Dave Grohl, Times Like His

by Martin James

  ‘Winnebego’ had barely changed from its earlier incarnation, while ‘Podunk’ gave little insight into the nature of the album that would follow. Both tracks were to be omitted from the final album tracklisting. While the former was a match for any of the tracks on the album, ‘Podunk’ was a dull and rambling grunge-by-numbers rocker, complete with screamed verse and melodic chorus.

  ‘This Is A Call’ on the other hand was a joyous celebration of distorted guitars, machine gun drum fills and melodies straight from the Beach Boys songbook. The perfect introduction to the self-titled debut album. ‘This Is A Call’ reached #5 in the UK chart.

  Foo Fighters fittingly appeared on Independence Day, July 4, 1995. Opening track ‘This Is A Call’ clearly laid out the Foo Fighters’ manifesto. Solid, up front drums, grinding distorted guitars playing counterpoint to occasional simple jangly guitar refrains, strong sing-a-long vocal melodies and an arrangement that was as simple as it was effective.

  Perhaps tellingly, the vocals on ‘This Is A Call’, as with the rest of album, remained low in the mix, Grohl’s thin voice occasionally being beefed up with double tracking. “I just have an amazing insecurity about my voice… I think Michael Stipe once said that his sinuses were a God-given gift and that’s why his voice is so nasally and bizarre as it is. To me, it’s more of a curse. I’d rather have them repaired so I can sing like Luciano Pavarotti…” (19)

  Not surprisingly, drums were to the fore throughout, guitars were occasionally so distorted as to sound distant, although the bass frequently lacked any real punch. Despite such potential failings, the overall effect was of a garage band. For a major label debut (albeit through an independent label) Foo Fighters was surprisingly raw and under-produced. Indeed, it had more of a demo quality than any album Grohl had previously been involved with.

  The band’s sound was clearly centred around the grunge axis; however to suggest that the Seattle sound was the only influence at play undermined the huge part that Grohl’s DC roots played on the songwriting. Throughout, flashes of Bad Brains, Minutemen and even Scream pulled songs in an altogether more energised punk rock direction than the slow-paced rockers that had marked out Tad, Nirvana, Mudhoney et al. Furthermore, Foo Fighters displayed an obvious debt to 1977-era punk bands from the US and the UK and British artists like Led Zeppelin and early David Bowie.

  Perhaps the most obviously Nirvana-esque songs came with the second track, ‘I’ll Stick Around’, which combined furious guitar riffs with mellow, lilting vocals before erupting into a screamed chorus, evoking the vocal interplay between Cobain and Grohl. This may have been a trick that had become associated with Nirvana’s biggest hits, but they certainly weren’t the first band to do this.

  ‘Big Me’ found Grohl in more contemplative mood with country-esque twang delivering a love song to his wife, Jennifer, before ‘Alone + Easy Target’ reintroduced the distorted guitars for another anthemic rocker. Again, vocal melody was understated, while guitars and drums delivered a masterclass on power punk. A trick reproduced on the melodic hardcore groove of ‘Good Grief’.

  With ‘Floaty’, Grohl could be found deep in Mudhoney territory, combining the rawness of punk with sub-heavy metalriffing and a steady rock beat a la Led Zeppelin. The British rock legends had been a huge influence on the entire Seattle scene – with Soundgarden taking the admiration to the level of near-imitation.

  ‘Weenie Beanie’ found Grohl in full-blown hardcore mode, complete with distorted vocals and rock dynamics. A close cousin to the B-side track ‘Podunk’, it proved to be the least effective track on the album, sounding too much like pastiche to hold much weight – in fact it was comic book thrashcore.

  ‘Weenie Beanie’ represented one of the greatest problems faced by Grohl on this album. Realising that people would be scouring the tracks for any reference to Nirvana – be it sonic or lyrical – he seemed to be intent on showing how much he wasn’t messed up and how much fun he was having. While Nirvana’s final days were surrendered to overbearing unhappiness, Grohl seemingly threw in this throw away song to underline his new found joy. Nirvana this certainly wasn’t.

  In contrast to the comedy value of ‘Weenie Beenie’, ‘Oh, George’, one of the most recently penned songs on the album, was laced with a sombre mood, Grohl’s voice at its most emotional, displaying the kind of vulnerability that made the Pocketwatch tape work so well.

