Foo Fighters

by Mick Wall

  Most of the reviews were lukewarm. In America, Rolling Stone made nice noises but only gave it three and a half stars. Spin yawned pleasantly and gave it 6/10, insisting that ‘two-thirds of these tracks sound a lot like songs Grohl has done before’. In Britain, the Observer damned it with more faint praise, describing it as ‘undemanding arena rock that’s just leftfield enough not to jar alongside Grohl’s previous incarnation’. This was not the reaction Dave had been hoping for. By this stage in their career, the Foo Fighters may have been virtually critic-proof – but Dave wasn’t. It was now he decided he would simply bypass the critics and take his message straight to the fans.

  On 5 September, nearly three weeks before the album’s release, the Foo Fighters played a short, six-song set at Studio 606 West, four of which were brand-new songs: ‘The Pretender’, ‘Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up is Running)’, ‘Long Road to Ruin’ and, as an all-too-earnest finale, ‘Home’. It would be the first step on a touring treadmill that would run through to the end of 2008 and see them play more than 110 shows in venues ranging from tiny clubs to huge stadiums. This was no longer about building his empire; for Dave, this was now a pilgrimage to the faithful. The road to rock’n’roll Damascus.

  In early November, just five weeks after the album’s release, the band opened the MTV Europe Awards show at the Olympiahalle in Munich, playing a medley of ‘The Pretender’ and an arena-rocked-up version of the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ (whether the latter was in ‘honour’ of the British monarchy’s German roots is unclear). Although the Foos eventually went home empty-handed, losing out on the Video Star and Headliner awards to French dance duo Justice and Brit-rock titans Muse respectively, Dave happily accepted the job of hosting the so-called VIP ‘Glamour Pit’, interviewing assorted winners and celebrities. It was a mark of his own increasing celebrity, as well as his studied nice-guy reputation, that he’d been tasked with the job in the first place. The band were also given their own ‘Fantasy Suite’, where they played a separate set featuring guest stars ranging from Josh Homme to rapper CeeLo Green.

  Less than two months later, the MTV Awards would be overshadowed by the biggest music event of the year – one which Grohl was only involved in as a spectator. On 10 December 2007, the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin – guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones – reunited onstage at the 12,000-capacity O2 arena in London to play their first full show since the legendary band split up following the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980.

  The clamour for a Zeppelin reunion had grown exponentially louder as the years passed, though the band themselves had consistently turned down increasingly ridiculous sums of money to get back together. But this was different. It was a tribute to the late founder of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegün, the man who had signed and mentored Led Zeppelin way back in 1968. This was no cash-grab – the O2 show was a true one-off, and a comparatively intimate one at that.

  Given the size of the band and the uniqueness of the occasion, it was the must-attend show of not just the year, but of the entire decade. The VIP guest list read like a celebrity Who’s Who: rock legends such as Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Jeff Beck rubbed shoulders with the supermodels Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. While the newer generation of music stars were represented by the likes of Noel Gallagher, Marilyn Manson and, of course, Dave Grohl.

  The Foo Fighters’ frontman had never made a secret of his love of Led Zeppelin, even when he was a 16-year-old punk rock brat. John Bonham was his idol. Less well known at the time was that Dave was now a prime candidate to replace the late Bonham at the O2 show. His own drumming style was directly inspired by Bonham’s hard-hitting but percussive approach. ‘I am at their beck and call,’ he had told the NME after the Zeppelin show was announced in July 2007. ‘But Jason [Bonham, son of John] should be the one … everyone knows that. He’s a fucking phenomenal drummer. But if I got that call, what the fuck do you think I’d be saying? “Hey, Chris and Taylor, let’s take a little break for a few days. I’ll see ya later!” But I don’t expect that to happen.’

  In the event, it was Jason Bonham who rightly took his father’s place on the Zeppelin drum stool. The O2 show was a simple triumph, with Grohl declaring it one of the best nights of his life. It was in the rosy afterglow of the Zeppelin reunion that he looked back over 2007 and proclaimed it the band’s best yet. ‘I can’t imagine how this year could have been any better. But, at the same time, I can’t believe that this will be the best year of my life because they just keep on getting better.’

