by Mick Wall
The one consistent criticism of every Foo Fighters album since then had been that they had never really reached outside their comfort zone. Gil Norton, Dave decided, would be the perfect man to help push them up a gear. Norton, who had been involved in numerous critically acclaimed projects with artists like Patti Smith and Feeder, had nevertheless not enjoyed a huge international hit since he’d last worked with the Foos a decade before. He was more than happy to work with them again. The first step was to spend two weeks sitting at a table, alone with Dave, deconstructing everything he had written so far, focusing on the minutiae of what made a song work: arrangements, structure, melody, dynamics, harmony … As they progressed, they whittled the songs down from 40 to 20 to, finally, just 12, stripping things back and then painstakingly rebuilding them, piecing things together, said Dave, ‘like a little Lego fire truck’.
This ultra-methodical approach chimed with the singer’s own determined streak – an aspect of his character that he no longer tried to conceal from the public. It seemed the more of his working methods he revealed the more his fans liked it. Liked it that it was Dave in charge. Liked it that it was Dave’s band, Dave’s direction; Dave’s full attention they were getting every time they played one of his songs or bought one of his tickets.
‘We went and sat in a rehearsal space for about four weeks,’ Grohl recalled. ‘We got deep. We’d play a song a day, and I mean a song a day, from noon to midnight. By the time we got to tracking, we were like the fucking Bad Brains – the tightest band in the world.’ Of course, Dave had absolutely no intention whatsoever of turning the Foo Fighters into Bad Brains. His gaze was now firmly on claiming the same territory huge international mainstream rock acts like U2 and Coldplay occupied. He just liked to throw names like Bad Brains into the conversation to somehow make him feel more real. Like he was still one of us. When in fact he had not been that for too long now.
For the volatile Taylor Hawkins, who had yet to join the band when they recorded The Colour and the Shape with Norton, it was an eye-opener – albeit one he actually came to enjoy. ‘We basically played each of these songs a hundred different times, trying every little thing every different way,’ he recalled with a smile. ‘With him we took each song down to the studs and remodelled it completely. Gil’s whole philosophy is to stretch things out as far and wide as possible to see where these songs could go.’
Having decided which tracks made the grade, the band entered Studio 606 West – ‘our fortress’, as Dave now called it – in March 2007 to start recording. It wasn’t all work and no play, though. Dave and Taylor embarked on a competition to see who could go longest without shaving. The result, after nearly four months’ recording, was a pair of luxuriant beards. ‘I was looking like [late Beach Boys drummer] Dennis Wilson in his homeless period, hitching on the Pacific Coast Highway with a bottle of orange juice and vodka in his hand,’ Taylor boasted, while Dave compared himself to heroically hirsute ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons.
Mid-recording, the band descended en masse on the LA Forum to see Black Sabbath spin-off band Heaven or Hell, featuring Dave’s friend and sometime collaborator, Tony Iommi. The trip was one part team-bonding experience, one part frat boys’ night out. A tour bus was duly hired, and someone thought to supply beer bongs – a typically American device to aid consumption of vast quantities of booze at a rapid rate. Unsurprisingly, Dave’s recollections of the gig were hazy, though he woke up the next morning with a painful reminder of the evening’s hijinks: a cracked rib.
But the most surreal moment occurred during the Superbowl on 4 February. The pinnacle of the American football season, this battle royale between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts was watched by an estimated 90 million people in the US alone, plus millions more worldwide. By 2007, the half-time show had become an integral part of the glitzy, garish spectacle – every A-list superstar from Michael Jackson to U2 had played this 15-minute musical interlude in front of a huge TV audience. In 2007, it was Prince’s turn. Coming off the back of a decade-long cold streak, the Purple One’s career was on the up again and he was determined to put on a half-time show to remember. And, despite torrential rain, that’s what he did, serving up his Eighties hits ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and ‘Baby I’m A Star’, before launching into electrifying covers of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Proud Mary’… and the Foo Fighters’ ‘Best of You’.
