‘And so then I told them I would help them find a new drummer. I said, “So what about [former Kyuss drummer] Brandt Bjork? Let’s get Brandt, man, fuck, that’d be amazing, the three of you together again? That would be unbelievable.” So I get on the phone with Brandt, and I say, “Dude, have you heard the stuff?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I’ve heard it, but …” I don’t remember how the conversation went, but he wasn’t into it. And then there’s this other drummer, [former Page & Plant sticksman] Michael Lee, so I’m like, “Josh, there’s this guy Michael Lee, you’re gonna freak out, he’s perfect, he’s fucking unbelievable, let me call him.” So I called up Michael Lee. And once Michael Lee was interested I thought, “Uh-oh, that guy is the most amazing drummer in the world, so maybe I should do one show with Queens of the Stone Age before Michael Lee does.” And so we set up a show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, and we started rehearsing for it.
‘At night I’d go rehearse in a closet with Queens and I’d be in the best band in the world. And then I’d come back to Foo Fighters studio and be totally dismayed by the apathy and lack of any sort of passion. So things started getting tense in the studio.’
With work on Foo Fighters’ forthcoming album understood to be nearing an end – and recording costs now sailing towards a cool one million dollars after two months in Alexandria and almost three months at Conway – in March 2002 the Foos invited the world’s press into their lair. Unaware of the tensions behind the scenes at Conway, RCA, the group’s record label, flew English journalist Ian Winwood to Los Angeles to write a cover feature previewing the album for the readers of Kerrang!
‘Even the most dysfunctional bands are loath to air their laundry in public, at least not at the time that it’s happening,’ says Winwood, reflecting back on the experience almost a decade on. ‘There’s also a tendency in journalists, especially journalists with less experience, which would have been me at the time, to want to believe the best of a given situation, especially with a band as likeable as Foo Fighters. So at first glance it seemed that everything at Conway Studios was just fine. Dave was commanding company, cracking jokes and telling everyone how he’d just spent many thousands of dollars on a gun-metal BMW M5. He also played a selection of new songs through the speakers in the studio’s console room. Looking back on the occasion, and knowing what I now know about what life in the camp was like at that time, it seems quite obvious to me that there were signs that all was not well, signs that I should really have picked up on.
‘I remember being with Taylor Hawkins in one of the rooms, and him asking me what I honestly thought of the songs that I’d just heard. It’s always difficult listening to new songs in the company of the people that wrote and recorded them – even if you really like the material you sound like a sycophant when you try and find a way of articulating this – but the truth is that Foo Fighters songs I’d been played hadn’t really made much of an impression on me at all, so I was more concerned with couching my answers in diplomatic terms without betraying myself or telling an outright lie. It seems obvious now that had I been listening properly to what I was being asked I would have sensed that the reason Taylor was asking me what I really thought of the songs was because Taylor himself wasn’t at all sure about them. No one in the band was.’
Winwood, though, didn’t know the half of it. As Grohl and Hawkins posed in Conway’s smart garden area, pulling faces for photographer Tony Wooliscroft, the pair’s expressions showed no trace of the argument that had taken place away from prying ears just moments before, an argument that had potentially taken Foo Fighters to the point of fracture.
‘I remember getting into a fight in the control room with the Kerrang! people outside,’ Grohl recalls. ‘It wasn’t even a fight, just people making little jabs and little comments here and there. And I said, “Okay, do you want me to go and tell those guys that we’re going to break up right fucking now? Because I will. We can if you want.” And then the room was kinda silent. We did our photo shoot and we did our stuff and then I played the show with Queens of the Stone Age.’
By all accounts, Dave Grohl’s live début with Queens of the Stone Age was a magical evening: Kerrang! later hailed it as ‘a classic, once in a lifetime show, one of those rare nights that seems to last forever and yet is over all too soon’. Billed as ‘An Evening of Communion and Fellowship’, it took place on 7 March 2002 at the Troubadour club at 9801 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. It was Dave Grohl’s first full live set behind a drum kit since Nirvana’s 1 March 1994 show in Germany.
The choice of venue also came steeped in history. Since opening its doors in 1957, the Troubadour has provided the setting for early performances by artists such as Elton John, Fleetwood Mac and Tom Waits; it was here, too, that the ‘hair metal’ scene brought to international prominence by Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses in the 1980s was incubated. With its black walls and claustrophobic interior the venue may rightly be described as a toilet, but it is a toilet with hundreds of famous signatures on its walls.
Dave Grohl saw many friends descend on the legendary Los Angeles club on the evening of 7 March. One notable comrade, however, was conspicuous by his absence: the man at whose hospital bedside he had sat for day after day the previous summer.
‘It was the first time I’d played a show on drums since Nirvana,’ says Grohl. ‘It was a big deal for me, it had been a long time. There were people in the audience I’d known for five or six years, close friends, that had never seen me play the drums before. It was a part of me that I hadn’t revisited in a long fucking time. And the one person who wasn’t there was Taylor. And that really hurt me. It was like him not turning up for my wedding or something.’
