by Mick Wall
When, finally, the dice stopped rolling and they came off the road long enough for Dave to decide what their next move would be, it was the start of 2005, halfway through a decade they had so far spent almost entirely on the road. Time for something … new. Something … different. But what exactly? Privately, Dave considered taking up the offer of writing his first film score. ‘Walking After You’ had been used in the movie version of The X Files; and Dave had written ‘A3120’ especially for the soundtrack album of the 1998 movie Godzilla, and more recently the track ‘The One’ for the soundtrack to the Jack Black movie Orange County. Other, bigger offers had come in since then. But after such a long period of time away on the road Dave wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, except that it had to offer some much-needed contrast to the life he’d been living.
In the end, he simply sat down, alone, just him and his acoustic guitar, and began writing. No big ideas, no real agenda, just stuff that took him away of its own accord. Pretty soon he had ten new songs, all acoustic, reflective, pure, and no idea what to do with them. He thought about a solo album. Perhaps the time was right for something like that? But Dave Grohl hadn’t worked his nuts off these past ten years building the Foo Fighters up into an unstoppable machine to allow it to diffuse into solo albums and side projects right now. Especially right now, on the back of his biggest sales success since the height of Nirvana. Besides, what would a Dave Grohl solo album really mean? How would that be different from making another Foo Fighters album, where he had the final say anyway?
So, somewhat reluctantly to begin with, not entirely sure what he was proposing, he played the songs to the others in the band. ‘Who’s to say what we should sound like?’ he told them. Nate agreed. The fact that the songs weren’t what one would have expected from a Foos record was precisely ‘why [they] should go on the record’. When Dave ran the idea past the grown-ups at Gold Mountain though, they frowned. An all-acoustic Foo Fighters album? Really, seriously?
So Dave came up with a better idea that allowed him to have his cake and swallow it whole. A double album, one all-electric and razzed up; the other all-acoustic and spaced out. ‘I have to have loud rock music in my life somewhere,’ he explained in Classic Rock, in 2005, likening the whole to ‘the bottle and the hangover’. The hard rock side of the bargain being ‘my Jack-and-Coke record’ and the acoustic side ‘my Sapphire-and-Martini-with-Kylie record.’
Shrewd as ever, Dave was deflecting from the fact that what he’d really set out to do was make the grandest possible musical statement yet. Something akin to the great double concept albums of the Seventies that he still adored, like Led Zeppelin’s monolithic Physical Graffiti or, going further back, the Beatles’ groundbreaking White Album. ‘I wanted to do something special,’ he shrugged. As a result there would be a panoramic feel to the finished album, which Dave had now decided to call In Your Honor, that also summoned up such self-aggrandising double-album works as The Who’s much-maligned-at-the-time Quadrophenia, or the Rolling Stones’ equally misunderstood-first-time-around Exile on Main Street double – something heavily underlined by the all-electric album, with its filmic title track.
The album was recorded at another new studio Dave had purpose-built, this time in Northridge, California, which he named Studio 606 West and that took nearly four months to finish constructing. Meanwhile, the band rehearsed in North Hollywood’s Mates Rehearsal Studios, where ‘we ended up with three or four different versions of about thirty songs’, according to the album’s co-producer, Nick Raskulinecz, who added that ‘it got to the point where I didn’t want them to play the rock songs any more. I was afraid they were going to get stale.’
After the crooked lightning of One by One, the two-CD release of the grandiose In Your Honor in June 2005 was greeted with suitably gasping amounts of awe by Foo Fighters fans – enough to make it their best-selling album since their first two, going to No. 2 in both Britain and America. ‘I look at this album as kind of the end of one chapter and the beginning of something new,’ Dave proudly told the US music industry bible Billboard. ‘With the rock record, we finally got the aggressive, anthemic thing down. With the acoustic album, it offers some kind of look into the future of things we’re capable of doing and the direction we could move if we wanted to.’