  The end of the year, though, brought a new reality check to the situation Dave and the Foos now found themselves in. ‘I remember at one point thinking, “God, I wish our band was as big in America as it is in Britain,”’ he confided to Kerrang!. ‘[In the UK] we’re treated like this world-class rock band. Then we go home and we’re playing in theatres, much smaller places.’ He was being disingenuous, but only slightly. While his band were festival headliners in the UK and across Europe, they were still capable of pulling large crowds in the US.

  On 14 January 2008, the Foo Fighters launched the US leg of the Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace tour with a show for LA’s KROQ radio station at a Hollywood sweatbox, The Troubadour. Coincidentally, it was also Dave’s thirty-ninth birthday, and the band were joined onstage by their old friend Lemmy, bearing a cake for the birthday boy. The tour proper kicked off two days later at the decidedly less-fabled Frank Sinatra Theater at Bank Atlantic Center in Sunrise, Florida, and continued through such venues as the Fed-Ex Forum in Memphis and the Jobing.com Arena in Glendale, Arizona.

  As the corporate nomenclature of the venues they were playing suggested, this was the Foo Fighters’ biggest and most extensive US trek yet, with a touring infrastructure to match. To get this particular show on the road involved eight musicians (including touring musicians Rami Jaffee, Drew Hester, Jessy Greene and their old friend Pat Smear), 35 crew members, six tour buses and nine trucks. More importantly, it also represented the point where Grohl had to reconcile his view of arena rock as a teenage punk with the realities of the position the Foo Fighters now found themselves in – namely, their status as an arena rock band. ‘I was a cynical pothead,’ he told Q in early 2008. ‘Like, “This is stupid, this place is so big.” It made no sense. But now, I guess it does.’

  It wasn’t just the size of the venues that had changed. It was Dave himself. The snotty punk rock kid would have barely recognised the grinning, audience-conducting ringmaster he had become. The middle-aged man Dave now was knew that the people who made up a typical Foo Fighters crowd didn’t come for political reasons or to find answers to The Big Questions. They came for a good night out. Playing arenas wasn’t a case of them selling out. It was just a case of Dave being honest about what people loved about his band, and their place in the scheme of things. ‘I think people should be entertained. The last thing in the world I want to do is challenge someone with our concert. I want people to feel included in what’s going on. I don’t want them to think I’m anything that I’m not, so I try my best to feel completely at ease. I would like for the audience to look at the band and feel like they’re looking back at themselves.’

  If Dave had any niggling doubts about his band’s status in America, they were at least partly banished by the 50th Grammy Awards, held this year at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The Foos were nominated for five awards, two of which they went home with: Best Hard Rock Performance for ‘The Pretender’ (which they performed on the night in front of a roomful of sedate, suited-and-booted invitees) and Best Rock Album for Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, beating such heavyweights as Bruce Springsteen and John Fogerty in the latter category.

  There was very little time for celebration, however. The day after the Grammys, the Foo Fighters’ tour machine was already rolling on to the next date. As the effective CEO of the whole operation, the success of the tour, and of the band, fell on Dave’s shoulders. While he was never one
to complain about the heavy workload, he had become aware that, as a father, there was more to life than just being in a rock’n’roll band. For the first time in his life, Dave mused on the idea of taking time away from the band for domestic reasons.

  ‘The key to longevity is balance,’ he explained to Spin. ‘And I love the band like a family. But I’ve realised that the most important thing is my life outside the band. Without this, everything else would fall apart.’ Family was now all to Daddy Dave. Speaking again to Q, he talked of how being a husband and a father had ‘centred’ him. ‘Personally and honestly, it’s something that I’d always imagined happening,’ he said. ‘I grew up with a tight family. I’m probably one of the few rock musicians that didn’t have a fucked-up life. I mean, my parents divorced when I was seven years old and we grew up with no money. But we got by with very little and we were still the happiest people in the world.’

  But then, as Anton Brookes points out, Dave Grohl was always more grounded than your average rock star – and more private. Fatherhood may have altered his perspective on the rock’n’roll industry in particular and the world in general, but his family weren’t there to be paraded as tabloid bait.

