This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘The best part is that no one ever tells us what to do,’ he said with a smile. ‘No one has ever told us who to record with, where to record, how to make a video, what video to do, when to go on tour. Because I am the President of Roswell Records, at the end of the day I’m in charge.’

  Grohl was now starting a whole new game, and at square one. Soon enough it was time to unveil his new band. Foo Fighters’ first live appearance was at a Seattle keg party: ‘It wasn’t too bad. But it kind of was,’ Grohl later recalled. The band’s first show in a regular club – at the Jambalaya Club in Arcata, California, on 23 February 1995 – came as a support act for the Unseen, a group of sharp-dressed and musically astute teenagers. Prior to this show Grohl bought second-hand T-shirts from a local thrift store and, with the aid of a homemade stencil, spray-painted onto them the name of his band, a move which turned out to be almost as big a hit with the audience as the set itself. The following month Foo Fighters graduated to the status of headliners, with an appearance at the Satyricon Club in Portland, Oregon, the first major city one reaches when travelling south from Seattle. In the audience on the evening of 3 March was one Jerry A, the frontman with celebrated local hardcore punks Poison Idea. Writing of what he witnessed in the pages of Kerrang!, Jerry said that Grohl possessed ‘a well-developed singing voice which he put to good use with pleasant, heart-felt harmonies in a similar style to his former band, minus the hard edges’.

  ‘But compared to Kurt,’ he wrote, ‘Grohl has neither the charisma nor the entertaining stage presence.’

  The following day Foo Fighters headed north to Seattle to make their first headline appearance in their hometown. Appearing at the Velvet Elvis club, the group performed a nine-song set to an audience containing rather too many familiar faces, ensuring that the blue touchpaper remained unlit. Still, their display was convincing enough to draw a positive review from Kerrang! journalist Kevan Roberts. ‘It turns out that Dave Grohl’s been the best-kept secret in rock,’ he wrote.

  Really, though, this brief spate of appearances was merely the exhibition game that prepared the ground for the regular season to come. Following the release of Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, in the spring of 1995 Mike Watt was to embark on a solo tour of the United States. His original idea for his solo tour was to invite along Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder to be a part of his group – a proposal to which the pair gave their consent so long as each man could also perform in a supporting capacity prior to Watt’s own headline turn. Eddie Vedder would appear as a member of Hovercraft, the art-rock project he founded with his wife, Beth, while Grohl would take his Foo Fighters out on their first national excursion. And so it was that the most intriguing alternative tour of the year came to fruition.

  ‘I was shitting a pecan log about that tour, man,’ Mike Watt later told me. ‘With the Minutemen, D Boon [the group’s singer, now deceased] was like Kurt in that he pushed up the other two guys, so I was never really a background guy, but I was never the front guy either. So that was really scary for me. And I could see how it might be scary for Dave too. But it was cool. It was a tour like the old days. And I don’t think the guys wanted the hype, but it kinda got strange because with the hype there was so much attention on them.’

  Foo Fighters embarked on the tour in a manner in which the headliner would surely approve. They travelled not in a tour bus, but in a van; Nate Mendel read the American political journal Harpers while the band listened to Queen and the soundtrack album to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. From time to time William Goldsmith would employ his frontman’s camera in order to take pictures of his own genitalia. These were happy, uncomplicated times.

  ‘Dave had an amazing amount of enthusiasm, and a great attitude about what this band could be,’ said Mendel. ‘We approached everything with the idea that we’d make every show and everything we do an exciting adventure. And that’s what we concentrated on. There was no sitting down and making a ten-year plan. I wasn’t surprised that there was attention from the start. But the main challenge for us was to establish our own identity and not use Dave’s past as a crutch.’

  From the start the tour was a success, playing to packed rooms of between 400 and 800 people each night. Onstage each evening Dave Grohl looked out from his new vantage point at the front of the stage and saw before him an assortment of Nirvana shirts, a sight about which he was philosophical and even sanguine: by definition those gathered were familiar with the traditions of underground music the tour was seeking to uphold, and were both curious about and supportive of Dave Grohl’s latest venture. And while the frontman himself may have downplayed and in some cases even dismissed his abilities as a performer able to command attention from the centre of the stage, footage from this period shows a man the world viewed as being a drummer to be possessed of enough charm and charisma to project himself and his music to the back of the small rooms in which he found himself.

