On his motivation for recording an album’s worth of acoustic material, Grohl told me, ‘I’d originally been thinking about making an album on my own. I’ve always thought about making an album on my own, because I enjoy recording by myself, and it might be something that you wouldn’t expect. So I’d written a lot of really beautiful acoustic music and I thought, “Maybe what I could do is find a film that needs a score and make an album on my own, and sorta disguise it as a film score so it doesn’t seem like a pretentious solo effort.” Like with Tom Petty’s She’s the One, like an album of songs that are yours entirely but not meant to prove that you can do it on your own, if that makes any sense. And then I had a revelation at some point, thinking, “Wait a minute, this should be the next Foo Fighters album. Fuck rock music, let’s really take a hard left on everyone and change up the game a little. Wouldn’t that be nice?” So I considered it, but then I thought, “Wait a minute, I can’t not make a rock album, so let’s do a double.”
‘Meanwhile I was moving the studio out of Virginia and looking for a studio in Los Angeles, and that whole process was fucking long and crazy; I’m glad we did it, but holy shit – to write and record a double album in a studio that you built from scratch? We’d start with the contractor and the construction team at the warehouse and then go back down to rehearsal and writing and demoing and then at night come back to the studio to fucking staple insulation to the ceiling. And that was every day for six months. We were still building the studio as we recorded …’
Recorded from January to March 2005, In Your Honor was given its worldwide release that June. The double album entered both the US and UK album charts at number 2 (kept from the top spot in both countries by the release of Coldplay’s third album, X & Y), selling 311,000 copies in the United States, and almost 160,000 copies in Great Britain, a jump of nearly 70,000 first-week sales from predecessor One by One. Foo Fighters’ fifth album also débuted in the top five of album charts in thirteen other countries, and attained Top 40 status in six more. Reviews were also kind, although sometimes in a way that suggested damnation by faint praise. Spin wrote that ‘both these records chronicle the mental and physical graffiti of figuring how to emerge from some very large shadows, including his own, with nerve and power’. The New York Times was of the opinion that ‘the rock CD overpowers the acoustic one.Yet among the quieter songs, there are enough supple melodies and hypnotic guitar patterns to suggest fine prospects for a follow-through album that would dare to mix plugged-in and unplugged.’ Others, though, were less charitable. MOJO claimed that In Your Honor’s rock disc was merely ‘grunge-punk-metal boiled down to mere energy – and calories don’t rock’. Across the Atlantic, Blender put it even more baldly when it wrote, ‘Let’s face it: Foo Fighters are dull.’
But it was perhaps the website Cokemachineglow that came closest to summing up a fan’s eye view on Foo Fighters’ fifth album. ‘Lurking somewhere in its spotty 80+ minutes there lies an excellent 40-minute album, one of the best Foo Fighters have ever done,’ noted reviewer Matt Stephens. ‘As it is, though, with its heaps of filler, dated production, and needless separation of rockers from ballads, it may actually be their weakest.’
In Your Honor isn’t Foo Fighters’ weakest album – that dubious honour must go to its predecessor – and some of the reviews it attracted were perhaps unduly harsh (as a rule, the music press tends not to like it when it praises an album, as it did with One by One, that its creators subsequently dismiss out of hand). But the notion that its finest moments are harder to find for being obscured by tracks that aren’t as remarkable as they might be is justified comment. In Your Honor opens and closes with some of the finest material Grohl has ever authored, but for all the admirable ambition and ability the band display, keeping the whole enterprise airborne across 21 tracks proves to be too much of a strain.
The title track provides a stirring opening to this epic endeavour. Over martial beats and guitars which soar skywards and beyond, Grohl’s own fanfare for the common man is delivered with an intensity and raw passion that cannot fail to prickle the skin: ‘Mine is yours and yours is mine / There is no divide / In your honor I would die tonight,’ Grohl sings. Only the hardest of hearts could fail to be moved. ‘No Way Back’ fizzes with an invigorating vigour, and ‘Best of You’ shrugs off a chest-beating opening which sounds like a pumped-up US military recruitment ad to blossom into an open-hearted everyman anthem capable of filling the biggest of stadiums. ‘The Last Song’, meanwhile, like ‘Enough Space’ on The Colour and the Shape, seems written with the express design to cause festival crowds to bounce, while its punchy call-and-response chorus – ‘This is the last song that I will dedicate to you’ – is a gloriously uninhibited declaration of independence. There is art and craft too in the likes of ‘DOA’ and ‘Resolve’, but even amid their well-honed melodies there is still the nagging feeling that this album’s noisier half has been somewhat taken for granted.
