed, I’ll call you tomorrow.” I sat by my friends’ phone all fucking day and finally, at about five o’clock, they called to say it was on. That night I went out and got completely smashed on beer and sushi!

  ‘I’d been playing in a band called No Use for a Name for four and a half years and we’d always say we wanted to open up for the Foo Fighters … which never happened. It took a while for the initial, ‘OhmygodIamintheFooFighters’ to wear off. It’s not actually worn off yet, but they do make it very easy to be part of the team. It’s cool.’

  It turned out Dave had met Chris at a punk show in Santa Barbara when they were both teenagers. Chris was born there. Dave was in Scream and Chris was playing bass in a garage band called Rat Pack. They opened for Scream. This fact alone almost won him the gig in the Foos. A badge of honour that Dave felt meant something. Dave thought: ‘He’s gonna get it. He’s gonna understand. He won’t take this shit for granted.’

  Dave made his phone call to Chris at around 6 p.m. It was Dave and Taylor on speaker telling Chris he’d got the gig. They told him: ‘We start rehearsing tomorrow. Say goodbye to your friends. You’re not gonna see anybody for the next year.’ They weren’t kidding. Eighteen months and over 200 shows later Chris Shiflett was still in the Foo Fighters and getting ready to make his first album with them.

  That is, if the band stayed together long enough for that to happen. Something neither Chris – nor the other Foos – were now sure of.

  11. The Honourable Thing

  Then suddenly, out of the pleasant yellow sunlight came the suffocating darkness, black as a raven’s wing.

  The tour to promote There is Nothing Left to Lose began as a slyly low-key affair, some of the modest club dates like the ones in September at the tiny Troubadour in LA (capacity 350) and the equally ‘fun-sized’ Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto explained away as deliberately low-profile shows to introduce Chris Shiflett into the band gently. The truth, though, was that with the new album not out until November and ‘Learn to Fly’ not available until the end of the month, the Foo Fighters would have struggled to fill the same enormodomes that had become their staple two years before.

  Instead, they pitched themselves at big TV shows and radio productions to help spread the word, beginning with two live TV appearances in Sydney and Melbourne in October, followed by two songs at the MTV Sports and Music Festival at the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas; Dave’s first appearance on Howard Stern’s new, much-hyped radio show on Sirius, where Dave played three songs alone with an acoustic guitar; and five days later another Saturday Night Live performance doing ‘Learn to Fly’ and the track slated as the follow-up single, ‘Stacked Actors’. Three days after that they were in London playing live on the Jools Holland BBC2 TV show, Later. Then the high-profile arts show Nulle Part Ailleurs (trans.: Nowhere Else) on Canal Plus in Paris. By the end of November they were back in New York for two shows on the 29th and 30th: MTV’s Total Request Live and the following night Late Show with Letterman. After that there were various American radio shows, special events then, in January 2000 – the daddy of American talk show delirium – a two-song appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and, a month later, on Friday 18 February, yet another appearance on the Letterman show. The latter, though, would turn out to be a truly historic appearance, the band having been invited by Letterman personally to appear on what was his comeback
show after a quintuple-bypass heart operation. Introducing them on the night as ‘my favourite band, playing my favourite song’ – ‘Everlong’ – he went on to explain how, listening to the song during his weeks of recovery in hospital, he’d asked specifically for them to be the band that appeared on his first show back – and that to oblige him they had cancelled some scheduled dates in South America to be there.

  It was true they had been forced to reschedule three shows in Brazil. But as far as Dave Grohl was concerned it was a no-brainer. Letterman’s sudden illness had been front-page news for weeks in America. Huge celebrity guests had lined up to guest-present while he was in hospital, including stellar names such as: Drew Barrymore, Robin Williams, Bill Murray, Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis, Steve Martin, Danny DeVito, and Jerry Seinfeld, to name just a few. Dave couldn’t believe his luck when he got the call about the Letterman comeback show. With the main Foos tour starting in March, this was the kind of publicity you couldn’t buy.