  ‘Dave is very closeted actually when it comes to his private life and his family,’ says Anton. ‘You never see him in the tabloids. You never read about him doing something silly or involved in something. You occasionally see snaps of him with his wife and kids where they’ve gone out somewhere. But it’s very few and far between.’

  He may have been out of reach for the tabloids, but Dave always seemed to have time for pretty much everyone else, not least his fans. ‘Sometimes I’ve been with Dave and we’ve gone out just to grab a sandwich or something in between interviews, or just get out of the hotel or the record company,’ says Anton. ‘But as soon as he walks into somewhere, it’s all, “Ah, Dave Grohl!” Dave just plays along with it, and he gives the people what they want. He knows what to do. He’s a seasoned pro. He’s very intelligent. He knows how to play the game. For that twenty seconds people are in his face trying to connect with him, he’ll give them what they want. Then they’ll walk away feeling like a million dollars. Which then allows Dave just to get on with his life.’

  Of course, part of the reason for this is that Dave was – and is – still a fan boy at heart. This was put beyond doubt in May 2008, when he wrote an open letter to Metallica via the pages of Metal Hammer magazine. The heavy metal band were working on their latest album with the producer Rick Rubin, and as a long-time fan, said Dave, he wanted to show them some love. The letter opened with the gushings of a star-struck fan.

  ‘Hey, it’s Dave!’ he began. ‘Remember me? Yeah, I’m the guy that’s been listening to your band faithfully since 1983.’ He talked about buying the first Metallica album, Kill ’Em All, from a mail order catalogue, and how that record ‘changed my life’. Then he offered some characteristically enthusiastic support: ‘I can’t wait to hear the new shit, and no matter what you guys do I’ll always be the first one at the shop waiting to hear it. I’m sure you’ll come out and blow everybody’s fucking minds, because you’re fucking Metallica! Good luck. And don’t release it until it’s kickass. PS Have you finished recording the drums yet?’

  It was a letter that reaffirmed his nice-guy credentials, though there was an interesting subtext. Dave may have been a true-life Metallica fan, but it was also written by someone who was now their equal. For, in 2008, Dave Grohl had every reason to be brimming with confidence. Just four weeks after the open letter was printed, the Foo Fighters returned to the scene of their greatest triumph yet: Wembley Stadium. And this time they were the main attraction. The Foos’ two Wembley shows, on Friday, 6 June, and Saturday the 7th, had been announced a few months earlier. For Grohl’s biographer Paul Brannigan, who had followed the band since their inception, the step up to a stadium took a lot of people by surprise.

  ‘Things have always grown for the Foo Fighters,’ he says now. ‘But there’s a massive leap between two nights at Brixton Academy and two nights at Wembley Stadium, yet that was done within the space of fifteen years. If you’re watching from outside and hadn’t been paying too much attention, you’d see the Foo Fighters doing Wembley and think: “How the fuck did that happen?” It wasn’t like they were notching up a string of Top 10 singles. It would have been quite easy not to have noticed the curve they were on.’

  No one, however, was more surprised than Dave. The frontman admitted he wasn’t convinced the band were big enough to fill the stadium. To his amazement, both shows sold out instantly. ‘Someone said it’s 85,000 tickets and we’re like, “We’ll never sell that out, are you crazy?” And then two nights at Wembley sell out in a fucking day or whatever? Honestly, can you imagine that happening?’

  His apprehension was understandable. Headlining two nights at Wembley wasn’t just the biggest achievement of his career so far, it was by far the most prestigious. If they pulled it off, the Foo Fighters would be elevated to rock’s A-list. If they fell flat, then … well, that didn’t bear thinking about.

  It was with this in mind that the Foo Fighters pulled out all the stops on those two balmy nights in June. The capacity crowd gazed down on the vast stage in the centre of the Wembley pitch. It wasn’t so much ‘in the round’ as ‘in the square’. The revolving main stage was covered by an illuminated pavilion, while a lengthy runway led down to a smaller stage where the band would perform a semi-acoustic set. This same attention to detail was extended to the backstage area, where a replica of Dave’s favourite London rock dive, the Crobar in Soho, replete with skulls, burning black candles and a permanent soundtrack of sheer heaviosity, had been created to entertain the VIP guests.

