This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘Right when the thing with Stan Lynch happened, we were already booked to go on Saturday Night Live, so that left us high and dry,’ Petty told MOJO in 2009. ‘So we thought, first of all, who’s a great drummer? Dave Grohl is our favourite drummer right now and he isn’t doing anything. So I called Dave’s office. He phoned back and was really keen to do it. I didn’t get that deep with him about Kurt Cobain. What I did talk to him about was joining the Heartbreakers. He thought about it but he was torn. He told me he’d just completed [what became] the first Foo Fighters album on which he’d played everything, so the idea of actually being in a band really appealed to him. But I told him that with that going on, and with a deal, he would be unhappy with us. We’re an older bunch of guys and I thought he would be happier doing his own thing.’

  Even as he was respectfully declining Tom Petty’s invitation to keep the beat for his Heartbreakers, in the autumn of 1994 rumours abounded regarding Grohl’s employment status. It was suggested that the drummer might join forces with ex-Misfits frontman Glenn Danzig in the muscular, dramatic noir rock collective Danzig, replacing none other than Chuck Biscuits, one of his teenage heroes. Even louder came the rumour that Dave Grohl was to join Pearl Jam, a notion put to Virginia Grohl by one of her high school students in Alexandria, and duly passed along to her son. ‘I don’t know where the fuck these rumours came from,’ was Dave’s response, not strictly speaking in itself a denial.

  But while in 1994 the world at large still viewed Dave Grohl as simply being a drummer – albeit a terrifically accomplished, A-list drummer – the man’s perception of himself was changing. Awake to the possibilities afforded by his brand new demo tape, Grohl quickly came to realise that in those few days in October he had put his name to something that was possessed of both quality and potential. Or, more to the point, he hadn’t put his name to it, for if there was one thing above all Dave Grohl desired for his own music at this point, it was anonymity and protection from the complicated shadows cast by the ghost of Nirvana. Even so, word regarding the tape was beginning to spread.

  ‘One of the DJs from a Seattle radio station came up to Barrett’s studio to hear something else and Barrett played him a demo of “I’ll Stick Around”,’ Grohl told me. ‘And actually, when I’d demoed that song with Barrett, when I heard it back for the first time, mixed, I actually had an anxiety attack because I finally realised that this was good, whereas everything else I recorded over the previous six years I thought was crap. I just thought, “Oh shit, this is real. Oh no! Now I have to pursue this …”’

  Grohl took his demo to a cassette copying facility in Seattle, and emerged with 100 copies of his fifteen-song tape. Inspired by former Police drummer Stuart Copeland’s decision to release his earliest solo material under the pseudonym Klark Kent, the drummer decided to title the demo with a fictitious band name, just as he had done when issuing the Pocketwatch cassette as Late! The name he chose was Foo Fighters.

  In 1995, in his band’s first press release, Grohl explained the origins of the band name thus: ‘Toward the end of the Second World War, U.S. Air Force flyers patrolling the German skies would encounter a number of strange aerial phenomena in the area between Hagenau in Alsace-Lorraine and Neustadt an der Weinstrasse in the Rhine Valley. Similar to modern reports of UFOs or so-called “flying saucers,” these objects would come to be referred to as “Foo Fighters” (“Foo” being slang for the French feu, fire).’ In 2009 he told me simply, ‘I wanted to call it Foo Fighters because I didn’t want people to know it was me.’

  In his bid to create music anonymously, making multiple copies of the Foo Fighters demo Grohl would later acknowledge as being his ‘first mistake’. His second? ‘My blind generosity,’ he said. ‘That fucking tape spread like the Ebola virus, leaving me with an answering machine full of record company jive.’

  Originally Dave distributed his Foo Fighters demo to a select group of friends, including Chris Novoselic, former Nirvana tour manager Alex MacLeod, Gary Gersh and Mark Kates. Another recipient of the tape was Kurt Cobain’s guitar tech (and later Grohl’s own guitar tech) Ernie Bailey, who tells a lovely story about receiving the demo in Taking Punk to the Masses.