  ‘We dropped everything to do it,’ Dave said. ‘It was an honour to be asked.’ Like every other American of his generation, Dave had grown up as a teenager digging Letterman’s cool, irreverent brand of humour on TV. ‘I would stay up every night to see him and his band. I was an aspiring rock musician, and the Late Night band in the Eighties was the best rock’n’roll band on television. Their drummer, Steve Jordan, was a huge influence on me. I love Letterman – his wit, and sarcasm. I related to him. So we were obligated to play that show, not just because he’s been a huge part in the career of our band, but our teenage years.’

  It was, in fact, the beginning of a long and happy relationship, which would continue right up to the final ever Letterman show in May 2015, when they would play him out with ‘Everlong’. ‘I think we mean a lot to each other,’ Dave told Entertainment Weekly at that time. ‘We’ve traded cigars; I’ve given him guitars and snare drums. We gave him a guitar once as a thank you, and he got really emotional with us. It clearly meant a lot to him. He’s just genuinely a warm, sweet person.’

  Back on the road in America that summer the Foos got an even bigger, more sustained promotional push when they agreed to open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers on their arena-shredding tour in support of what would prove to be the biggest-selling album of their career, Californication. The hottest ticket of the American summer, Dave and Taylor, in particular, really loved the highs of it all. Chris couldn’t believe how hard Taylor drove the whole machine along. They became pals, instantly. Even Nate liked Chris, certainly more than he ever had Pat or Franz. Like Nate, Chris was more ‘ordinary’. And he was younger than Nate, and didn’t have the same pedigree and pre-existing relationship with Dave as both Pat and Franz had had. For Chris, being in the Foos was ‘genuinely everything that I ever wanted. This was the dream coming true.’

  As it was also for Dave, the dream not being remotely punk at all, of course, but all about being in a hugely popular, worldwide-name band, playing the biggest, most lucrative shows, and being as rich and famous a rock star as it is possible to be. Never mind the cred, where’s the bread? Even Nate grasped that this was now about putting on a show. Nothing fake, just something bigger, louder, more. These were giant rooms, you couldn’t just stand there sucking your own dick, dude. Dave modelled their new live production after Queen’s Live Killers album cover, all red, white and black stripes. They even carried a wardrobe case now, with clothes mainly red, white and black, themed tour clothes. Like, wow, man. Chris would be in a black shirt, white tie, black pants; Nate would have on a red shirt, black tie and red pants combo. Taylor would play stripped to the waist, all the young girls crying for him. Some nights Dave even came on in a tie, a proper tie with a shirt and a jacket. Was he being ironic? Was irony even still alive by then?

  For Paul Brannigan, this was the tipping point in terms of the Foo Fighters becoming part of the mainstream pop culture. ‘Songs like “Learn to Fly” – a lot of hardcore Foo Fighters fans are not big fans of that song but it’s one of those FM-radio-type songs that really crosses over into the real world, beyond rock and metal and indie. It’s one of those songs that people liked. Like one of those waltz songs, or honeymoon songs, that people get sentimental about.’

  This, says Brannigan, was the beginning of ‘the Foo Fighters’ popularity growing away from just what was reported in the music press, to just the regular people: the £50-man who buys five albums a year; the lady putting in money on the jukebox on hen nights. These were songs that connected to the everyman character. These weren’t the people that got on the phone at nine a.m. to get tickets for some gig at the Apollo, but suddenly when the opportunity presented itself to go to one of the bigger shows, suddenly all those people were interested – even if they hadn’t got the first album, even if they didn’t like [Nirvana] or whatever.’

  The Foo Fighters stayed with it right up until August, when they jetted off for a string of major festival appearances in Britain and Europe, before heading back to the US in the autumn for their own headline tour, albeit in much smaller venues than the ones they’d been sharing with the Chili Peppers just a few months earlier. By the time they got to the Grammy awards show in January 2001, where There is Nothing Left to Lose won Best Rock Album (despite having come out in 1999), Dave felt entirely vindicated for whatever decisions he’d made over the past five years. Especially so, in his eyes, as he’d done it against the odds, defying whatever fate threw his way, whether it be recalcitrant band members or the vicissitudes of a record business about to endure another sea change with the advent of the new file-sharing service Napster.

