by Martin James
With the recording and a rough mix done, Grohl duped up one hundred copies of the completed demo and started circulating them among friends and industry people. The demo went under the name Foo Fighters. This was the only information apart from song titles.
“I just wanted to release this tape that I had done on my label, with no names on it, and then get an independent distributor and send it out to the world, maybe 10,000 or 20,000 copies so people would think, ‘God, who is this band Foo Fighters? I’ve never heard of them before.’ I just wanted it to be this real anonymous release.” (6)
Grohl’s ambitions for this collection of songs may have been minimal but the demos quickly became the industry’s worst kept secret. Bootlegs started to appear on the market and major labels started sniffing around to sign the drummer up. Says Grohl: “… my first mistake: my trip to the duplication lab downtown for one hundred copies. My next mistake was my blind generosity. That fucking tape spread like the Ebola virus, leaving me with an answering machine tape full of record company jive.”
However, Grohl was still not happy to launch himself onto the world with a full-blown solo career. He decided to put a band together for the project. He had also made a decision that would help him to put the past in its place. He vacated the drummer’s seat for the first time since those Freak Baby days. Grohl was to be singer and guitarist in the new band.
Thanks to Novoselic’s involvement in the initial Nirvana-era Bob Lang recordings, rumours started to circulate that the two would be reunited on this project. Both had remained close since their Nirvana days when their friendship had been cemented on that last Nirvana tour when Grohl and Novoselic had opted to travel on one tour bus while Cobain and Love travelled in a separate tour bus with Pat Smear.
To add to the rumour of Novoselic and Grohl working together, the duo had actually recorded some material at The Laundry Room. “He (Novoselic) was like, ‘Man, d’you wanna jam?’ It seemed to really spark something in me. So we got together in Barrett’s studio and wrote maybe four of five of these jams, no vocals, just bass and drums. It was really cool, we wanted to get in the van and go on tour, doing this bass and drums thing. But Krist was really busy with things like Bosnian Relief Organisation and he has a farm now, out in the middle of nowhere in Washington. So he’s actually really busy.”(7)
The first person Grohl approached to join the band was Seattle local Nate Mendel, who’s band Sunny Day Real Estate had recently split following one album on Sub Pop. Grohl had first met Mendel at a Thanksgiving Party held at the former’s house. Mendel’s girlfriend was a good friend of Grohl’s wife and the two hit it off immediately. Interestingly, it was at this party that Grohl confirmed his suspicions that his house was haunted. After the party, the remaining friends (Mendel included) used a Ouija board to contact the spirits. Grohl’s ghost expressed its displeasure by rocking the table violently and spelling out answers to their questions. Everyone freaked.
Said Grohl: “Jennifer asked if there were spirits in the house. The glass on the Ouija board spelled out ‘Y-E-S’. I was just looking at Jennifer and she wasn’t moving at all. The glass was travelling without her pushing it. Jennifer then asked, ‘What happened here?’ The glass spelled out ‘M-U-R-D-E-R-E-D’. I asked who was murdered, and got the reply ‘M-Y- B-A-B-Y’.”(8)
Grohl subsequently discovered that, according to local legend, in the late nineteenth century, a Native American baby was murdered by its mother and buried in a well. The mother’s ghost supposedly haunts the area, waiting for her child to be given a proper burial.
The next piece in the Foo Fighters band jigsaw slotted into place with the arrival of Pat Smear. Such was Grohl’s admiration for Smear – and insecurity at his own recordings – that it had taken him ages to give Smear a copy of the demo. Indeed, Grohl had been such a fan of Smear’s guitar playing that he had memorised almost every word spoken by the guitarist in the early 1980s LA punk documentary, The Decline Of The Western Civilisation – and this was long before he’d become the fourth member of Nirvana.