Taylor was watching the Superbowl on TV with the Foos’ former producer Nick Raskulinecz and members of Rush, who were working with Raskulinecz on their latest album, and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. ‘I’m outside smoking a cigarette with [Rush drummer] Neil Peart and someone sticks their head outside and goes, “Uh, dude, Prince is doing your song,”’ he told MTV.
There was no small degree of irony in Prince’s cover. Just five years earlier, Prince had blocked the Foos from releasing their version of his gloriously sleazy 1984 funk rock classic ‘Darling Nikki’ in the US, pompously proclaiming that bands should ‘write their own song’. Whether his own take on ‘Best of You’ was a heartfelt tribute or belated dig wasn’t immediately clear. ‘Dude, I have no idea why he did it, but I’d love to find out,’ Taylor told MTV. ‘The thought went through my head that maybe he was doing it as a sort of “Fuck you” to us, or maybe he really likes the song. Either way, it was pretty amazing to have a guy like Prince covering one of our songs – and actually doing it better than we did.’
As the beard-growing competitions, drunken hijinks and unexpected superstar tributes indicated, there was an optimism and energy to the sessions that had been absent just a few years before. The studio buzzed with the confidence of a band truly hitting their stride. The end result of this hot streak was both the most focused yet musically diverse record the Foos had made in years. While it had its share of ready-made arena rock anthems in the shape of ‘The Pretender’ – its compelling ‘What if I say I’m not like the others’ refrain the mission statement of the whole album – and the assuredly breezy ‘Long Road to Ruin’, elsewhere Dave boldly attempted to mix things up. He cited Metallica as an influence on the gnarly ‘Erase/Replace’ (‘I still listen to Kill ’Em All at least once a week,’ he claimed), while ‘Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up is Running)’ was effortless thrash-pop that Grohl only half-jokingly compared to R.E.M. and their 1989 mainstream breakthrough album, Green. At the other end of the spectrum was the stripped-back ‘Stranger Things Have Happened’, a song whose hushed tension wouldn’t have been out of place on Nirvana’s Unplugged album, and acoustic instrumental ‘The Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners’, a song featuring virtuoso acoustic guitarist Kaki King and a tribute to the 17 men who narrowly escaped death during the collapse of Tasmania’s Beaconsfield mine in April 2006.
There were some unexpected left turns as well. The piano-led ‘Statues’ was Dave unashamedly tapping into his inner Paul McCartney; the result wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a 1970s Wings album. ‘I was quite nervous about putting it on the record because it’s a big departure,’ he confessed. ‘Then I thought, “What the fuck? That’s exactly why we should put it on the record.”’
The new album also found Dave finally accepting his role as a serious lyricist in a way that he’d never allowed himself to before. Long gone was the guy who rubbished his own lyrics, getting in his excuses early, claiming he only wrote them quickly, almost as an afterthought. It had never been true, only now he no longer felt the need to apologise for voicing his increasingly mature emotions. A large part of this was down to the changes in his domestic circumstances. ‘I used to be scared,’ he told Clash magazine. ‘I used to be afraid to say certain things, but after becoming a father, the big picture really does open up a lot and you realise that life’s too short to hold back those things that you’ve always wanted to do or always wanted to say.’
No Foo Fighters album would be complete, of course, without speculation that at least one song was about Kurt Cobain. In this case, it was ‘Let It Die�
��. In fairness to the critics, the lines ‘A simple man and his blushing bride / Intravenous, intertwined’ seemed to point in only one obvious direction. The fact that it echoed the same quiet/loud dynamics as Grohl’s old band only amplified the probable connection. This time, though, he didn’t bother to deny it. ‘[It’s] a song that’s written about feeling helpless to someone else’s demise,’ he told the Mail on Sunday. ‘I’ve seen people lose it all to drugs and heartbreak and death. It’s happened more than once in my life, but the one that’s most noted is Kurt. And there are a lot of people that I’ve been angry with in my life, but the one that’s most noted is Courtney. So it’s pretty obvious to me that those correlations are gonna pop up every now and again.’