  ‘When I first started singing for Foo Fighters, never in my life had I ever considered becoming the front man of a band,’ Grohl would tell me some fifteen years later. ‘I was perfectly comfortable being the drummer and I didn’t ever aspire to being the person out front in the spotlight. But when Foo Fighters started I realised I’d been thrown into that position and it was incredibly uncomfortable for me: I might be something of a jackass in real life, and love to be the life of the party, but the responsibility of being someone larger than life seemed too much for me.

  ‘To me what makes a good front man is that the person I’m watching perform is entirely themselves, and not a character, not an act. I’ve always gravitated towards music and musicians that are real: I can appreciate a Bowie and a Marilyn Manson or a Gene Simmons or an Alice Cooper but there’s something about a Neil Young or a Paul McCartney or an Ian MacKaye that I relate to the most. I like the guys that become the show and become the entertainer and ringleader without having to put on a costume. That, to me, is pretty bad-ass. That’s like John Wayne shit right there.’

  Every journey begins with one step, and Foo Fighters’ tour with Mike Watt represented their own faltering baby steps on a journey that would eventually deliver them to the arenas of their home country and the stadia of England. But at some point at the end of each evening from 12 April to 20 May Grohl was able to return to his more familiar position behind the drumkit, keeping the beat for the tour’s headliner. He did so with his customary flair – Watt himself told me, ‘Dave was something else to play with. His sense of timing, his musicality was amazing’ – secure each night in the knowledge that his own band was gelling better than he could ever have hoped, and playing better than he could ever have dreamed.

  ‘All four of us in the band came from bands that had stopped prematurely so that first tour and everything that came along with it was almost like comfort food in a way for us,’ he told me fifteen years on. ‘We got a van and built a platform in the van and we went on tour with bands we liked and it wasn’t like a contrived grab at bringing back the good old days, it was just where we felt most comfortable. And it was nice that way, because we functioned like a band and we played like a band, and it was fucking great. But I didn’t do it to forget about everything that had happened before: I did it because I wasn’t finished. There was more to do.’

  When the Foos’ tour with Watt drew to a close in San Diego on 20 May, the band were given two weeks to prepare for their début appearance on foreign soil, at the tiny King’s College student union hall in London on 3 June.

  The gig drew rave reviews from those in attendance. But, really, for those paying attention the advent of the summer was not so much about appearances in small clubs in large cities as about the forthcoming début album from the band in question. Two months earlier, in April, Ker rang! had been played each of the fifteen songs that comprised Grohl’s demo tape recorded the previous year with Barrett Jones, and had judged the music to be ‘awesome’. By July, shorn of three songs – ‘Winnebago’ and ‘Podunk’ would be used as future B-sides, while
the rather excellent ‘Butterflies’ would remain to this day unreleased – Foo Fighters’ eponymous first album was ready to drop.

  Released on Dave Grohl’s own Roswell Records, distributed by Capitol Records and featuring artwork by Jennifer Youngblood, Foo Fighters was released to the world on 4 July 1995, perhaps tellingly a date known to Americans as Independence Day. Advance press was warm and supportive. Rolling Stone awarded the twelve-song set four stars, with the reviewer, Alec Foege, shrewdly observing that ‘Dave Grohl could turn out to be the ’90s punk equivalent of Tom Petty.’ Melody Maker hailed the album as a ‘play-loud Summer blast’ while its sister paper the NME countered that Dave Grohl’s band had recorded a set that was ‘massively important’, praise indeed from a magazine that viewed itself in much the same terms. Kerrang! awarded the album a maximum KKKKK rating, predicting that this was a collection that would ‘sell by the millions’. Q, as was its habit, was rather more sniffy. ‘Too much may be placed upon Foo Fighters, expectations which Grohl, never regarded as a songwriter or vocalist, hardly deserves or needs,’ wrote John Aizlewood. ‘These expectations may prove to be his undoing, but, just as likely right now, they may yet be his making. He’s done what he can.’

