This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  By comparison, Grohl’s original soundtrack for Touch – a quirky, pitch-black comedy/thriller starring Christopher Walken, Skeet Ulrich and Bridget Fonda and adapted by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver / American Gigolo) from an Elmore Leonard novel – is a likeable, laid-back and rather charming affair. Recorded at Robert Lang Studios in the summer of 1996, just days after Foo Fighters closed out their inaugural world tour at the Phoenix Festival in the picturesque English village of Stratford-upon-Avon, the thirteen-track collection afforded Grohl the opportunity to stretch and experiment. Only one song, the fizzing, perky ‘How Do You Do’, resembles Foo Fighters; elsewhere Grohl marries Californian surf music with DC hardcore dynamics (on the staccato Dick Dale-meets-Fugazi instrumental ‘Bill Hill Theme’) indulges in lazy back-porch country blues (‘Making Popcorn’, ‘Remission My Ass’) and throws down some slinky, white-boy funk on the noir grooves of ‘Outrage’. John Doe, the frontman of seminal LA punks X, provides vocals on the down-home country ’n’ western shimmer of ‘This Loving Thing (Lynn’s Song)’, but his guest spot is rather eclipsed by Veruca Salt vocalist Louise Post’s sensuous, smoky turn on the gorgeous, drifting ‘Saints in Love’ and the dreamy duet ‘Touch’, a sweet, mesmerising ballad given an extra frisson by rumours that Grohl and Post were conducting an illicit affair at the time. Asked about his reported relationship with Post in the summer of 1997, Grohl simply said, ‘That’s a big no-no. Next question’: that September, during Veruca Salt’s first Australian tour, Post announced from the stage of St Kilda’s Prince of Wales hotel that Grohl had just broken up with her and had started dating actress Winona Ryder.

  Kerrang! was one of the very few magazines to review Music from the Motion Picture Touch. Writer James Sherry noted, ‘Not only is Touch a great album, it’s also a major personal achievement for Dave Grohl and a valuable insight into what he may turn his musical hand to once he’s tired of touring in a rock ’n’ roll band. The future should be interesting.’

  Grohl’s own assessment of his first foray into the soundtrack world was typically modest: ‘I had no idea what I was doing and I faked it and it worked,’ he said. ‘It’s important to break out from behind the dunce throne they call the drum set and do things that are challenging.’

  With William Goldsmith’s exit from Foo Fighters, Grohl now faced the task of finding someone to occupy the ‘dunce throne’ in his own band. Enter Taylor Hawkins.

  An engaging mix of Californian pothead and lithesome all-American surfer dude, Oliver Taylor Hawkins was born in Fort Worth, Texas on 17 February 1972. Growing up in Laguna Beach, California, Hawkins was given his early musical education by his older brother Jason, who introduced him to FM radio staples such as Boston, The Eagles and Aerosmith, but it was two idiosyncratic English bands, Queen and The Police, who first truly captured his imagination. Like Dave Grohl, Hawkins started out playing guitar, but inspired by the flailing energy of Queen’s drummer Roger Taylor and The Police’s Stewart Copeland, soon enough he switched his affections to drums. At the age of 10, in his next-door neighbour Kent Kleater’s Laguna Beach garage, Hawkins sat behind a drum kit for the first time; within weeks he was able to play along to Queen’s News of the World album. ‘And then,’ he admitted in 2005, ‘my life became drums, drums, drums.’

  Hawkins’s first ‘serious’ band was Sylvia, an experimental, psychedelic rock group featuring vocalist/guitarist Riz Story, guitarist Sean Murphy and bassist Jauno. The drummer later remembered the band as ‘awful’; Story and Murphy would go on to enjoy moderate success in the rock band Anyone. In the summer of 1994 Hawkins turned to session work, landing a gig with the British-born, Montreal-raised singer Sass Jordan; the following year he jumped ship to another Canadian singer/songwriter, 21-year-old Alanis Morissette, who had just released her third studio album Jagged Little Pill. By October 1995 Hawkins’s new boss was the world’s most talked-about new artist, with a Billboard Number 1 album: Jagged Little Pill would go on to sell a staggering 33 million copies worldwide.