The song that was emblematic of what the Foo Fighters were doing with the album though was the closing track, ‘Home’. A stark, startling pared-down piano ballad, it was as far from ‘This is a Call’ or even ‘Learn to Fly’ as it was possible to get. This is Dave Grohl, 38-year-old husband and father, baring his soul.
‘I sat and wrote the lyrics in about ten minutes, sang it once, listened to it, and just felt overwhelmed by how revealing it was,’ he said, simply. ‘It made me feel quite vulnerable, so much so that it’s hard to listen to. I get really choked up thinking about all the time I spend away from the things that are important to me. It’s tough being away on tour; it’s even tough just to be talking about how much I wish I was with my family.’
‘Home’ also gave the album its name. Whereas in the past Dave had agonised over album titles, favouring the direct and to the point, here he wanted something that summed up the album’s breadth and diversity; something that gave it the weight it deserved. There was a line in ‘Home’ that fitted perfectly: ‘Echoes, silence, patience and grace, all of these moments I’ll never replace.’ Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace … The sixth Foo Fighters album had its name.
‘I thought it was nice because it’s open to interpretation and it’s a beautiful title,’ Grohl told Clash. ‘I think the album is beautiful in its diversity and its melody and its musicality.’ Not all of his band mates were on quite the same page, though. Taylor, as usual, for one, led the charge, declaring the album far too polished for his taste. ‘It’s pristine,’ he complained to Drummer magazine, ‘a Steely Dan version of the Foo Fighters.’
But Dave had learned to take such utterances with a pinch of salt. If Taylor wanted to play boss in an interview with a drumming magazine that was fine by Dave, who now had bigger fish to fry. ‘At the end of the day, I wanna jump up onstage in front of 80,000 people and make ’em kick up dirt for a few hours,’ he informed Q magazine in yet another cover feature. ‘But the quality and craft of what we’ve done is far above anything we’ve ever done before.’
That desire to ‘jump up in front of 80,000 people’ was now closer to being fulfilled than he knew. The Foo Fighters finished work on Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace in June 2007, and the album was set for release three months later, in September. But before that there was the matter of the biggest performance of the Foo Fighters’ career so far: Live Earth.
On 21 January 2007, the unlikely team of former US Vice President-turned-environmental-crusader Al Gore and A-list hip hop producer and singer Pharrell Williams had announced a series of seven simultaneous benefit concerts taking place on 7 July under the banner of Live Earth. These shows would be held on each of the seven continents, and were collectively designed as a consciousness-raising exercise for global warming and climate change issues – a hot-button topic ever since the release of Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, the previous year.
Live Earth stuck closely to the template laid out by the landmark Live Aid concert more than 20 years earlier: every A-list band and superstar under one roof – or, in this case, seven roofs – where the eyes of the world could focus on them. The European Live Earth show, where Dave and the Foos would be high on the bill, was the biggest of all. Held at London’s enormous, 86,000-capacity Wembley Stadium, the bill brought together the biggest names in pop (Madonna, The Black Eyed Peas, Pussycat Dolls), alternative rock (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snow Patrol, Razorlight) and hip hop and R&B (Beastie Boys, John Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae). There were high-profile reunions (Genesis, Duran Duran and, to the delight of Dave and the rest of the Foos, spoof Eighties rockers Spinal Tap), housewives’ favourites (James Blunt, Paolo Nutini) and even a lone representative from the world of heavy metal (Metallica, dude!).
It was into this billion-dollar line-up that the Foo Fighters found themselves parachuted. For Dave Grohl, it was an opportunity to engage with politics for the first time since his days on the Washington, DC, hardcore punk scene – though, this time, it would be in front of an audience that ran into the billions. ‘I grew up in Virginia, where we had beautiful seasons, summer, winter, spring and fall,’ he said ahead of the show. ‘In LA you don’t get that, you get heat, and in the last six years I’ve lived here every summer has gotten hotter than the one before. My priority is to look out for my daughter’s future, not to mention the wellbeing of the human race.’
