But the brightest stone in Live Earth’s glistening cluster of diamonds could be found in London, albeit in a not particularly attractive part of the city. The suburban borough of Brent may be as far removed from the lights and landmarks of Westminster as Staten Island is from Times Square, but this rather grey neighbourhood was the home of the then brand new Wembley Stadium. The original venue, built in 1923, became the grand old lady of European stadia: the place where in 1966 England won football’s World Cup, the location of Bob Geldof ’s Live Aid spectacular and the setting for showcase football finals and concerts by iconic rock acts such as the Rolling Stones, Queen and U2. Rebuilt from the ground up in 2000, the second Wembley Stadium may have taken seven years to complete and cost more than a billion pounds, but with its 133 metre tall supporting arch and its inner bowl of 90,000 fire engine red seats, the second largest stadium in Europe could hardly have been more impressive.
The new Wembley Stadium branded itself, rather smugly, as ‘The Venue of Legends’. But on the first Saturday in July such a claim amounted to a good deal more than hubris. Gathered in North-West London on that bright day were some of the biggest and most storied names in popular music, artists such as Madonna, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Genesis, Metallica, Beastie Boys, Duran Duran and the mighty Spinal Tap. Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters sat among this stellar bill of performers who had never before publicly uttered a single word on the subject of climate change, and have been largely mute on the subject ever since. Opening the show, Genesis singer and drummer Phil Collins told the crowd that in plugging in their instruments his band had made the global warming problem worse, while Metallica frontman James Hetfield – whose band would headline Wembley Stadium the very next day, and who provided the stage on which Live Earth’s many acts performed – subsequently said of the occasion, ‘I really avoided talking to the press around the Live Earth day. I didn’t quite agree with what was going on there.’ Meanwhile, performing his open-air show in the grounds of the Tower of London on 7 July, one-time Dave Grohl collaborator Elvis Costello made a point of joking to his own crowd that a slight frog in his throat had been caused by ‘all the hot air coming from Wembley Stadium’.
When the performers playing at ‘The Venue of Legends’ received the running order for London’s Live Earth concert, a running order not announced in advance of the day itself, the Foos found themselves below only Madonna on the bill: Metallica were appearing in a teatime slot that the BBC, broadcasting the event live to homes across the United Kingdom, opted only to air in part. Two days previously, on 5 July, Foo Fighters had played a secret show at the tiny 500-capacity Dingwalls club in London’s Camden Town, an event attended by Queen drummer Roger Taylor. Grohl took the opportunity to ask Taylor what the new Wembley Stadium was like. ‘Too big,’ came the answer. ‘Fucking huge.’
‘And when someone from Queen says a place is too big,’ Grohl told me in 2010, ‘that means it’s really fucking big.’
As if the occasion wasn’t pressurised enough, on the evening of 7 July, as the sun was dipping below Wembley’s iconic arch and his charges were about to step onstage for their most high profile show ever, Foo Fighters’ manager John Silva approached Dave Grohl with a simple injunction.
‘Okay, I just need you to do one thing,’ he said. ‘I just need you to be better than Metallica.’
Grohl looked at his manager and thought, ‘Are you fucking insane? That’s impossible. That’s the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said to me in my entire life …’
But then again, maybe not. All day, a ‘kinda strange day’ as he remembers it, Dave Grohl had been watching the bands come and go on the Live Earth stage; he sensed from most of them a lack of any real connection between themselves and the 80,000 people gathered inside the stadium. And he made the decision that, in his own allotted stage time, Foo Fighters would go for the jugular.
The five songs that Grohl selected for Foo Fighters’ set were ‘All My Life’, ‘My Hero’, ‘Times Like These’, ‘Best of You’ and ‘Everlong’, each one a tried-and-trusted arena rock anthem. Inspired by his memories of Queen’s legendary set at Live Aid a generation earlier, his intention was to reach out to every single person gathered within the vast bowl, as well as those watching on television all over the world, not least on network television in the United States. And in doing this, and in doing it with considerable grace, charm and heart, the profile of Dave Grohl’s band changed. Foo Fighters went from a band who were known to hundreds of thousands of their own fans but remained something of a well-kept secret to the wider world, to being a truly mainstream concern. All in just 25 minutes’ work. In the week following their set, a two-year-old song, ‘Best of You’, appeared once more in the UK’s Top 40 singles chart on downloads alone.