Reviewing the album for the New York Times, the estimable Jon Pareles seemed to agree, describing In Your Honor as ‘an unexpected magnum opus’, though he felt strongly that ‘the rock CD overpowers the acoustic one’, but that ‘among the quieter songs, there are enough supple melodies and hypnotic guitar patterns to suggest fine prospects for a follow-through album’. A more accurate appraisal followed in Rolling Stone, where Barry Walters hailed the acoustic album over the electric, pointing out not unreasonably that In Your Honor ‘could have been easily pruned down to one disc’, complaining not unjustly that several of the electric rocker tracks ‘strain so hard that the melody gets lost’, lurching along in a ‘cartoonish headbanging fashion’ that ‘accentuates the band’s self-inflicted one-dimensionality’.
But Dave Grohl, nicest man in rock, people’s champion and world’s greatest everyman capable of doing just about anything, no longer cared deeply about what the reviewers had to say, pro or con. His career had now moved past that. He was now dealing directly with his people. The advent of social media had seen to that, through MySpace, then Facebook and of course the spanking new Foo Fighters website. As did his plan to embark on a one-off acoustic tour of theatres. In the new age of ‘event media’ in the music business, Dave, sharp as ever, had grasped the nettle and come up trumps again, announcing a detour from the band’s already planned arena tour to do seven smaller acoustic shows in July and August 2006, beginning at the Seattle Paramount Theater, on 11 July, the setting for so many classic pre-fame Nirvana shows, and highlighting at New York’s Beacon Theater, on 21 August.
Aware of the limits of all-acoustic shows, stretching back to his experience with Nirvana’s Unplugged show more than a decade before, Dave also announced that the band would be augmented on stage by a violinist, Petra Haden (recently of Beck and Green Day), and a keyboardist, Rami Jaffee (formerly of The Wallflowers and Everclear), both of whom also appeared on In Your Honor, plus the ace percussionist Drew Hester, who had recently produced Taylor’s side project, Taylor Hawkins & the Coattail Riders.
And that was not all, the best being kept for last – cue drum roll: the return of Pat Smear! Pat, who had most recently been playing reunion shows – minus Darby, of course – with The Germs would be coming along not as a fully fledged member, Dave stressed, but as a ‘touring guitarist’. The idea was to perform live for the first time most of the songs from In Your Honor’s second, more mellow side, along with whittled-down versions of all the biggest Foos hits. Pat’s return came as a huge surprise to Foos fans generally, but most especially to Chris Shiflett, who had no idea what was going on until Dave let him know just weeks before. But then Dave no longer felt the need to consult with anybody on anything when it came to decisions about what he was going to do with his band. Chris, though, admitted he was aghast. ‘To me that was just a guy that wanted my job,’ he said of Pat. ‘I was just like, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”’ Pat, with his hotwired sense of entitlement, claimed not to feel weird about it at all, only in the sense that he hoped it didn’t freak Chris out too much. And if it did, then, well …
In fact, Pat had been angling for a return to the Foo Fighters almost from the moment he’d left nearly ten years before. Watching from the sidelines as the band got bigger and bigger without him, he realised that, boy, had he made a fucking big mistake. When he heard that Franz had been booted out, he began calling Dave, ‘just to say hi’, making noises about wanting to come back. According to Chris, he’d only been in the band a couple of months when ‘Pat almost came back’. Dave didn’t know that Chris had got wind of the fact that he and Pat had been speaking and scheming together again. But Chris, shrewdly, said nothing, just waited to see whic
h way the wind was gonna blow. Dave, more wary than ever of making another bad public move, after the loss of first Will, then Pat and now Franz, knew he had to tread carefully, though. The announcement about Chris joining the band had already gone out. Now he was gonna announce that, actually, that was a mistake, and Pat was back? Uh huh. Also, could Pat really be relied on not to let him down again? Dave had cried and begged Pat not to leave. He promised himself he would never allow himself to be put in that position again.
According to Pat, it was all his decision: ‘There was at least a couple of times where I called Dave and said, “I want back.” Then when it looked like it might actually happen that was when I got scared,’ he declared in the Back and Forth documentary. But Dave knew he had to play his cards close to his chest. Simply couldn’t afford to make any more rash moves. So he fobbed Pat off with some time’s-not-right guff and told him: maybe next time, buddy. Then tucked the idea away in his back pocket like a get-out-of-jail card while he waited to see how things turned out with the latest version of the band.