“I called Pat up a couple weeks after I gave him the tape,” Grohl said in 1996, “way before we had a tour booked, probably before we had even played with each other. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was working on his guitars.” (9)
The conversation, according to Grohl had gone: “(Working on guitars) For what?” “For a tour.” “Whose?” “Ours.” (10) Smear was on board. “After you’ve been in the coolest band ever,” Smear explained, “what do you do? I sat on the couch with the remote control in my hand for a year. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to be in a band again. I was just working on solo stuff. Dave and I had kept in touch and I had heard about his tape, but I didn’t know what to expect. When I heard the tape, I flipped. Dave gave it to me at a club and I went home. After I listened to it, I went back to the club. But I didn’t want to ask to join the band. I waited for him to ask me.”
Now all Grohl needed was someone to take the unenviable position of sitting in the drummer’s seat. Enter William Goldsmith, Mendel’s band mate from Sunny Real Estate. Grohl subsequently got his wife to pass two copies of Foo Fighters’ tape on to Goldsmith and Mendel. It wasn’t made clear what Grohl was intending. There was some mention of recording, or simply working together, but no suggestion of becoming members of a band.
“We listened to the tape and we liked it a lot, but we didn’t know what would happen next,” Goldsmith explained. “Then I was in DC that week after our last tour and he called. It was a great phone call. He was like, ‘Oh, so your band’s in the shitter.’ I told him ‘yes’. He said, ‘All right. Let’s play.’” (11)
Grohl had seen the bassist and drummer in action twice with Sunny Day Real Estate and had been impressed by their energy as much as their ability. This energy was important to Grohl’s game plan, as he explained in 1996: “My main concern wasn’t finding someone who could do everything exactly as it was on the tape, but someone who had really good energy. There’s not very many of them. When I saw Will play, I was really amazed. So I called Nate and Will and… we started playing. After the second or third time in William (Goldsmith)’s basement, we had the songs down.” (12)
With the final addition of the Sunny Real Estate rhythm section, Grohl felt he had the right band to publicly launch Foo Fighters. The band decided to perform for the first time at a private keg party in a friend’s house. The band even provided the kegs of beer.
Despite the band’s activities, rumours still circulated that Novoselic would be joining as well. Eventually Grohl put paid to these rumours: “For Krist and I, it would have felt really natural and really great, but for everyone else, it would have been weird and it would have left me in a really bad position. Then it really would have been under the microscope.” (13)
On January 8, 1995, Foo Fighters received their first public airing, although they were announced under Grohl’s name. It was on Eddie Vedder’s Self-Pollution Radio Show. Vedder introduced the songs as being by his friend Dave Grohl. The tracks he actually played were the demos Grohl had handed to Vedder during the Mike Watt sessions. ‘Gas Chamber (No Action)’ led the broadcast, with ‘Exhausted’ following. The track which followed Grohl’s segment was Babes In Toyland’s ‘Pain in My Heart’.
A month later the entire band flew to The Shop Studio in LA to do a final mix on the demo tracks. The session was booked in for the beginning of March, however the band called ahead and blagged a support slot at the Jambalaya Club in Arcata, CA on February 23. It was to be the first time the public would get to see Foo Fighters live; a show that Grohl has fond memories of.
“We cut out stencils and sprayed them on top of shirts we bought at a thrift store,” recalled Grohl. “There’d be, like, Hooters T-shirts with our stencil over it, and we sold them for three bucks. We opened for a band called The Unseen. We thought they’d be some wicked punk-rock band, but they turned out to be a cover band made up of seventeen-year-old kids who dressed like The Jam and could play any song
you asked for. We just drank, and danced. It was such fun, and there were no rules and no expectations.” (14)
Of course, this show wasn’t exactly the most widely-advertised performance imaginable, and as far as the wider world was concerned, Grohl was still contemplating his future. The demo tape had become common knowledge, along with Grohl’s constant claims that he wasn’t intending to do much with them. Even at this stage, the public opinion of the drummer was that he would probably join another high profile band.
Adding fuel to this idea was Grohl’s appearance in the drum seat for Pearl Jam on three of their Australian dates in March 1995. On March 16 he played along to ‘Sonic Reducer’, March 17 ‘Keep On Rocking In The Free World’ and on March 22, ‘Sonic Reducer’ again and ‘Against the 70s’, one of the songs he’d recorded with Mike Watt.