  Grohl and Hawkins met for the first time on 17 December 1995 at a KROQ Almost Acoustic show at Los Angeles’ Universal Amphitheater, where Foo Fighters shared a billing with Morissette, Sonic Youth, Radiohead and Butch Vig’s Garbage. A fan of both Nirvana and Foo Fighters, Hawkins relished the opportunity to bro down with Grohl, a drummer whose style, power and touch he greatly admired. For Grohl, meeting the easy-going, live-wire Hawkins for the first time was like staring into a mirror. ‘We got along like brothers from the second we met,’ he recalls. ‘We were best friends from that instant.’

  ‘I was just this little dork playing in Alanis’s back-up band and the first thing that struck me was that Dave was really nice, and really fun to hang out with,’ Hawkins told me in 2009. ‘I’d met some other people from big bands, musicians that I’d looked up to, and when I met them the vibe was, “Oh, you’re not important,” but I walked away from Dave thinking he was a cool guy. I had so much respect for him mainly because of that first record, which I really loved and still do. And it was just an instant rapport, like, “Oh my God, you’re so much like me!”’

  In summer 1996 Foo Fighters and Alanis Morissette had occasion to play several European festivals together, giving Grohl and Hawkins the opportunity to bond further over hard liquor and hard rock. In spring 1997, when Grohl phoned to ask if Hawkins knew of any good drummers looking for a new gig, Hawkins’s response was immediate.

  ‘He said, “Fuck yeah! I’ll do it,”’ Grohl recalls. ‘I reminded him that we weren’t selling out stadiums like Alanis and he said, “I don’t care, man, I just want to be in a fucking rock band.”’

  Hawkins made his début with Foo Fighters on 19 April 1997 at a secret club gig at the Alligator Lounge in Santa Monica, California. The show passed smoothly enough, but the preceding week had not been without its stresses: on the first day Hawkins showed up to rehearsals, guitarist Pat Smear announced his intention to quit the band.

  ‘We had a European tour booked,’ recalls Grohl, ‘and on the first day of rehearsals Pat said, “Hey guys, can I talk to you?” And he very calmly and politely says, “You know what? I’m gonna leave the band.You guys should be a three piece.” And we were like, “Pat! What the fuck, dude? We leave in ten days! What do you mean?” and he said, “I’m sick of touring. I don’t want to go on tour any more.”’

  ‘I just remember I was just sick of it,’ Smear told me. ‘From the minute we started it was just non-stop and I think I’m just lazier than the rest of them! It was crazy the amount of things we did in a year. I just got burnt: we came on so strong for so long and I just wanted it to stop.’

  ‘The most touring Pat had ever done before Nirvana was I think maybe … none,’ says Grohl. ‘So that first record really freaked him out a lot. And then there were some … personal things. But honestly I was on my knees fucking crying, begging him to stay, I really was. But he just said, “No, I don’t want to, I don’t want to.”

  ‘Everyone was kinda mixed up and crazy at the time. I was sleeping in Pete Stahl’s back room and because my life was fucking going down the toilet I would sit at night in my sleeping bag in the back room of Pete’s house and I had a journal for when I was writing lyrics and just keeping a journal, and I would list out all of my problems, like – “1. Homeless. 2. Divorced. 3. No access to a bank account. 4. I’m sleeping in a sleeping bag! 5. Pat quit the band. 6. William quit the band …” Because if I thought of all those things at once I surely would have had a complete nervous breakdown. So I would list them and think, “Okay, well, let me try to figure out each one of these things by going down the list.” Like, “Homeless … I really need to find somewhere,” you know what I mean. It was not a good time. My ex-wife was mixed up in it and she was not being cool at all. I was just trying to stay the fuck out of everybody’s way, just to finish what I’d started.’

  The stresses involved in the breakdown of Grohl’s marriage led the singer to see a therapist for the second time in his life. Unlike the sessions h
e had endured as a wayward teenager, as an adult Grohl found the experience positive and rewarding: ‘Everyone could do with a little therapy now and again,’ he later told me.

  ‘The best thing about therapy is reassurance,’ he said, ‘having someone talk back and give you a response that makes you feel like you’re not alone, and that what you’re going through is understandable. Therapists may have a better understanding of human nature than your best friend who deals pot and works in a gas station.

  ‘But I had a bad experience with a therapist once where he basically told me that because I tour and live in hotel rooms and don’t have a “normal” job my life is just not reality. And I thought it was time to get the fuck off the couch, because this is my reality.