Chris, meanwhile, not knowing what to believe, never stopped looking over his shoulder, his feeling during those years: ‘It probably will end, sooner than I want it to.’ Dave’s idea to finally bring Pat back as a ‘touring guitarist’, strictly for the acoustic shows, was a wonderfully subtle way of testing the water. Pat didn’t get a free pass back into the Foos and Chris maintained the illusion that he had not been usurped in the band. When, as things turned out, Chris and Pat instantly hit it off, from their very first rehearsal, it opened the door wide for Pat’s full return. Not yet but very, very soon. Dave had already decided. It was just a case of getting round to actually letting the guys know. Hell, yes, it was awkward to begin with. Dave of course just pretended not to notice. He’d learned by now that that was the best way for him to operate in such circumstances. He’d made his decision, let the others figure out their own ways of dealing with it.
Meanwhile, Pat’s return, albeit in a minor role to begin with, was greeted with joy by longer-standing Foos fans, and deep fascination by the younger generation. Chris was a very good guitarist and a perfectly serviceable foil for Dave’s livewire onstage persona. But having Pat back in the band brought back a much greater sense of character and destiny to the Foo Fighters; a much greater sense of fun. As Charles R. Cross points out, ‘The early Foo Fighters had a sense of humour that was sarcastic. It was really Pat Smear’s sense of humour. Early on I think Pat had a much bigger role in keeping everybody grounded. Pat is just the kind of guy that is no nonsense. He frankly has the sense of humour far closer to the sense of humour that Kurt Cobain had than anybody else I’ve ever met in rock.’ And no one was more aware of that than Dave Grohl.
When the acoustic dates sold out, three more shows were added, over three consecutive nights at the Pantages Theatre in LA, which would be filmed and later released as the live CD and in-concert DVD Skin and Bones. When Clive Davis, then the president and grand fromage at RCA, came to one of the acoustic dates he helped clear Dave’s thoughts on where to go next. Dave had been thinking it would be great to have an acoustic experience, and a rock experience, for separate audiences. Hence: the jumble of acoustic and electric dates that year. It was Clive who told him: why not do both together?
It seemed so obvious yet it took someone of Clive’s stature – someone who had signed Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Pink Floyd and dozens of other superstars – to say it before the light bulb went on in Dave’s head. Dude, if Clive thought it was a good idea then what are we waiting for?
From here on in, the Foo Fighters would become far more than its constituent parts. It was no longer a case of what happens is we lose one member or bring another back, the new live version of the Foo Fighters would be a constantly evolving travelling circus of musical super-troupers who cared more about entertaining the crowd than they did pining for credibility.
‘I always remember Dave talking about when he first met Neil Young, how that made him realise the band had longevity,’ Anton Brookes recalls. ‘You could forge it into a career. A band didn’t have to self-combust after two or three albums. Even after ten years, it could go on and on. He also saw the close-knit family which Neil Young’s community is. In the kitchen there was Neil Young, his wife, band members and their family, preparing food for everybody. Something as simple as that, Dave saw that as an indication that actually you don’t have to be stereotypical: that you can go your own way. That he’d earned the right.’
12. Not Like the Others
In Your Honor and the subsequent Skin and Bones tour hadn’t just allowed the Foos to step off the treadmill, it had shown Dave Grohl that there were different ways of doing things. The Foo Fighters had spent the first decade of their career with their foot on the gas, rocketing down their own sonic highway, learning to fly. But now it was time to head off-map and see where they ended up.
‘After that tour, I finally realised the possibilities hidden in a lot of our songs,’ Dave told Billboard. ‘We had been kind of caged by the fact we were just a four-piece rock band. With additional instrumentation, which we’d never really experimented with before the last album, we could take songs from ground level to soaring heights.’
Grohl’s reputation as the nicest man in rock had been cemented years before, but ever since the demise of Nirvana, he’d been a serious contender for the title of Hardest-Working Man in Showbusiness. The instruments had barely even been packed away after the Skin and Bones dates before the seeds for the Foo Fighters’ sixth album were already being sown in his head. He refused to entertain the thought of going back to the heads-down, arms-aloft arena rock with which his band had made their name, but neither could they repeat In Your Honor’s binary electric/acoustic split.