“That was kind of a fluke. We had Foo Fighters just about ready to go on our first tour opening for Mike Watt and we were to be gone for a little over a month,” explained Grohl of how the Pearl Jam shows came about. “I had all these frequent flier miles so I thought I might as well have a little vacation before the tour. Pearl Jam was on tour down there and we have a good friend doing the tour accounting for them and another friend of ours is their tour masseuse or witchdoctor or whatever. So we thought we would just fly down, book ourselves into the same hotel and surprise them.
I thought it was so great because we got to go and see some of the Pearl Jam shows and I was so excited just to be a spectator and have all the fun of someone who doesn’t have to go up onstage and play. Because I get so incredibly nervous before I play. Whether it’s drums or guitar, I get really, really nervous. And so I was looking forward to going down and hanging out and seeing friends and having something to drink and watching the show. The first night I got there, we went to the show and they asked me if I would play a song with them… and then it was like – vacation was over.” (15)
Joining forces with another band full-time was no longer an option, however, as by this stage Foo Fighters had not only put together their first tour, but also inked a deal with Capitol Records. So much for only putting out a few thousand records on his own label!
The deal was a production and distribution (P&D) deal for Grohl’s label Roswell Records Inc., through which all Foo Fighter records would be released. As a result, Grohl retained his intention of being on an independent label; however by signing this label to a large major, he was also showing signs that he had greater confidence in the material than he’d previously stated. Grohl wanted his new venture to be successful on a commercial level, just as his previous band had been.
Grohl was, of course, perfectly in tune with the changing face of the music industry. By this time it was becoming increasingly difficult for small independents to finance videos, tours and other means of promotion. It was obvious that Grohl wanted his venture to succeed on a large scale, so signing a P&D deal was the obvious way forward. Through the deal he gained the funding required to push the band forward, without losing control.
So, Foo Fighters started their career in the strange position of being on an independent label, but through a major. They wanted to be small enough to gain credibility despite featuring two members of the biggest rock band of the 1990s. And last but not least, they had a frontman who used to be a drummer, but still claimed to want the anonymity of the drum seat. Finally he wanted the band to be seen as just that, a band, despite the fact that it was common knowledge that Grohl had written and recorded all of the songs on the demo, and that these tracks were now re-mixed and ready to be released as a Foo Fighter album. It was all a long way from the second-generation copied Pocketwatch set.
In the few days preceding the album mix down, Foo Fighters played two low profile shows at Satyricon in Portland, (March 3) and Seattle’s Velvet Elvis (March 4). This latter date found five hundred people queuing around the block to gain entry to the one hundred and fifty capacity venue. On completion of the album mix, they played another two equally low key dates at Pan at Silverlake on March 10 and then on the last day of the month, at Albuquerque’s Dingo’s Bar.
These opening Foo Fighters shows were important in that they gave the band time to iron out any problems in lesser known venues. Furthermore, they provided the band with a good chance to enjoy life on the road away from the media glare. Following Nirvana’s last tour, in which the camaraderie that Grohl had loved so much all but disappeared, it was important for him to rediscover the same feeling with his new band.
These few dates were extremely successful on all counts. The crowds who witnessed the performances were very vocal in their support. The band gelled enormously as a unit, with Smear becoming something of an enigmatic figurehead for the rest of the band, while Grohl himself was able to counter some of the nerves he suffered playing live. He had become extremely susceptible to stage fright in the latter days of Nirvana.
On April 12, Grohl was able to test his nerves further as the band headed out on a twenty-date tour of the US in support of Mike Watt. Hovercraft supplied the second support. Opening in Phoenix on April 24 and coming to a close on May 20 in San Diego, the tour would wind round the US, taking in Denver, St. Louis, Nashville and Atlanta before eventually hitting the higher profile locations of New York, Philadelphia, and on April 25, Grohl’s own club, the Black Car in Washington DC. Perhaps the most noteworthy gig on the tour came on the Chicago date at Cabaret Metro on May 6, at which Foo Fighters joined forces with Eddie Vedder and Mike Watt to perform songs from the latter’s album.