  The first night’s show was as gloriously memorable as anything they’d yet done. The 20-track set list covered all bases, from the latest album right back to Dave’s Nirvana-era B-side, ‘Marigold’, recalled only by those whose memories were now longer than their hair. After traversing the length of the runway for an extended ‘This is a Call’, the singer offered up a lovingly irreverent tribute to the audience: ‘Hey! Hey! Hey! Wembley fucking Stadium, ladies and gentlemen, I love each and every one of you fucking assholes tonight!’

  If the first show was a triumph, it was the second night that truly elevated the Foo Fighters to the next level. ‘We knew from the beginning this wasn’t just going to be an ordinary show,’ a clearly jubilant and emotional Dave announced near the end of gig. ‘We knew that this country, you guys, you made us the band that we are today. So we’d like to invite a couple of very special guests: Mr Jimmy Page and Mr John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin.’

  The roar that greeted the appearance of the two musicians could probably be heard across the Atlantic. Just six months after the already-legendary Led Zeppelin comeback show, Dave had managed to pull off what would turn out to be the closest anyone would get to another Zep reunion. At the end of 2007, he had sat in the audience at the O2. Now two of the three surviving members were onstage with him.

  Page and Jones played two Zeppelin songs with the Foo Fighters. For the first, the old Zep warhorse, ‘Rock and Roll’, Taylor stepped up to the microphone, allowing Dave to get to finally live out his John Bonham fantasies behind the drum kit. Then the latter stepped back to the front of the stage for a triumphant ‘Ramble On’. ‘Welcome to the greatest day of my whole entire life,’ an emotional Grohl told the crowd as Page and Jones took their bows. This was stadium rock as it should be done: on the grandest of scales. If their Live Earth show was a party in someone else’s house, this was bigger and far more significant. For those two nights in June, Wembley Stadium was The House That Dave Grohl Built.

  The significance of the show wasn’t lost on anyone. Fourteen years into their journey, the Foo Fighters had done what no one up to and including Dave Grohl had expected them to do: they had secured a seat at rock’s top table. The two Wembley shows were the moment when the Foo Fighters were admitted to the pantheon of the greats, bigger eve
n perhaps than Nirvana, certainly in terms of mass widespread recognition. The moment when Dave Grohl was anointed as the heir to the Seventies rock gods he had once worshipped. Not that the man himself would ever admit it.

  ‘Did I enjoy it? Yes and no,’ Dave told Kerrang! in the days after the gig. ‘I mean, I was pretty nervous beforehand, but it was an amazing night. The crowd were great, and come on, having Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones onstage? How could I not be excited about that? The question now, though, is where do we go from here?’

  The answer, as would soon become evident, would be right back to the start.

  13. Wasted

  On Wednesday, 14 January 2009, Dave Grohl turned 40. If this landmark birthday gave him cause to look back, then he would have been both proud and bewildered at what he saw. In the 19 years since he’d joined Nirvana, his life had been a rollercoaster ride, punctuated by triumph, tragedy, chaos, struggle and, ultimately, vindication. The Foo Fighters’ two huge Wembley Stadium shows the previous summer had been their crowning glory, and on the back of them Dave had called that whole year the finest of his life. Little did he know going into 2009, and his fifth decade, that he would have to recalibrate what he meant by ‘finest’. For the fan boy inside Dave, what was on the horizon was arguably more exciting than anything he’d done before.

  The tour for Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace had officially come to an end in September 2008, and the band temporarily went their separate ways. Nate Mendel reconnected with his old band, Sunny Day Real Estate, who had reunited for a tour (the line-up included Mendel’s former Foos colleague, the drummer William Goldsmith), Taylor Hawkins was asked to complete an unfinished song by the late Beach Boys singer and drummer Dennis Wilson which appeared on a reissue of the latter’s classic 1977 album Pacific Ocean Blue, and Chris Shiflett diverted his attention to his side project, Jackson United, who had recorded a new album at Dave’s Studio 606 West (and which featured guest spots from both Dave and Taylor).