On the day of the show, London was bathed in sunshine – ironic, given the cause behind the show. For Taylor, it really was a baptism of fire. The day’s entertainment kicked off with the SOS Allstars, an all-drumming supergroup featuring Hawkins alongside his hero, Queen sticksman Roger Taylor, and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, plus more than 40 back-up drummers from backgrounds as diverse as the British Army and East London bhangra institute The Dhol Foundation. Watching from the side of the stage, Dave was suddenly made ecstatically aware of the sheer scale of the day. ‘You see Wembley Stadium with all of those people and it’s like jumping into a cold lake, like “Holy fucking shit this is HUGE!” Not to mention two billion people watching it on television!’
The Foo Fighters found themselves in the slightly surreal position of being the night’s penultimate act. Even more surreally, they were sandwiched between burlesque-themed girl band Pussycat Dolls and the Queen of Pop herself, Madonna. ‘I thought it was kind of funny,’ Dave told the NME. ‘I just thought, “All right, let’s do this!”’
At precisely 9.17 p.m., following an introduction by comedian-lately-turned-political commentator Russell Brand, the Foo Fighters took to the Live Earth stage and launched straight into a ferocious ‘All My Life’. The MO for their 20-minute set was exactly the same as Taylor’s latest heroes Queen’s had famously been at their now-legendary Live Aid show: get on, play the hits, knock ’em dead. As well as ‘All My Life’, their five-song set featured ‘My Hero’, ‘Times Like These’, ‘Best of You’ and a startling, stripped-down ‘Everlong’. The response from the crowd was uninhibited euphoria. ‘Once we got to the middle of “My Hero”,’ said Dave afterwards, ‘I was like, “Ah, I think I’ve got these fuckers in the palm of my hand!”’
Dave was charm itself, his Every Dude persona utterly in keeping with the serious-but-celebratory tone of the day. The Foos themselves looked like a band that had finally come to terms with the idea of being an arena rock act – or, in this case, a fully fledged stadium rock act. The show might have been called Live Earth, but this was the Foo Fighters’ own Live Aid moment. Speaking to Kerrang!, Dave said as much. ‘I realised that we could jump into a stadium like that, somewhere that size, and feel like we owned the place for the time that we were onstage.’
‘They were a big band in Kerrang!’s world, a big band in NME’s world,’ says Paul Brannigan, editor of Kerrang!. ‘But they were still a level below that of Metallica and U2, the Stones and Springsteen. They weren’t anywhere near that kind of plateau. The big turning point seemed to be Live Earth. That was the first time you thought, “Oh, hang on, wait a minute…”’
The only question now was: when would Foo Fighters play Wembley on their own? Dave neatly sidestepped the question by joking about returning for a five-night stand, only to politely shoot down the idea. ‘I don’t think that’s feasible. For that moment it felt like that
massive stadium had shrunk into a tiny room, and when that happens it’s the greatest feeling in the world! If we could do that again it would be good,’ he added almost as an afterthought, albeit a prescient one given that little over a year later the Foos would return to Wembley, ‘that massive stadium’, this time strictly on their own terms.
For now, though, there was a more pressing matter: the release of Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace. The Live Earth show and a subsequent ‘secret’ appearance on the second stage at the popular British V Festival had only served to ratchet up anticipation for the new album. Things were taken up several notches further with the release of the barrelling first single, ‘The Pretender’, which became their biggest hit in America and Britain since ‘Best of You’ two years before. The album hadn’t even been released yet, but Foo Fighters had become one of the most talked-about bands on the planet again.
When Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace arrived in September, however, it did so to mixed sales reactions. Unlike In Your Honor, it entered the UK album chart at No. 1. In America, though, it only got as high as No. 3 and would become the first Foos album not to achieve platinum status for over a million sales. Partly, this was due to the rapidly collapsing state of the record industry as downloads took over from hard-copy CD sales. Mostly, this was simply due to the fact that the Foo Fighters’ career had now plateaued in America. They were about to become one of an increasing number of high-profile rock acts whose albums would still enjoy full-spectrum publicity campaigns by an adoring media, but whose actual sales initially took them high into the charts, only for them to descend just as rapidly soon after.