‘I can see why that would be hurtful,’ Taylor Hawkins admits. ‘The funny thing is Dave and I have never discussed this, but I can guess we can discuss it here. Now that we’ve all gone off and done other things it’s not as big of a deal, but at that time that was the first time any of us had gone off to do something else and the band was at a point where we were not really looking good. And to me, going to see Dave play with Queens would have almost been like going to see your girlfriend fuck some other dude. I know he wasn’t trying to hurt me, he was just out doing what he wanted to do and enjoying what he wanted to do, but I think if he gave it real thought to what was going on at the time with the band, he’d have to understand that him playing with someone else and us being at the point where our band was falling apart was a little hurtful to me.
‘It was a tough time, and I wasn’t really interested in going to see Dave play with another band when our band felt like we were breaking up. He’s never even said anything about this to me really, but I understand. While on one hand I was excited for Dave as a friend – as a friend I’m always excited for Dave playing with someone else and enjoying flexing his musical muscles – but on a band level, on our little family level, I was upset. I wasn’t exactly over the moon that Dave was enjoying his rise with Queens of the Stone Age, because to me that spelt out the end of this.’
‘Me and Dave get along the best,’ Hawkins once told me, ‘but we don’t get along the best either, do you know what I mean? Because we’re more like brothers. He can really hurt my feelings worse than anybody else. I’m not just talking about the music or whatever, he knows how to fucking make me feel like shit if he wants to. And I know how to fucking press his buttons too, I know where his weaknesses and insecurities are. And that can be a hard thing for us. He doesn’t like too many people to know too much about him.’
With communications in his own band at all-time low, on 24 April Grohl returned to the Troubadour for a second time with Homme and Oliveri. This time, joined by A Perfect Circle guitarist Jeordie White (formerly known as Marilyn Manson sidekick Twiggy Ramirez) the trio took to the stage as the cast of Oliveri’s side-band Mondo Generator. This too was a truly remarkable night, a gig I count myself fortunate to have seen. Officially Oliveri’s ragtag collective were playing in support to local punks Amen, but the
fact that a good 80 per cent of the paying audience filed back out into the muggy LA night air as soon as Mondo Generator finished their set told the real story of the evening.
For Grohl, the camaraderie, spontaneity and slightly unhinged nature of the gig brought his own band’s current malaise into perspective, too much fucking perspective as Spinal Tap once pithily observed. It was at this point that he decided that the desperate circumstances in which his band found itself required drastic actions as a means of, if not redemption, then at least stopping the rot. With his band having authored music that for the most part they did not care for, and certainly did not believe in, Grohl took the executive decision to take what had been recorded thus far and simply toss it in the bin. When one considers the notion of artistic integrity – or perhaps the concept of what it means to be ‘punk rock’ – the willingness of a band to put its money where its mouth is to the tune of something like one million dollars is a hard gambit to top.
‘I remember getting a promotional schedule for that album, looking at it and thinking, “Wait a minute, I don’t even like this music, how am I supposed to promote it? How can I tell anyone I’m proud of this when I’m just not?”’ the singer recalls. ‘And to be honest, the last thing in the world the band wanted to do was [for us] to be in the same room as each other. So I thought, “Fuck it, okay, I’m going to play with Queens of the Stone Age for a while, and if the other guys want to be in the band again, then we can be in the band. But right now nobody wants to be in the band.”
‘It’s nice to know that we always have that emergency switch, that we don’t have to be in this band, we don’t have to do anything that we’re doing,’ Grohl told me when the dust had settled. ‘We make commitments and we honour those commitments, but at any time we could always say, “Nah, fuck it, let’s stop.” And we know that, and it’s great. Honestly, I don’t feel obligated to anyone but the other guys in the band, and if the day comes where we all look at each other and say, “Nah, fuck it and fuck you,” it’ll be easy just to pull the switch. And that was about to happen then.’
In switching his attention from his own band to Queens of the Stone Age in 2002, Dave Grohl didn’t so much ‘pull the switch’ on Foo Fighters as press the ‘Alarm’ button.
‘My first thought was, “Man, I’m not even going to get to make a record with these guys? Are you kidding me?”’ says Chris Shiflett. ‘Bands are funny organisations: lines of communications tend to be pretty bad, but you tend to fumble your way through it. But when I heard we’d postponed the album it made me very nervous. Very nervous indeed.’
Temporarily released from the pressures of being bandleader for Foo Fighters, Grohl instead revelled in finding himself once more working in the engine room of a powerful rock band. To prepare for the tour the drummer worked out; on the road he guzzled Crowne Royale whisky, smoked cigarettes, drank coffee and ate pungent cheese as an alternative to the QOTSA-approved list of narcotics eulogised in their crowd favourite, ‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer’. Tiring of journalists continually enquiring as to the future of his own band, Grohl turned down most of the interview requests that came during the time of his busman’s holiday, all of which meant that he was free to do something that it seemed he’d been unable to do for some time – take pleasure in the simple act of making music.