  ‘At one point Dave phoned me and said that he had this demo tape, y’know, that he wanted me to hear,’ Bailey recalled. ‘I remember feeling awkward about that, y’know, it’s really tough when friends present you with their demo tape. So he said he was going to swing by. I remember him ringing the doorbell. I think I told him on the phone, “If I’m not here, just pop it through the mailbox,” and so I waited for him to pop it through the mailbox and then after he drove off I went and got it and listened to it. And I wanted to phone him straight away and say, “Hey, this is really good!”’

  Another impressed Seattle music scene luminary was Eddie Vedder. So impressed was Vedder, in fact, that on 8 January 1995 Pearl Jam’s frontman gave the world its first listen to Foo Fighters: in the third quarter of his four-hour DIY ‘Self Pollution Radio’ show Vedder aired the tracks ‘Gas Chamber’ – a cover of the opening track on Back to Samoa, the Angry Samoans album Grohl had picked up at lacrosse camp a decade previously – and ‘Exhausted’. Speaking on air about the music, Vedder introduced the songs thus: ‘This is a rare opportunity to play this stuff to you. It’s two songs by Dave Grohl. As far as I know he’s played everything on these songs, he’s playing all the instruments, and he played it to me a while back … We ended up recording a song or two with Mike Watt … I’m just going to let these songs fly … They’re real good.’

  Word of this most underground of musical projects was slowly bubbling its way to the surface. At the tail end of 1994 Kerrang! was able to exclusively reveal that Dave Grohl’s latest excursion would be known as Foo Fighters, with the magazine stating that the former Nirvana drummer would henceforth be singing and playing guitar. A ‘music industry source’ was quoted as claiming the Foos to be ‘a great band in their own right’.

  In truth, at the time the story ran, in early December, Foo Fighters could not yet be legitimately referred to as a ‘band’. For while the songs of Foo Fighters existed on a cassette tape, now swirling around the underground as second- and third-generation copies, much like the tapes dedicated to thrash metal and hardcore punk bands traded by Grohl a decade or more earlier, as late as December 1994 Foo Fighters as a band did not exist. In a recording studio it was possible for Grohl to play each of the instruments heard on his tape; live it was not. If its creator wished to take Foo Fighters beyond the realms of recorded music, and into the great wide open, he needed a band.

  And so, without fuss or fanfare, he went out looking for one.

  The first, or at least second, part of Foo Fighters’ puzzle came in the form of 26-year-old bassist Nate Mendel. Born and raised in Richland, WA, on the eastern side of the Cascade mountain range, a locale he later described as ‘a weird place to grow up’, the thoughtful, laid-back Mendel was introduced to punk rock at age 14: if finding punk rock records in eastern Washington was a struggle, finding any semblance of a ‘scene’ was even tougher.

  ‘I played in a punk band called Diddly Squat, and we were out in the middle of the desert, on the other side of the mountains from Seattle,’ the bassist told me in 2009. ‘There was a developed punk rock scene and an infrastructure in the bigger cities, but where I lived there wasn’t any of that. So I took it upon myself to find places where we could play. There was a place called The Hoedown Center and I’d ring up and ask to play a little music show, and I’d bring in bands from out of town. There was no place to go and no bands to see so we just made it happen on our own.’

  ‘Maximumrocknroll was the New York Times of the punk rock scene. So you’d get your name in there, and when it came time for bands to book tours they might see that you booked shows and give you a call. It was a great way to experience music growing up. No one had any money or a place to stay, so, like, bands would stay at my house. I’d wake up in the morning and Fat Mike from NOFX would be gett
ing served pancakes by my mom.’

  One Mendel-booked show, on 24 October 1987, saw Diddly Squat open for DC hardcore legends Scream. It was then that Mendel first met his future musical collaborator Dave Grohl.

  ‘I remember very little about that show,’ the bassist admitted to me, ‘but I must have shook Dave’s hand at the very least. I can’t remember being impressed by his playing, but then at the time I wasn’t a musician guy paying attention to the ability of different musicians, I just wanted to dance around and slam-dance and just go nuts.’