  Foo Fighters is a superb statement of intent. Early in 2011, discussing his approach to songwriting in Guitar World, Dave Grohl said this: ‘I approach every song trying to write the biggest chorus I possibly can. But then what I’ll do is use that as the prechorus and go ahead and write an even bigger fucking chorus.’ This formula runs right through Foo Fighters, most effectively on three brilliant singles – ‘This Is a Call’, ‘I’ll Stick Around’ and ‘Alone + Easy Target’ – which fuse The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Hüsker Dü and Trompe Le Monde-era Pixies into irresistible, fizzing distorto-pop gems. The last of the three shines with such incandescent brilliance that Kurt Cobain actually considered claiming it for Nirvana.

  ‘I recorded “Alone + Easy Target” at the tail end of 1991,’ Grohl told me. ‘Barrett and I were now living together, and I recorded songs like “Floaty” and “Alone + Easy Target” and maybe “For All the Cows” in our basement. I told Kurt that I was at home recording and he was staying in a hotel in Seattle at the time, as he was living in LA, and he said, “Oh, I wanna hear it, bring it by …” So I went over to his hotel and I played him “Alone + Easy Target”. He was sitting in the bathtub with a Walkman on, listening to the song, and when the tape ended he took the headphones off and kissed me and said, “Oh, finally, now I don’t have to be the only songwriter in the band!” And I said, “No, no, no, I think we’re doing just fine with your songs.” But it was funny, because Nirvana would play the “Alone + Easy Target” riff at soundcheck sometimes. I think he liked the chorus.’

  Cobain, of course, would not have the opportunity to hear the other two standout tracks on Foo Fighters as both ‘This Is a Call’ and ‘I’ll Stick Around’ were written after his death. The latter song is arguably the most controversial song on the record. Seeking references to Grohl’s painful recent history, fans and critics alike seized upon the song’s incendiary chorus – ‘I don’t owe you anything’ – and jumped to the erroneous conclusion that the track was about Nirvana’s late frontman, an interpretation which both embarrassed and irritated Grohl. In reality, with lyrics such as ‘How could it be I’m the only one who sees your rehearsed insanity?’, the song is about Courtney Love, though Grohl denied this for years. ‘I don’t think it’s any secret that “I’ll Stick Around” is about Courtney,’ he finally admitted to me in 2009. ‘I’ve denied it for fifteen years, but I’m finally coming out and saying it. Just read the fucking words!’

  ‘This Is a Call’, the album’s searing opening track, is harder to decipher. Written in a Dublin hotel room while Grohl and Jennifer Youngblood honeymooned in Ireland, the song’s verses contain unfathomable references to fingernails, Ritalin and acne medication Minocin, before exploding into a widescreen chorus – ‘This is a call to all my past resignations’ – which sounds suspiciously like a kiss-off to the drama of the Nirvana years.

  ‘I intentionally wrote nonsensical lyrics, because there was too much to say,’ Grohl told me. ‘I mean, with “This Is a Call” the verse is just bullshit, it’s nothing, I wrote it in a bathroom, but the chorus on the other hand means a lot to me. This was me finally saying goodbye to my past.’

  Elsewhere, though, Foo Fighters is clearly indebted to Grohl’s past, or rather to his teenage record collection. The breezy and beautiful ‘Big Me’ owes a debt to early R.E.M., the punk-ish ‘Wattershed’ – titled in tribute to Mike Watt’s role in setting Grohl back on his feet – could have been lifted from Back to Samoa, while ‘X-Static’ (which features a guitar cameo from Greg Dulli) nods towards the glistening dream-pop soundscapes of My Bloody Valentine. But it would be churlish to suggest that Foo Fighters is wholly in thrall to the ’80s: the warmth and wit of the lounge jazz-meets-hardcore fuzz live favourite ‘For All the Cows’ and the slow-burning, blissed-out drawl of ‘Exhausted’ display a new openness and experimental edge to Grohl’s songwriting which suggested he had both the chops and the chutzpah to stride away from familiar formulas and ghosts of the past.