‘We’ve been a band for thirteen years,’ Dave explained. ‘Album after album, we’ve tried to redesign what we do. Not reinvent, but just make it all a little prettier. We wanted to experiment and go deeper melodically. The first record to me sounds like it could have been a garage hardcore band. The idea now is to step it up and make Odessey and Oracle.’ He was joking, but only just. He was referring to the 1968 album by British band The Zombies. A work of peculiarly English psychedelia made by men who looked like they’d never touched a psychedelic drug in their lives, Odessey and Oracle was destined to remain little more than a footnote in rock’s history books before a turn-of-the-millennium reappraisal rubber-stamped it as a bona fide cult classic. Re-creating an album along the hazy lines of Odessey and Oracle might have been a big ask even for Dave, but the point remained: the Foo Fighters’ horizons had opened up. Some said they had opened up a little far, perhaps, put off by the sheer overindulgent weight of the double In Your Honor set, but for Dave Grohl it was now anything goes.
Part of the challenge was simply to stave off boredom. What does the rock star who has seemingly achieved everything do next? He’d spent the last decade and more playing the part of the textbook rock star, ‘running around a stage with a beer in my hand, singing my fucking throat out … You do get to the point where you think, “Man, there’s got to be more than just that, so let’s explore a little bit more.”’
But there was another reason for his burning desire to keep moving forward. In April 2006, Dave became a father for the first time when his wife, Jordyn, gave birth to a daughter, Violet Maye. While most new dads find themselves locked in a hellish cycle of sleepless nights and nappy changing, fatherhood only seemed to amp up his already irrepressible energy levels. More importantly, it flicked a switch in his brain. Suddenly, he found that having a daughter fed into his songwriting in new and entirely unexpected ways.
‘It made me feel like the big picture had opened up so wide that I wasn’t afraid of anything any more, to try things I’ve never done and to say things I’ve never said before,’ he gushed to Kerrang!. ‘It changed everything about the way I write. Now when I get fucking angry or defensive or something, I just want to rip someone’s fucking head off. When I
feel love, I feel it in fucking every cell of my body. So it just makes me fucking more alive. So when you’re writing music with that in mind or that in your heart, everything just blooms into this fucking incredibly colourful feeling.’
This newfound energy could instantly be heard in the new ultra-vivid songs he was writing. Abandoning the laboured electric-or-acoustic approach of In Your Honor, early demos for the prospective album featured songs that ranged from what the frontman described as ‘wall of noise hard shit’ to ‘fucking mellow piano ballads.’ Unlike its predecessors, however, there was no over-arching concept or philosophy behind the process. ‘The only philosophy that Dave had for this record was anything goes,’ said Taylor Hawkins. ‘After playing that acoustic tour we shed some of the fear of incorporating mellower stuff with the heavy stuff.’
The process of actually writing the album was no different to the way the band had worked before. Dave always kept an acoustic guitar to hand whether he was in his studio or his lounge watching TV on the couch. Ideas would be sketched out; if they worked, he would bring them to the band’s practice space to turn into ‘big loud rock songs’ – or, in some cases, quite the opposite. After the turf wars and near implosion of the early 2000s, these days the rest of the band were just happy for their fully acknowledged leader to shoulder the songwriting burden. But if it was now crystal clear who was in charge, they weren’t unaware of the scale of his responsibilities.
‘We have a lot of people that work for us,’ the newly sober Taylor said. ‘Every time Dave puts a pen to paper or picks up the guitar, it’s a big deal. I don’t think he thinks about it like that, but every time we’re due for a new Foo Fighters record it’s like, “Okay, Dave, what do you got?”’
That said, Dave’s determinedly unconventional approach to the new album needed an equally unconventional producer. Various names were bandied around, but there was one the frontman kept returning to: Gil Norton. Of course, the Foos had history with Norton – both good and bad, in Dave’s eyes. He hadn’t forgotten what a hard taskmaster the producer had been on The Colour and the Shape, with the scorchingly honest approach of a drill sergeant. Yet for many that remained still one of the best Foo Fighters albums and Dave was equally mindful of how effectively Norton had elevated the songs to another level, giving the Foos’ sound the extra punch it needed while sharpening its sleek pop appeal.