‘I felt like I was being challenged by all of the bands before me,’ Grohl recalled after the event. ‘I’m not a competitive dude, but I thought, “Okay motherfuckers, watch this.” I had my wife and my daughter at the side of the stage. I was standing there behind the curtain with a guitar in my hand, after four beers, and thought, “Fuck it, this is going to be good.’”
Three years after his game-changing first appearance at Wembley Stadium, Dave Grohl told me that he felt that his band’s Live Earth set marked his first true moment as a frontman.
‘We showed up that day to Wembley, and we thought, “Oh God, how can we possibly entertain this size with this many people?”’ he said. ‘And then I looked at the line-up and saw that we were after Metallica, we were after the Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys, and after the Pussycat Dolls, and I just couldn’t imagine how our band was going to stand up. But I realised that we had five songs and 25 minutes, so we’ll play the five songs that everyone knows the chorus to, and I’ll get them to sing along with me. And in those 25 minutes I became the frontman. And every concert since then has been a little bit easier.’
Grohl may be being slightly disingenuous here when he says this. To those who had followed his band from their earliest days it appeared that Grohl always seemed comfortable behind the microphone, has always striven to make those in attendance feel like guests in his home rather than customers in his shop. And for five years prior to their appearance at Live Earth Foo Fighters had been headlining festivals to tens of thousands of people in the United Kingdom without Grohl giving anyone the impression that he was a frightened rabbit frozen at the front of the stage. But this was a band whose circumstances were changing, and for the better. From a band who in 2002 were at their wits’ end and struggling to cobble together the songs that would comprise One by One, by the middle part of the decade the group seemed to be comfortably growing into their own skin. And the same could be said of their leader.
In August 2003 Dave Grohl took his marriage vows for the second time, on this occasion to MTV producer Jordyn Blum, whom he had met one evening in 2001 at Hollywood’s chic Sunset Marquis hotel. Grohl was there that day only to make up the numbers for Taylor Hawkins, who’d snagged a date with one of the hotel’s pretty barmaids, but he ended up writing ‘you’re my future ex-wife’ and his phone number on a piece of paper he handed to Blum, there to support her friend, Hawkins’s date. Prior to their marriage, as the couple’s courtship grew more serious, so too did Grohl’s relationship with, and commitment to, the city in which he’d met his partner.
‘I went back and forth to Los Angeles for years and I basically used it like a dirty fucking whore,’ he says. ‘I took it and I dragged it around and I fucked it and I drank it under the table and I left it lying in the middle of the road, and then I would be like, “Okay, I’m done with this place, I’m going home now.” It all changed when I met my beautiful Californian wife, Jordyn, and I figured, “Well, I can’t take a born and bred Angelino out of Los Angeles. It’s just not what you do.’”
Jordyn Blum became Mrs Dave Grohl on 2 August 2003. The wedding itself took place that afternoon on the tennis court of Grohl’s new home in Encino. Having decided that he no longer wished to treat the
Los Angeles metropolitan borough like ‘a dirty fucking whore’, Grohl had decided to put down both money and roots in order to live full time on the West Coast. For his and Jordyn Blum’s nuptials, Dave Grohl enlisted the services of Krist Novoselic as best man, with the job of usher being shared by Taylor Hawkins and Jimmy Swanson. Following the wedding ceremony, the 250 or so guests invited to share the happy couple’s day were able to dance the night away to the sound of The Fab Four, a top notch Beatles tribute act.