  ‘I’m not opposed to having therapy again,’ Grohl added at the time (indeed he would later revisit therapy on several occasions when life seemed ‘overwhelming’), ‘but that time it was like, “If you don’t understand my world that’s fine, but don’t tell me it doesn’t exist.”’

  Despite the trauma and instability of both his private and professional life, Grohl hid his problems from the public gaze. Having secured a promise from Smear that the guitarist would remain by his side until a suitable replacement could be found, on 2 May 1997 Grohl was back in London, performing ‘Monkey Wrench’ on Channel 4’s Friday night entertainment show TFI Friday, with his trademark beaming smile fixed firmly on his face. As Foo Fighters hit the promotional trail for the release of their second album, to the outside world at least, Grohl appeared ready to take on the world.

  The Colour and the Shape was released on 20 May 1997, to somewhat mixed reviews. Cutting-edge electronica, as supplied by The Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, was now the flavour of the month among music critics, and rock bands touting glossy, shiny rock anthems aimed squarely at the mainstream were considered decidely déclassé. Jessica Hopper’s review of the album in Spin encapsulated the patronising tone of many of the initial notices received by The Colour and the Shape: in her six out of ten critique, Hopper pegged Grohl as ‘a simple rock guy in a simple rock band who occasionally manages to write some really good songs’.

  ‘He’ll probably never come up with a godhead masterpiece,’ Hopper concluded, ‘but then again, he already played drums on one.’

  Rolling Stone too referenced Nirvana in their review, noting that Foo Fighters’ eponymous début album had been ‘hungrily received by a nation of Nirvana fans looking for a substitute’. For writer Christina Kelly, the second Foo’s album was ‘over-produced’, with a ‘big, radio-ready, modern rock sound’: ‘Screaming can get boring,’ Kelly noted tartly, ‘but it’s what Grohl does best.’

  Many of the album’s UK reviews were equally ambivalent. ‘At it’s worst,’ wrote Select, ‘[the album] puts remarkably little distance between Foo Fighters and any run-of-the-mill band with tattoos, big shorts, bleached hair and a bug up their ass.’ ‘There is a touch of desperation about the album,’ wrote Andy Gill in the Independent, ‘as if Dave Grohl and his cronies realise that there’s not that much mileage left in this kind of lumpen, overwrought American rock.’

  In May 1997 I reviewed The Colour and the Shape for Kerrang! magazine. Awarding the album a maximum 5K rating, I celebrated it as ‘one of the most captivating and sublime collections of songs you’ll hear this year.’ Fourteen years on I stand by those words.

  The album can be read as a quest, one lost soul’s attempt to make sense of a world crumbling beneath his feet. It opens with Grohl whispering, ‘In all of the time that we’ve shared I’ve never been so scared’ (‘Doll’), then descends into the noisy rush of ‘Monkey Wrench’, a song dealing with the exhilaration that comes with overcoming feelings of entrapment, claustrophobia and suffocation. The track concludes with Grohl singing, ‘I was always caged and now I’m free,’ and from this point on the album is in freefall, as the singer tries to take stock of his changing world. There are songs about love and obsession (‘Everlong’, ‘Up in Arms’), about insecurity and betrayal (‘Walking After You’, ‘February Stars’) and about childhood dreams and adult responsibilities (‘Hey Johnny Park’, ‘My Hero’). Throughout Grohl flits between rage and reconciliation, but the album closes (on ‘New Way Home’) on a positive note, with the newly empowered, emancipated singer screaming ‘I’m not scared’ as he faces up to an uncertain future.

  An artistic triumph, The Colour and the Shape was also a confirmed commercial success. The album reached number 10 on the Billboard 200 and peaked at number 3 in the UK; the album also reached the Top Ten in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Looking back, Gil Norton hails the album as ‘a big, bold statement’.

  ‘It really elevated Dave to where he should be,’ says the producer. ‘It helped established Foo Fighters as a new band and gave Dave the platform to go on to do what he’s done. I’m proud of what we achieved.’