  The following year, Mendel relocated to Seattle. Here he spread his wings musically, playing with a reformed version of DC punks Christ on a Crutch, while also jamming with teenage guitarist Greg Anderson in Galleon’s Lap and the straight edge band Brotherhood. Christ on a Crutch contributed one track (‘Off Target’) to the 1989 Dischord compilation State of the Union and released a handful of independent singles locally before falling apart in 1993; Mendel then fell in with another local outfit, the fabulously named Chewbacca Kaboom, where he struck up an instant friendship with livewire drummer William Goldsmith.

  Born in Seattle in 1972, the affable, outgoing Goldsmith had first started messing around on the drums as a pre-pubescent fifth grader. A freestyle player too inattentive to focus on the sheet music handed out by his school’s music teacher, the teenager received many a detention for cluttering his playing on the school’s drumkit with rolls and fills. His elder brother later introduced him to Led Zeppelin, The Who and the worlds of punk, New Wave and classic rock. ‘All I wanted to do,’ said Goldsmith, ‘was be Keith Moon, with the kick drum foot of John Bonham.’

  Soon enough, Chewbacca Kaboom morphed into Sunny Day Real Estate, a less ‘hardcore’, but more dextrous and emotional outfit, fronted by songwriter Jeremy Enigk. The group’s 1994 début album, Diary, released on Sub Pop, received substantial underground acclaim: at one point it was the second biggest selling album in Sub Pop’s catalogue, second only to Nirvana’s Bleach. Intense and impassioned, the album has since been recognised as one of the releases that laid down the blueprint for the punk rock subculture dubbed ‘emo’, a resurrection of the word first applied to bands such as Rites of Spring and Embrace during DC’s Revolution Summer. In common with their spiritual DC forefathers, Sunny Day Real Estate were not long for this world, things heading south for the group when their frontman ‘found’ Jesus and suggested to his bandmates that Sunny Day Real Estate’s music should henceforth follow a Christian path. Nate Mendel’s reaction to Jeremy Enigk’s proposition was distinctly un-Christian: ‘I wanted to fucking murder him,’ said the bass player.

  Around the same time, Mendel met Dave Grohl for a second time at a Sunny Day Real Estate concert in Seattle. On seeing the drummer backstage, the bassist remembers saying, perhaps to himself, ‘Hey, it’s that guy from Nirvana.’

  ‘I’d never really met someone in a famous band before,’ he told me in 2002. ‘But he seemed cool and friendly, and I knew because of his DC hardcore roots he’d probably be okay … I guess those first impressions were pretty accurate.’

  It just so happened that Jennifer Youngblood was a friend of Nate Mendel’s girlfriend, a connection that led to the bassist being invited to chez Grohl for Thanksgiving dinner in November 1994. The host declined to tell his guest that he believed his Shoreline dwelling to be haunted. After the meal, the party sat down to a session at an ouija board, a session that drew the attentions of an ‘uninvited guest’ that displayed its displeasure to the others in the room by banging on the dining room table. Grohl recalls that the bassist ‘freaked out’; Mendel’s reaction is unprintable.

  The following month, Sunny Day Real Estate themselves gave up the ghost. At the end of a month-long tour with Dischord prog-punks Shudder to Think and New Yorkers Soul Coughing, the quartet bowed out with a show at the Black Cat in Washington DC on 16 December 1994. At the climax of the band’s set, Enigk turned his back on the audience and, to his bandmates’ visible disgust, started quietly praying.

  ‘This was exactly the big, huge rift that made everybody feel so uncomfortable,’ Soul Coughing frontman Michael Doughty later told Magnet magazine. ‘Nate just threw his hands up, put his bass down and left the stage. Dan [Hoerner, SDRE guitarist] just started drowning everything in feedback. The club got so hot they’d opened a door behind the stage, and Willie, who had worked so hard during the show – as the cold air poured in, steam is pouring off his body. He was so pissed off, just venting this incredible rage, staring at Jeremy, the steam exploding off him.’

  As chance would have it, Dave Grohl had caught the quartet’s final hometown show just weeks previously. It was then that he realised that he might not need to cast too far from his own home for a rhythm section for his new band.