  ‘For All The Cows’ found Grohl stripping Husker Du of their punk flavour, reducing them to their country and western roots, while the Greg Dulli track ‘X-Static’ offered slow-grinding rock, with drums rumbling like a juggernaut. Vocally the song featured an almost apologetic melody, so understated was Grohl’s voice.

  Back on the hardcore trail, ‘Wattershed’ was Grohl’s gloriously thunderous tribute to Minuteman and fIREHOSE. Indeed the ‘tt’ in the mispelt title was a direct reference to Mike Watt. Final track ‘Exhausted’ was perhaps the least commercial of the album’s songs. Despite the poppy melody, the song meandered through a pea soup of distorted guitars, feedback and sub-metal dynamics before reaching its power chord climax. Its minor chord sequence and extended feedback was reminiscent of Joy Division’s debut album.

  Of the songs recorded during October 1994’s Bob Lang session, only ‘Butterflies’ remains unreleased. A slow-paced strum along which erupted into a full-blown assault; complete with heavy metal dynamic in the bridge. The song may not have represented Grohl’s finest hour, but its country and western-style chorus harmonies, and verse melody was reminiscent of the unlikely source of Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Stand!’ which, along with the song’s Clash-like two-note guitar solo wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the album. The sheer driven, hardcore edge of the track may even have sat well on a Scream record.

  The media’s reaction to the album was, in the main, positive. Inevitably perhaps, common reservations were expressed, among them the opinion that Grohl’s new venture was far too overshadowed by the legacy of his previous band.

  Metal Hammer’s Pippa Lang gave the album the maximum five stars, noting that “Grohl has transferred from drum stool to mike and guitar with astounding ease… Leaping to the fore with relish, his vocals have the same winsome quality as Cobain, but, and here’s the crux, Grohl’s achieve a far wider range, never grating, always stretching deliciously to those higher pitches.”

  She also declared Foo Fighters to be “an album of great personal triumph, dripping with easily likeable melodies, and a sort of ‘clean grunge’ vibe. Tidier and, dare I say, better played than anything any of the four have done before. Like a collaboration waiting to happen, the chemistry between Grohl, Smear, Goldsmith and Mendel positively crackles.”

  Less ecstatic but nonetheless positive was the UK’s Sunday Telegraph whose James Delingpole said, “This month’s biggest surprise is the remarkable debut by Seattle’s Foo Fighters. Knowing their pedigree, I had feared the worst… somehow, the band have passed through both minefields unscathed. It helps that their leader, Dave Grohl, is just as good on vocals as guitar as he was with his ticks.”

  One of the more cynical responses came in John Aizlewood’s Q magazine review. “Grohl has taken the wise man’s approach: he’s stopped drumming and recruited men who know their way around the block, but won’t eclipse the leader. Foo Fighters sound wise too, sufficiently like Nirvana to serve as a reminder where they came from, but not so blatant that they’ll be pinned down as copyists. Foo Fighters are grunge-quite-lite… Grohl (was) never regarded as a songwriter or vocalist (so) these expectations may prove to be his undoing, but just as likely right now, they may yet be his making. He’s done what he can.”

  That Foo Fighters was endlessly compared to Nirvana was perhaps a little unfair on Grohl. One of the reasons he had wanted to launch his latest venture with near-anonymity was so that people would listen to the songs without prejudice. However, to criticise him for making music that was reminiscent of Nirvana was ridiculous. Both he and his previous band had come from the sam
e punk tradition. They had been into the same bands, enjoyed the same influences, talked the same language. This was exactly why Grohl fitted in to Nirvana so quickly. And yet the media could not resist making the link. To some, Nirvana, or rather Cobain, had somehow been attributed with owning the copyright of the sound.

  Style magazine i-D typified this angle: “Dave Grohl has managed to bring some of that Nirvana spirit to his new band: fierce bass, pounding drums, soulful vocals, and always, always, a guitar melody underpinning the whole shebang. HE would have approved.”

  The undercurrent to such references was that for Grohl to even consider playing this kind of music could be seen as a form of intellectual and emotional theft. A strange position for the man who told U2’s Bono that his main music was punk rock – and it had been this way since he was a teenager.

  “They don’t understand that when I was fifteen and had Zen Arcade [Husker Du], that’s when I decided that I loved this music,” he argued. “For me to do anything else for the sole reason of doing something different would be so contrived. For me to put out a free-form jazz record to be as far away as possible from Nirvana would just be ridiculous.