But if domestic life was providing Dave Grohl with happiness and stability, domestic politics certainly was not. Since the election of Barack Obama – a man whose oratorical brilliance and melting-pot ethnicity made him a dream candidate for liberal America – much has been forgotten about the febrile atmosphere of the US body politic and the popular arts in the middle part of the first decade of the twenty-first century. But as George W. Bush prepared to run for a second term as President of the United States, and with that country’s armed forces mired in unpopular conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the artistic community kicked up in protest in a way that hadn’t really been seen since the days of the Vietnam War. Green Day released the Bush-baiting American Idiot, and sold 14 million copies of a set that spoke to people who wished not to be part of ‘a redneck agenda’. Filmmaker Michael Moore released the film Fahrenheit 9/11, a documentary which stopped just short of labelling Bush and his cronies as being war criminals. Similarly disruptive was the Rock Against Bush movement, NOFX mainman Fat Mike’s campaign (which enlisted the help of many of his punk rock pals, including Foo Fighters, to contribute songs that ended up on one of two Rock Against Bush compilation albums) to unseat the incumbent President.
But while the queue to hit the Bush-shaped piñata with a stick stretched from Pennsylvania Avenue to the Pacific Coast Highway, there was a marked reluctance among the great and good of the music industry to join their voices in song with Bush’s political opposition. John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s nominee for the 44th President of the United States, may have had all the easy-going charm of a six and a half foot ironing board, but in his endless rallies around the American heartlands the Massachusetts-raised Vietnam veteran was accompanied by musical support only from Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. That was until the campaign trail hit the Midwest, whereupon the New Jersey superstars were joined in a number of cities by Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters, stung into action by the news that the Republican party was using the Foos’ own everyman anthem ‘Times Like These’ to soundtrack George W.’s rallies.
‘I was personally offended that George Bush was using “Times Like These”,’ Grohl explained the following year. ‘We were trying to think of a way to get him to stop, like, “Fuck man, I’m gonna send the President a cease-and-desist order.” I wrote that fucking song. I know what I’m singing about and it basically mirrored what John Kerry’s campaign was trying to represent.
‘I went out on the John Kerry campaign and tried to help them out because I really believed in getting Bush out of office. And it was really inspirational because you’d see tens of thousands of people gathered together with the common idea and will to make things better. We did a lot of stuff with the campaign, just travelling around through Middle America and seeing people who really needed to be rescued.’
It was this time spent on the fringes of Presidential politics that led Grohl to author a collection of songs for the next Foo Fighters album inspired by the experience.
‘Every day before Kerry got up to speak, I’d go play acoustic music,’ he explained. ‘And the audiences weren’t Foo Fighters audiences. The front row was World War II veterans and teacher unions and blue-collar workers. I came back from that so inspired by the people and the real emotion and the feeling of a small community all coming together for an honourable reason. But rather than write an angry Rage Against the Machine record, I wanted to give them a sense of hope and release and faith.’
With Dave Grohl moving to California it made sense that Studio 606 should follow. But rather than install a studio within the grounds of Grohl’s family home – or at least not yet, anyway – in 2004 the band invested $750,000 of its own money to set up their own studio on neutral ground. Buying a large, anonymous-looking commercial property somewhere amid the sprawling nothingness of the suburban San Fernando Valley, an area infamous as the epicentre of the American pornographic film industry, the quartet went about equipping the facility to their exact requirements. The group’s members even dirtied their hands themselves with a touch of heavy lifting.
On the ground floor of the 606 complex is the recording studio, modelled upon Stockholm’s Polar Studios, the Abba-owned facility where Led Zeppelin committed their In Through the Out Door album to tape in the winter of 1978. Todd MacFarlane Metallica figures sit atop a workbench. There is ephemera celebrating Motörhead and Mötley Crüe. On the wall hangs a black and white print of Dave Grohl with Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen and ‘Little Steven’ Van Zandt, each man deep in concentration as they practised The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ backstage at Madison Square Garden. There are framed posters advertising Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown EP, as well as the American punk record label Slash. There are cushions fashioned from Grohl’s old concert T-shirts, lovingly handmade by Virginia Grohl. And in the hallway hang scores of gold and platinum discs for albums featuring Grohl in some capacity or other – from drummer in Nirvana, and for Queens of the Stone Age and Tenacious D, to bandleader with Foo Fighters. At the time Foo Fighters began work on Echoes … the discs represented CD sales of somewhere in the region of 50 million, and suggested that in whatever guise he made music Dave Grohl did so with something of a Midas touch.