Reaction to the band was positive throughout the tour, although some members of the audience insisted on calling out for Nirvana songs, much to Grohl’s annoyance. “When we first started playing, people would come to shows and shout for us to play ‘Heart Shaped Box’ and I thought they were joking. But they were serious. I was afraid I was never gonna be able to shake it off,” Grohl explained a few months later. (16)
With anticipation growing for the release of the debut Foo Fighters single and album, rumours started to circulate that Grohl had agreed to join Nailbomb as well. Nailbomb was the side project for Sepultura’s Max Cavalera. It later transpired however that nothing had been agreed.
“What really happened,” says Cavalera, “is, I met Dave a couple of times, he’s into Sepultura, so I gave him a Nailbomb CD and he liked it. I called him and asked him if he wanted to play at the Dynamo. He was really into it, but he was on tour with Foo Fighters. Otherwise, he said he’d have definitely done it.”
On June 3, Foo Fighters played their debut UK gig as unannounced support for Teenage Fan Club at London’s King’s College. The set list for the show ran: ‘This Is A Call’, ‘I’ll Stick Around’, ‘Winnebago’, ‘Wattershed’, ‘For All The Cows’, ‘Weenie Beenie’, ‘Butterflies’, ‘Big Me’, ‘Podunk’, ‘Good Grief’, ‘X-Static’, ‘Alone + Easy Target’ and ‘Exhausted’.
Interestingly, despite the band’s stated desire to remain out of the spotlight, the contract that the photographers were requested to sign allowed only three songs during which to shoot the band, which certainly showed that Grohl had his sights set firmly on global success.
It has already been noted that Cobain had stated his desire to control all of the content that was generated around Nirvana, but Grohl already seemed to be seizing the horns of this particular issue. He was learning from Nirvana’s mistakes and putting a solid foundation into place from day one.
Of the level of paranoia that surrounded Nirvana when it came to unofficial merchandise, Grohl claimed to be ambivalent. “Having been in Nirvana, I can see both sides,” he said. “I’m not worried. You can’t be paranoid for the rest of your life – so I’m not totally paranoid. And in that sense I still am relatively naïve. I think that’s a good thing, because I can’t stand distrust; I hate feeling like everyone is out to get me and that everyone wants a piece of me.
Life’s too short to sit around worrying about whether someone’s going to bootleg your T-shirt. It’s like, fuck man, if a
kid’s going to bootleg a Foo Fighters T-shirt, all right. I don’t endorse mass bootlegging, but the bottom line of it is that some kid’s going to be walking around wearing a Foo Fighters T-shirt.” (17)
Despite the fantastic audience response to the debut London gig, press reactions were less than ecstatic. Nirvana champion Everett True was particularly negative in his review for the Melody Maker. Discussing this later with Grohl, True admitted that a part of his problem with the band was that too much sympathy was being extended towards the new band.
“That’s true,” Grohl agreed. “Well, it’s hard. It’s hard for me… (clicks teeth)…I don’t know. I don’t take a lot of the sympathy because…I read somewhere recently that you should never ask a man if he’s OK. It’s true. It’s so belittling. It makes you feel like nothing, pee’d on. But it’s hard, because a lot of the times when people write about the band, there’s always some personal interjection, and people do feel really sorry for Krist and I. And I don’t feel sorry for myself,” he continued. “I’m sorry that a lot of things happened that did, but I’ll never ask for anyone’s sympathy. I know it’s there though…” (18)
True’s initial reaction to Foo Fighters was fairly typical of a media who viewed Grohl’s latest venture through cynical eyes. He would variously be accused of succeeding through default, launching a sound-alike band off the back of a legend and, perhaps most bizarrely of all, abusing Cobain’s legacy. Grohl was in a no-win situation from the start.
Nine days after the London show, a promo 12” of ‘Exhausted’ hit the streets featuring the new version of the track he’d recorded at Bob Lang’s studio sessions, coupled with a new version of ‘Winnebego’ from Pocketwatch. The debut single ‘This Is A Call’ arrived a week later on June 19, backed by ‘Winnebago’ and ‘Podunk’.