  ‘When we won for best rock album, which we made in my basement, I was so proud,’ he said, ‘because we made it in my basement in a crappy makeshift studio that we put together ourselves. I stood there looking out at everybody in tuxedos and diamonds and fur coats, and I thought we were probably the only band that won a Grammy for an album made for free in a basement that year.’

  In the end, though, road fever got them all. At the start of the tour, they would do a shot before the show, which they called ‘band prayer’. Chris: ‘That turned into, “Let’s do ten shots before we play.”’ Booze, pot, coke … ‘We all started getting hammered before we went on stage. We got really shitty by the end,’ Taylor recalled in the Back and Forth documentary. Fun just wasn’t fun any more. They needed a break. They would get it but not in the way any of them had foreseen, most especially not Dave and Taylor.

  Taylor had been going for it big time. Smack, downers, crack, anything he could get his hands on. Dave had spoken to him but the drummer was out of control. Revisited by visions of the last days of Nirvana, when it was such a huge fucking drag just being around Kurt and all his junkie ‘friends’, Dave told Taylor again and again how worried he was about him. But Taylor was tripped out on his own dreams, still young and famous enough to feel untouchable, he knew what he was doing, he told Dave. No problemo, dude!

  Until one night it turned into a very big fucking problem indeed when the recalcitrant drummer overdosed on heroin and nearly died.

  ‘I was a rocker. I took it to the edge,’ Taylor would later claim. But that was not how Dave and the rest of the band saw it. The Foos had just headlined the V Festival in England, and the band was back at their London hotel, the Royal Garden in Kensington, the next day chilling. That evening they had all gone out together to a bar opposite, getting drunk and hanging out. Dave went back to his room early. Then got a phone call the following morning telling him the news: Taylor was in a drug-induced coma and was on his way to the hospital. ‘I think it was heroin that he did,’ admitted Chris, who recalled their tour manager telling him that Taylor had fucked up and was ‘gonna die’.

  Smack and booze, the most clichéd and lethal combo in rock, the very same formula that had done for so many, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison to Bon Scott, Phil Lynott and so many others. For Dave it was a mind fuck. First Kurt, now this. He felt angry, frustrated, helpless, wronged, frightened. He hurriedly dressed and sped t
o the hospital, the Wellington North, an expensive private facility in nearby St John’s Wood. For Dave, after Kurt, to go through that again, he must have just been thinking, what the fuck’s happening?’ says Anton Brookes. ‘Yet Dave was there for him all the time [Taylor] was in London in hospital. Who was by his bed? Dave.’

  Furious as he was, Dave stayed by Taylor’s bedside for the two weeks he remained in a coma. The remainder of the Foos tour dates were cancelled; 2001 was effectively over. ‘A part of me resented music for doing this to my friends,’ Dave would comment a decade later, after the dust had settled and all the bad dreams had been left behind. But at the time he was devastated, wondering how the band could even carry on, or even whether it should. ‘I just felt like, “I don’t want to play any more if it’s gonna make my friend die.”’

  It was touch and go for most of those two weeks. Doctors warned that if Taylor did come out of it he might do so mentally impaired, or so physically altered he would never be able to play drums again. When, miraculously, Taylor finally opened his eyes, Dave looked at him and said, ‘Dude, it’s gonna be okay.’ According to Dave, Taylor’s reply was ‘Fuck off.’ Dave: ‘And I thought, oh good, he’s gonna be okay.’

  Once the overriding feeling of relief had subsided, though, once he knew his drummer would soon be back to ‘normal’, deeper, more conflicted feelings began to emerge. Why, every step of the way, were things so fucking difficult to maintain in the Foo Fighters? After the disaster of Nirvana, he had been determined to make sure his own band would never have to suffer the same shitty slings and asshole arrows. Yet every time a tour finished there was a new problem to deal with.