Despite the bespoke nature of their new studio, initial reports emanating from the latest 606 were not unduly encouraging. Speaking to Kerrang! in 2005 Dave Grohl admitted that for a time the notion of a fifth Foo Fighters album was just that, a notion.
‘There was a moment when I thought, “Well, that was fun and we’ve had a good run at the thing,”’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought that bands shouldn’t last forever, there’s always an expiration date. So, yeah, for a moment I thought that we should call it quits and end it on a high note.’
Speaking to the NME in the spring of 2005, the frontman admitted that he never imagined that his group’s success would reach such a point, and revealed, ‘When it happened it got me thinking.’
‘About what?’ he was asked.
‘About what it meant for us,’ he responded. ‘We’d reached a certain level and it meant something. It was just a question of what. Did it mean it was time for us to split up? Did it mean it was time for us to take one of those four-year breaks? Or time to try something different?’
When pressed on the viability of splitting up as being a realistic option, Grohl answered, ‘Well, yeah, that was one of the things I wondered about. I did think about going out at the top.’
But after considering the three options of breaking up, of embarking on a four-year hiatus, or else simply trying something different, Foo Fighters opted for the last. Stretching their creative limbs, as well as flexing a little corporate muscle, the quartet decided that their fifth album would in fact be a double album, with one CD dedicated to the Sturm und Drang of the group in full-blown rock mode, and the second disc comprised of more reflective, acoustic-based numbers.
‘It didn’t make a lot of sense not to try and challenge ourselves this time out,’ explained Grohl just prior to the album’s release. ‘It wouldn’t have made any sense at all just to go in and make another record. That would have been boring for us. So we decided to do something that would challenge the band. I’ve always known that we were capable of producing an album like the acoustic record, but it never made sense to try and incorporate that into a rock setting. So this time we attempted to eliminate a lot of the middle ground. So we made a rock album that rocks as hard as possible and we tried to go completely the opposite way with the acoustic record.
‘When
I listen to some bands who have been around for ten or fifteen years like, God bless ’em, the Ramones or Green Day or AC/DC – those bands have made a career out of making music that wrestles with one dynamic. But fuck that, I don’t want to be that band. I want to be a band that can do fucking anything, because we can do fucking anything. There’s a song on the record that [jazz chanteuse] Norah Jones sings on: how nuts is that? But fuck it, why not? We should do whatever the fuck it is we want to do. Because when we do follow our instincts, when we do follow our hearts, it ends up sounding really good. My ambition is for people to ask us what kind of music we play and for us to answer, “Just music.” Not, “Oh, rock music,” but “Just music.” I think with this album we’ve taken a step toward that happening.’
With sessions taking place at 606, work on the acoustic half of the album came together like a dream. The group originally had a list of dozens of artists they hoped would contribute to the songs; as things turned out, sessions came together so quickly that the authors hardly had the time to recruit many of the names on their wishlist. Even so, alongside Norah Jones (on ‘Virginia Moon’), the quieter half of InYour Honor features appearances from, among others, Josh Homme (who plays additional guitar on ‘Razor’), as well as songs starring The Wallflowers keyboardist Rami Jaffee, double-bass contributions from co-producer Nick Raskulinecz, that and the sound of mandolin and piano – on the songs ‘Another Round’ and ‘Miracle’ respectively – played by the hand of erstwhile Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.
‘I ran around the room screaming,’ said Dave Grohl of receiving a call from Jones saying that he was willing to play on the album. ‘“Guess who I fucking got a call from?”’ When the Englishman arrived at 606 to record his parts, Foo Fighters’ frontman reported, ‘I tried to be cool, but I’m sure I looked like a total fucking idiot. I was shitting my pants. Full diaper.’
This is a Call Page 38