On the second half of the band’s first double album too there are songs which shine with an incandescent brilliance. The reflective, delicate ‘Friend of a Friend’, reprised from the Pocketwatch cassette, is moving in its own right, even without the knowledge that the song was written in Kurt Cobain’s apartment in Olympia some fifteen years earlier. Elsewhere, the gently rolling ‘Cold Day in the Sun’, voiced by Taylor Hawkins, flies by on a jaunty beat and the strength of its own breezy melody, while ‘Miracle’ sounds like the perfect song to accompany a cold beer and a last cigarette at the end of a stressful and taxing day. And tucked in the middle of this disc is the undeniably beautiful ‘On the Mend’, a touching tale of love and brotherhood written by Grohl in a London hotel room in August 2001 as he wondered whether his comatose friend Taylor might live or die.
There is here a subtlety and poise not always displayed in the album’s rather self-consciously ‘rocking’ opening disc.
The tour in support of In Your Honor saw the band’s tour buses pull up to the backstage doors of some of the world’s largest indoor venues. And festival season found the Foos taking star billing at some of the most prestigious events on the circuit – among them Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival, Denmark’s Roskilde, Holland’s Lowlands, Belgium’s Werchter, Scotland’s T in the Park, Ireland’s Oxegen and, once again, the Reading/ Leeds double-header.
But if evidence was required that Foo Fighters’ profile was expanding beyond even that of festival headliner, such evidence came the following summer, when on Saturday 17 June 2006 the quartet headlined an outdoor show at London’s Hyde Park. Ironically, the site of the Foos’ greatest triumph to date took place less than a mile from the spot where they endured their darkest hour following Taylor Hawkins’s overdose almost five years earlier. But in headlining a concert at London’s most prestigious royal park, Dave Grohl’s band were joining a roll-call of rock royalty. In 1969 the Rolling Stones performed a free gig on the site, just two days after the death of guitarist Brian Jones. Seven years later Queen followed suit with their own free show. More recently, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Simon & Garfunkel were just two of the acts that had filled the air of one of London’s most exclusive quarters with music.
Dave Grohl told the audience gathered in the greenery just off Park Lane that when the idea of playing Hyde Park was put to him he thought that maybe 30,000 people might turn up. As it transpired, a crowd of some 85,000 people enjoyed a day in the sunshine watching Juliette Lewis & the Licks, Angels & Airwaves, old friends Queens of the Stone Age, the redoubtable Motörhead, and then, finally, Foo Fighters. As if this wasn’t proof of popularity enough, the next night the band headlined a show at Lancashire County Cricket Ground in Manchester, supported by The Strokes, Angels & Airwaves, The Subways and Josh Homme’s side band The Eagles of Death Metal. And although Foo Fighters’ fanbase was blossoming all over the western world, it was still the people of England that were carrying the brightest torch, and who had been carrying it the longest.
‘It was the same with Nirvana,’ obse
rved Grohl. ‘We exploded in England before we did in America. I think the UK’s always had a pretty good idea of what’s about to break. If it blows up in England, it’s only a matter of time before it blows up everywhere else. Even so, I never imagined something like Hyde Park would work.’
But work it did, and spectacularly well. Featuring not just a selection of Foo Fighters favourites – ‘Stacked Actors’, ‘Everlong’, ‘Monkey Wrench’ and ‘Breakout’ among them – the set also found space for a Probot song (‘Shake Your Blood’, sung, as on its parent album, by Lemmy) as well as Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘Tie Your Mother Down’, songs which saw Queen guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor emerge from the wings to join Foo Fighters onstage. By any measure, this was rock played by A-list musicians.