  Following a homecoming show of sorts in the parking lot of Tower Records in Rockville, Maryland, Grohl took his new-look Foo Fighters out on the road. Following a UK theatre tour, the band embarked upon a small-scale American club tour, then hit the global festival circuit, appearing at Japan’s FujiRock festival, Germany’s Bizarre Festival, Lowlands in Holland, Pukkelpop in Belgium, England’s V97 festival and Ireland’s Feile. The shows were strong and, despite the clock ticking on Pat Smear’s tenure in the band, morale was high, due in no small part to the effervescent Hawkins. ‘I think I helped bring Dave out of his shell a bit,’ says the drummer. ‘We were young bachelors at the time and I remember saying to Dave, “Hey man, you were the fucking drummer in Nirvana, get rid of your punk rock ethos and let’s go find some chicks!” On a personal level it was easy to fit in.’

  On 29 August, at the start of Labor Day weekend, the quartet returned to Seattle to play the 27th annual Bumbershoot Festival at the city’s Memorial Stadium. It would prove to be an emotional, historic night.

  Opening his band’s set with ‘This Is a Call’, Grohl told the 75,000 strong crowd that Foo Fighters were now ‘officially associated with stadium rock!’The quartet then tore through a fifteen-song set, climaxing with ‘New Way Home’, with Seattle’s adopted son drawing huge, appreciative cheers as he sang of driving to his Shoreline home past ‘the boats and the King Dome’. Those cheers were just fading when Krist Novoselic walked onstage holding his bass guitar. With Grohl on drums and Pat Smear on vocals, the trio launched into covers of ‘Purple Rain’ by Prince and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Communication Breakdown’. The final song carried a certain amount of irony, for unbeknown to the crowd this would be Pat Smear’s last full show with Foo Fighters for nine years.

  ‘When he left I was kinda happy to see him go, to be honest,’ recalls Grohl. ‘In those few months shit went really south with Pat and I, it was not a good few months. And it took a while for Pat and I to talk again – I don’t know how long, it was a few years. He had finally got the paperwork [confirming] that he was officially out of Foo Fighters and he sent me a very sweet letter that said, “I’m sorry that it all went down that way, and whether you like it or not we’ll forever be connected by these things, Foo Fighters and Nirvana, and I love you and I hope you’re doing well. And here’s my phone number …” And I immediately called him because I missed him so much. He answered the phone and I think for the first five minutes we just laughed, we didn’t even say anything, we were just laughing at the absurdity of it all. And now he’s back in the fucking band again!’

  On 4 September 1997 Pat Smear officially announced his (initial) retirement from Foo Fighters. He did so in the most public way imaginable. The quartet were booked to play outdoors on the balcony of New York’s iconic Radio City Music Hall for MTV’s Video Music Awards; after a storming run through ‘Monkey Wrench’, Smear stepped up to the mic and declared that he was leaving the group.

  ‘The last song we played was my last song with the band,’ he said. ‘I’d like to introduce you to Franz Stahl, who’ll be taking over. Rock on, guys!’

  Franz Stahl
had been tipped off by his brother Pete that he might get a call about joining Foo Fighters. While his older brother was tour managing Dave Grohl’s band, Franz Stahl was in Japan, playing guitar with Jun ‘J’ Osone, bassist of the hugely successful J-Rock band Luna Sea, then just striking out as a solo artist. When the call from Grohl came, Stahl immediately accepted his old friend’s invitation to join the band. On 3 September the guitarist bade farewell to his Japanese friends and flew from Tokyo to Los Angeles and then on to New York to meet up with his new bandmates; the following day, as his father and brother looked on from the street, he was playing ‘Everlong’ in front of a TV audience numbering tens of millions. ‘It was crazy,’ says Stahl, ‘but I couldn’t have been more happy.’

  ‘When Pat decided to leave I knew we should ask Franz [to join],’ Grohl told me. ‘I’d been in a band with him before, and we’d grown up playing music together and I knew he was a great player and we came from the same place: how could it not work?’

  There was precious little time for Stahl to adjust to his new surroundings: two weeks after he joined Foo Fighters, the band kicked off a six-week American tour at the Huntridge Theatre in Las Vegas. Kerrang!’s Lisa Johnson, a long-time friend of the group, was invited along to rehearsals to see how the new boy was settling in. She found the band, and their new guitarist, in ebullient spirits.

  ‘Had Franz not been in Wool at the time, he would’ve been Foo Fighters guitar player when we started the band,’ Dave Grohl disclosed. ‘But he was, and Pat’s awesome and he was a friend, so …’