  That said, however, in 1995, without exception, each reviewer of the début Foo Fighters collection contextualised the album by referencing Nirvana. This, perhaps, was inevitable. But when it came to discussing the songs on the album, their author proved unwilling to buy into the process. That journalists desired to ask questions regarding not only the music of Grohl’s previous band, but also its messy conclusion, was to be expected, but Foo Fighters’ frontman’s refusal to comment on such matters – for reasons that were probably as political as they were personal, at least in terms of attempting to position his new group as far away as possible from Kurt Cobain’s headstone – ran counter to the expectations and wishes of magazine editors.

  ‘I understand that people want to know this, but there has to be a line drawn,’ Grohl told Rolling Stone firmly. ‘Because the day after your friend dies and American Journal wants to talk to you and [ABC news anchor] Diane Sawyer wants to do an interview … It made me so fucking angry. It made me so angry that nothing was sacred anymore. No one could just stop, not even for a day or a year or the rest of our lives, and just shut the fuck up. So I decided that I was just going to be the person to shut the fuck up.’

  But while all over the world journalists’ heads were banging against a Dave Grohl-shaped brick wall, over their heads things were going swimmingly. In the UK, Foo Fighters débuted at number three in the national albums chart; in the US it entered the Billboard Top 200 at number 23. Beyond such bald statistics, more satisfying for Grohl was the idea that those who had bought Foo Fighters’ début album seemed to concentrate on what it was rather than it what is was not, and to accept the group on the terms its creator wished for – as a band in their own right, and not an adjunct of Nirvana.

  Evidence of this came late in the summer of 1995, in what would become one of the most famous stories in Foo Fighters’ file. The final weekend of August found the band at Reading festival, the site at which Nirvana had headlined to more than 70,000 people three years earlier. Perhaps wishing to avoid comparisons to this event – one that had quickly attained the status of great cultural significance – Dave Grohl decreed that Foo Fighters’ first appearance at the Berkshire site would be not on the main stage but rather in one of the marquee tents that lay on the fringes of the site. And so it was that on Saturday, 26 August, Grohl’s new band appeared in the wholly unsuitable confines of the Melody Maker tent, a facility designed to hold just a few thousand people but which, here, had attracted the attentions of tens of thousands of festival goers, all desiring their first glimpse of Foo Fighters. The set was witnessed by English music journalist Paul Travers, who remembers the occasion well.

  ‘Whoever decided – and it appears it was Dave Grohl’s idea – that a band with as much ready-rolled interest and anticipation as Foo Fighters should play one
of their first-ever UK shows in a smallish tent at Reading needed their head examined,’ he says. ‘Half an hour before they were even due in the tent and its surrounding environs were already jam-packed and it took some serious elbow work to get within sight of the stage. When they did arrive, the place exploded. The walls and ceiling became slicked with sweat and people were passing out from the heat. Others started shinning up the huge supporting pole in the middle of the tent and scrabbling up any climbable bit of structure around the sides. A few made it, to huge applause, to the rigging that started about 15 feet up the central pole and continued straight up to the ceiling. When the power was pulled and Dave announced that he’d just been told the show would be cut if people didn’t get down, it looked for a moment like things might go either way. Thankfully, the most prominent climbers did eventually descend into the waiting arms of security, the power was restored and a potential riot was averted.’

  But if Foo Fighters’ appearance at the Reading festival was the most remarkable live appearance the group made in support of their début album, it was far from the only one. In the time between the release of the band’s début and the final date of the tour to support that release, the Foos played no less than 151 concerts worldwide. While some of the dates were glamorous in terms of their profile – on 14 and 15 November 1995 Grohl fulfilled his October 1990 dream of playing on the stage of London’s Brixton Academy not once, but twice – other shows, such as that staged at Paris’s cosy Bataclan theatre, were bookings made by a band willing to work for their audience and earn their wings. This strategy worked, and worked well. Through perspiration as much as inspiration, Dave Grohl’s insistence that Foo Fighters were more than an excursion, and were in fact a band that were here to stay, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time the quartet returned home from the road more than twelve months after the release of Foo Fighters, they had to their credit almost two million album sales. Not bad work for a group Grohl feared would be viewed as nothing more than the folly of ‘that guy from Kurt Cobain’s band’.