Prior to his band’s headline set in front of 85,000 people, though, Dave Grohl could be found backstage barbecuing for friends, just as he had done when the insanity around Nirvana threatened to spill out of control, just as he had done when recording There Is Nothing Left to Lose within a stone’s throw of his old high school in Virginia. Amid the sizzle of steaks and the chatter of friends and family, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Dave Grohl had not a care in the world.
‘It didn’t feel like the most important show of our career,’ he later admitted. ‘It was more like I was hosting a barbecue for 85, 000 people. It just felt like the biggest party I’ve ever had.’
Asked around the time of the release of In Your Honor if Foo Fighters planned to incorporate an acoustic set into their otherwise fully electric live show, drummer Taylor Hawkins laughed and answered in the negative, the reason being that ‘people would throw piss’. But by 2006 the group had enough confidence in its quieter side to embark on a tour of theatres armed not with Marshall amps but with hollow-bodied guitars and, that most telling sign of a band in quiet reflection, stools. Towards the end of the summer the quartet appeared live at the Pantages venue in Los Angeles for a three-night stand that would be recorded for release as a live album. The core musicians were joined by players such as Rami Jaffee, percussionist Drew Hester, violinist Petra Haden, harmonica player Danny Clinch, as well as a familiar beaming face, guitarist Pat Smear.
A selection of songs from these performances was collated for Foo Fighters’ first live album, titled Skin and Bones, released on 28 November 2006. Featuring imaginative reworkings of such staples as ‘Times Like These’, ‘My Hero’, ‘Friend of a Friend’ and ‘Everlong’, the fifteen-song set showed just how confidently the group had grown into their acoustic selves. Evidence of this came with the fact that, by definition, an acoustic live album from Foo Fighters would be compared to the similarly reflective Nirvana live album, Unplugged in New York, released in 1994. And while Skin and Bones was never likely to equal the majesty of that album, an album which is now recognised as one of the finest of its type, if not the finest, there is anyway something rather fanciful, perhaps even fatuous, about such a comparison. Unplugged in New York is the work of an entirely different band playing entirely different songs in an entirely different era. On its own terms, those Foo Fighters had since set for themselves, Skin and Bones is a worthwhile and enjoyable addition to its creators’ œuvre.
In the same month that the Foos’ first live album found its way into record shops, the group in its acoustic form accepted an invitation to tour Canada with the legendary Bob Dylan, then touring his acclaimed Modern Times album. There was something rather fitting about this partnership. In 1965 Dylan had outraged his supporters by ‘going electric’, playing a UK tour that saw his show split into two halves, one acoustic and one electric. Audiences did not take kindly to the latter section, with one ticket holder at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall exclaiming that the night’s headliner was a ‘Judas’. Five time zones east, at that summer’s annual Newport Folk Festival acoustic protest singer Pete Seeger reacted to Dylan’s plugged-in performance with such displeasure that he threatened to sever the power cables leading to the stage with an axe.
‘We don’t usually jump on other people’s tours because we’re out doing our own thing,’ Grohl told Uncut magazine. ‘But being asked by Bob Dylan to go on the road with him is like being knighted or something. How could we say no? We were asked by the man who turned rock ’n’ roll from boogie-woogie into bad-ass. Respect and honour, and for us it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’
In the weeks immediately before the trek, Grohl and his bandmates pumped keyboard player Rami Jaffe, who had previously played with Dylan’s son Jakob’s band, The Wallflowers, for some insider knowledge on the old master.
‘We all spent weeks asking him, “How’s Bob? What’s he like, man?” Grohl recalled. He said, “Bob’s the coolest guy in the world. He’s totally fucking chilled. But here’s the deal, though. If he’s got the hoodie on with the sunglasses, don’t even fuckin’ think of talking to him. If the hoodie is down and the sunglasses are off, it’s fair game to go and say hello.” That’s the best advice anybody has given me all year!’
The tour was in Canada when Grohl received a message in his dressing room that Mr Dylan wished to see him. With some trepidation, Grohl headed for the door.