  ‘Around that time my friend Tracey said, “Have you heard of Sunny Day Real Estate?”’ Grohl told me. ‘And I’d heard of them but not heard them yet. When I mentioned them to Barrett he said, “Yeah, they sound like they’re from DC.” So then Tracey said, “They’re playing their last show tomorrow night,” so I went down to see them. And I watched Will and thought, “Shit, if that guy’s not gonna be in a band tomorrow, he’s gonna be in my band tomorrow.”’

  On 16 December, Grohl left a message for Goldsmith at the Black Cat, a club he actually co-owned, asking the drummer to call him.

  ‘I called him back,’ Goldsmith remembered four years later, ‘and he said, “So your band’s in the shitter, huh?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Well, do you and Nate want to do a band with me and Pat [Smear]?” And I said, “Sure, I guess.”’

  Since Kurt Cobain’s death, Pat Smear had been living the life of a virtual recluse, sitting at home in Los Angeles smoking cigarettes and channel surfing through whatever television programmes happened to be airing that day. ‘After you’ve been in the coolest band ever, what do you do?’ he later pondered, not unreasonably. While in Los Angeles on posthumous Nirvana business, Grohl dropped his demo tape off at Smear’s house, hoping that the guitarist would like it. As it turned out, Smear’s enthusiasm for what he heard stretched further than mere approval.

  ‘I listened to the tape while he was gone and I was just blown away,’ Smear told me in 2009. ‘I thought, “Oh shit, this is so great, I want to do this.” And so about an hour after listening to the tape I walked down to the club where Dave was hanging out and said, “I love it, I wanna be in your band.”’

  ‘I knew that the band would need two guitars, but didn’t think that Pat would want to commit to anything,’ Grohl admitted in 1995. ‘To my surprise, not only did he like the tape, he expressed interest in joining up.’

  Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters were now officially a band.

  From the moment that Eddie Vedder premiered Foo Fighters on ‘Self Pollution Radio’, major label A&R men began calling Grohl at home. Grohl had dealt with the corporate record industry before with Nirvana, of course, but now he was no longer ‘just the drummer’, happy to sit on the sidelines while deals were struck: with Foo Fighters, even after the recruitment of Smear, Mendel and Goldsmith, he was effectively ‘The Band’. Two years previously, in a brilliant, if typically controversial, essay titled ‘The Problem with Music’, Steve Albini had laid bare the machinations of the major label world, exposing the myriad ways in which seemingly lucrative record contracts could come back to haunt artists; his article calmly concluded, ‘Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.’ It was an essay that resonated throughout the underground rock community, and one Grohl could not have failed to notice. Somewhat spooked by the deluge of messages cluttering up his answering machine, in the opening days of 1995 Grohl turned to John Silva for advice. The wily music business veteran suggested that the drummer speak with his lawyer Jill Berliner before contacting anyone else. And Berliner gave Grohl the same advice that Phil Spector had passed on to Andrew Loog Oldham when the Londoner was shopping around Rolling Stones demos to major record labels in 1963.

  ‘I got on th
e phone with Jill Berliner, who’s a fucking amazing woman,’ Grohl told me, ‘and she said, “Here’s what you do: you start your own record company – you own the record, you put it out and you just distribute it through a record company.”’

  Before one could say ‘Fuck the Man!’, and before the advent of his 26th birthday, the young musician who created Foo Fighters had also formed his own record company on which to release his music. The company was named Roswell Records, after the secret location in New Mexico that housed the supposed wreckage of alien spacecraft discovered by the United States government. And in true independent, even socialistic, style, with one fell swoop, and for the first time in his professional life, Dave Grohl claimed ownership of the means of production, and became master of his own destiny.

  ‘Every single thing that Foo Fighters have ever done, I own – the entire catalogue,’ he said, explaining the mechanics of the situation to me in 2009. ‘I license it to the record company and say, “You can have it for six years; after six years you have to give it back. And if you want to keep it some more, then you have to fucking pay.” So ultimately, every two years, another one of the albums is up for renegotiation; so the idea is to have your catalogue behind you every two years. I only sign for one- or two-album deals – I’m not locked into ten-album deals – so every time it’s time to sign a new deal …