‘Around the time I started playing drums with Queens I got these two red tribal symbols on my arms,’ he told me in 2009, rolling up his T-shirt sleeves to exhibit his tattoos. ‘At the time I didn’t think too much about it, but I think I had these tattoos done because I was getting my arms back. There’s a reason why I’m here, and it’s not my voice, it’s because these arms taught themselves how to play drums by listening to punk rock albums and Led Zeppelin. And so in a way it’s like I have these tattoos as a way to say, “Don’t forget what you’re here to do!”
‘When I joined Queens I think it’s the first time that I’ve ever felt truly confident and strong in a band. After doing that Troubadour show we walked offstage and [sometime QOTSA collaborator] Mark Lanegan said – and this was one of the few things that Mark Lanegan ever said to me – “You know, it’d be a shame just to do that only once.” So my decision was purely musical and motivational: I was now playing drums in the best band I’d ever been in.
‘Being in Queens was one of the greatest experiences of my life without question. If you can say that you were a member of Queens of the Stone Age that’s like wearing a patch on your chest that says “I am a badasss” for the rest of your life, because the only people that get to play in Queens of the Stone Age are badass motherfuckers, and that’s the truth.
‘Walking through the backstage area of a festival with Queens is like the moment in a Western where the saloon bar doors swing open and the piano player stops playing and everyone just stares. You have Josh, Lanegan, Oliveri and me walking in a straight line and it’s like being in the coolest gang. We never had a bad show, every show just got better and better.
‘Playing drums in Queens was like ESP – we barely talked about music, we just made it. It was like the perfect fuck – like fucking the hottest fucking porn star – something that memories and legends are made of. That precise musical connection is something you search for your whole life.’
It was, though, surely inevitable that Dave Grohl’s happy world of escapism with Queens of the Stone Age would soon enough come crashing against the realities that were his obligations as a Foo Fighter, both to his bandmates and to the music that they made together. Like a warning sign flashing on a motorway, the weekend of 27/28 April 2002 must surely have been present in his mind. This was the date of the annual Coachella Music & Arts Festival in Indio, California. The bill for the year in question included The Prodigy, The Strokes, Oasis and Bjork; also booked, albeit on separate days, were Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age.
It was during rehearsals for their appearance at Coachella that unspoken tensions and resentment in the Foo Fighters camp came noisily to the surface.
‘The whole band had a big blow-out,’ explains Grohl. ‘We were trying to write a set list and that turned into a petty, ridiculous little argument where then I thought, “Okay, I think this is probably going to be the last show.” But I didn’t say anything. We started rehearsing, but the vibe was so bad that Chris said, “Hey guys, maybe we should talk this out …” And then it just exploded.
‘There was finger pointing and yelling and, honestly, I thought that would be the last show. And it would be a good way to go.’
‘I was being an asshole,’ says Taylor Hawkins with disarming honesty, ‘so it was mainly Dave and I shouting. I felt that Dave was elsewhere at the time. We had a huge argument, but it did clear the air. That was when Dave let everyone know, “I’m leading this band.” The argument was kinda a bit like, “Don’t question me, everyone can have their opinion, that’s fine, but I’m the leader, I’m gonna have the final word, I’m gonna make the decisions and I’m gonna essentially write the songs.” So that’s when everyone went, “Okay, well, now I understand where we’re at, it’s Dave’s band and Dave’s ideas and if you don’t like it that’s okay, we can agree to disagree, but that’s the final word.” The dynamic changed a little bit then, but in a way it made things easier, it got rid of any lingering questions. Now we know who’s driving the ship. I’m not saying Dave’s a total control freak, because he’s not, he’s interested in everyone’s opinions and he wants everyone to enjoy what they’re doing, but at the same time if he feels strongly about something there’s not much to be discussed.’
In Dave Grohl’s mind, Foo Fighters’ Coachella performance on 28 April 2002 saved his band, “turned everything around”. It was a show that convinced him that Foo Fighters were a powerful, vital band in their own right, and a show that convinced Shiflett, Mendel and Hawkins that Grohl’s focus was unwavering.
Watching from the sidelines, Josh Homme was able to see the situation for what it was, rather than for what it appeared to be to its panic
ked combatants.
‘I always knew that Dave was going to go back to Foo Fighters, and I knew this was just a classic moment for us,’ he told me in 2009. ‘I was always trying to intimate that this wasn’t something the other guys needed to worry about, but that’s kinda impossible. Band people, and I mean this in a very blanket way, are very easily rattled: many bands don’t last and they’re such an unpredictable animal, so it’s easy to get your confidence rattled. Dave might even have had a moment or two wondering what he was going to do, but I knew. And what was great about that time was that Dave did go back, and that said that it’s possible to have a musical mistress. It would have been terrible if Dave had stayed in Queens, because it would have eliminated and killed the suggestion that you can do multiple things. In a rare moment it proved that having multiple personalities isn’t a bad thing for someone playing music. Once you feel you can do anything in music, that’s when you get closer to God …’
Never mind being closer to God, in spring 2002 Foo Fighters would have settled for being closer to completing their troublesome fourth album. Prior to taking the decision to consign the work recorded in Virginia and at Conway Studios to the bin, Grohl had played a selection of songs for former guitarist Pat Smear. The response from the usually positive guitarist was lukewarm at best.
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