‘So I walk out,’ says Grohl, ‘and I came around the corner and he’s standing like a silhouette in a dark corner – black leather boots, black leather pants, black leather jacket. He said, “What’s that’s song you got, the one that goes, ‘The only thing I ever ask of you is you gotta promise not to stop when I say when?’” I said, “Oh, yeah, ‘Everlong’.” He said, “Man, that is a great song, I should learn that song.”
‘So I don’t give a fuck what anybody else thinks,’ Grohl laughed. ‘Bob Dylan likes one of my songs. That right there is enough for me.’
Always an evolving entity, by the time Foo Fighters came to prepare themselves for their sixth studio album the participants opted for a more fluid approach than that taken on the In Your Honor set. Whereas that album had rather uniformly separated its electric and acoustic elements, with an unplugged tour underneath their belts it seemed that in re-entering 606 to record their next collection of songs the band felt more confident in mixing things up somewhat. Reunited with Gil Norton, Grohl, Mendel, Hawkins and Shifflet secluded themselves in their $750,000 bespoke recording studio in the San Fernando Valley and set to work. Their efforts amounted to the most supple and dexterous Foo Fighters album to date.
‘You know, at some point you turn [the] warning light off,’ said Grohl at the time. ‘At this point, having done it for as long as we have, it becomes a little more introverted. As a musician you need to do the things that satisfy yourself. One of the great things about our band is that we’ve built this little world with our own studios and our own label and directing our own videos and finding our own producers and producing ourselves … We were able to walk into our fortress, Studio 606, and lock the door and turn everything outside off, and I think that’s helped us survive this whole time. So at some point you can turn that off. I mean, of course I hope the people enjoy what we do, but it’s not a main motivation for doing it. It’s a challenge.’
The group emerged from 606 with a dozen well-rounded songs, songs that would gather under the rather portentous title Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace.
‘It’s always been a challenge to name any of our albums …’ admitted Grohl. ‘I picked through the lyrics and found a lyric from the last song, “Home”, which says “Echoes, silence, patience and grace, all of these moments I’ll never replace.” I thought it was nice because it’s open to interpretation and I think it’s a beautiful title and I think the album is beautiful in its diversity and its melody and its musicality. It goes from delicate acoustic moments to the heaviest shit we’ve ever done.’
Indeed it did. From the opening dynamite blast of ‘The Pretender’ – the album’s lead-off single, a track that spent a then record eighteen weeks atop the Billboard Alternative/Modern Rock Chart – to the fabulous Paul McCartneyesque pop roll of ‘Long Road
to Ruin’ to the quite gorgeous closing track, the stately piano-led ‘Home’ – which its author described as ‘the kind of song I can’t imagine singing live because it’s going to be too much’ – Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace is the culmination, and a seamless culmination at that, of everything Foo Fighters had been experimenting with since they decided to move away from only practising the type of loud rock music heard on the One by One album.
‘Dave has always had the ability to write a great riff,’ believes Gil Norton, the album’s producer. ‘He’s prolific. We were joking about doing a website called Spare Riff at one time, because he just comes up with a million riffs all the time. But obviously he has slightly different subject matter now: he’s older, he’s got a family … With the last album the whole sonic palate had increased and that sort of helped with the writing, because it just gave him more scope atmospherically.’
Released on 25 September 2007, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace débuted at number 1 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. In the US, Foo Fighters’ sixth studio album entered the Billboard Top 200 at number 3, with 168,000 first-week sales, a sizeable drop from the 311,000 sales racked up by In Your Honor on its first seven days in shops.
Critical reception to the album was, as ever, mixed. Kerrang!’s Ian Winwood was generous in his praise, writing, ‘The fact that this is a record that doesn’t sound like it was hard work means that it’s good work. In fact, it’s good enough to remind you just why you turned your ears towards Foo Fighters in the first place.’ NME believed that the set was ‘as consistent a record as Foo Fighters have ever made’. Not everyone, though, was as kind as they might have been. Spin said of the new album that it was ‘another quality entry in a fantastically average career’.
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