  I knew that when I was recording the album, people would say ‘OK, that song has some distorted guitars and heavy drumming and a strong melody to it, it must be like Nirvana.’ The instant I realised that, I thought ‘Fuck it, I don’t give a shit!’ What else am I going to do? It’s just what I love to do.” (20)

  Given the circumstances surrounding Nirvana’s demise, it was inevitable that people would pore over Grohl’s lyrics looking for clues to his feelings about his previous band, and more importantly, Cobain. These tunnel-visioned critics seemed to ignore – or be ignorant of the fact – that many of the songs actually pre-dated the singer’s death.

  Grohl was adamant that his lyrics had no real meaning, they were just a jumble of words that fitted with the melody. This claim led to one journalist accusing him of being skilled at ‘psychic hoovering’, namely to be able to remove himself and his subconscious from his own past. Grohl would admit that even he could see real life situations that had subconsciously influenced his own lyrics, albeit, he explained, only after the event.

  “Often, I’ll sit around and try to deny all the personal influences, like ‘Oh yeah, these songs, a lot of the lyrics are just nonsense.’ When I write them, it’s usually just before stepping into the vocal booth and Barrett [sound engineer] will be going, ‘C’mon, we’ve got five minutes, you’ve got to write something.’ So I write some stupid words and the syllables fit and it rhymes, so I go in and sing them. Then, three years later, I’ll look at them and think, ‘Oh my God, I think I actually meant something.’ It’s frightening. And it’s not like the album is some bleeding heart for twelve quid, either. But it’s helped. It really has helped.” (21)

  One song in particular was focussed upon, ‘I’ll Stick Around’, which seemed to allude to Cobain’s departure through the repeated lines “I don’t owe you anything” and “I’ll stick around.” When people first started asking me these questions I was like, ‘piss off, you fucking sod.’ I would totally deny if, but I wasn’t lying when I denied it. I just didn’t realise it… (‘I’ll Stick Around’) is just a very negative song about feeling you were violated or deprived.” (22)

  Talking to the NME he argued, “… even the last interview I did for another English publication leaves people under the impression that ‘I’ll Stick Around’ is about Kurt. And I’m so fucking sensitive to that, but there’s nothing I can do. There’s absolutely nothing I can do. I can sit down and I can say totally with all my heart, I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, whatever, that that song is not about Kurt.

  And I hate sounding so defensive but Jesus Christ, it kills me to think that people would think that I have no respect for the guy, that I have no respect for Nirvana, that I have no respect for the past five years of my life… that’s fucking ridiculous. I just don’t want people to think that I would be so disrespectful as to trivialise this shit in my songs, just belittle it by writing a song.” (23)

  Not content with just analysing the lyrics, critics also pored over the cover artwork. The sleeve featured a picture of a gun (the photograph was by Grohl’s wife Jennifer). Many people wrongly claimed the image was a sick reference to Kurt Cobain’s death. Closer inspection revealed that the weapon was in fact a ray gun called a XZ38 Disintegrator Pistol – a toy from the 1950s which was in perfect keeping with the band’s kitsch UFO imagery. Grohl told Rolling Stone magazine: “To me, it’s a toy. It has nothing to do with anything. I love kitschy 1940s and 1950s space toys. I thought it would be a nice, plain cover – nothing fancy.

  Then I thought I’d catch so much flak, but everybody said it would be okay if I made sure everyone knew it was just a toy. People have read so much into it. Give me a fucking break.” (24)

  Grohl’s UFO obsession had already manifested itself in his choice of band and label names. Foo Fighters was the name given by the US Airforce pilots who had witnessed strange sights in the sky towards the end of the Second World War. These sightings had taken place over Japan and France and the crews of the B-29 bombers reported “balls of fire” which followed them, occasionally came up and almost sat on their tails, changed colour from orange to red to white and back again, and yet never closed in.

  Of the many reports, one B-29 claimed to have made evasive manoeuvres inside a cloud, only to discover that after emerging from it, the ball of fire was following in the same relative position. It was, they reported, five hundred yards off, three feet in diameter, and had a phosphorescent orange glow. The ball of fire followed the plane for several miles before disappearing just over Fujiyama.

  Many crews believed these “Foo Fighters” (“Foo” was slang for the French for fire ‘feu’) were a new German weapon, which they referred to as “Kraut Balls.” However the pilot’s reports were met with scepticism and the subject of “Foo Fighters” quashed once and for all. It was probably for the best that Grohl chose not to name his new band Kraut Balls.

  This silence was broken when a crew from the 415th Squadron reported a pursuit by two “Foo Fighters” only to be attacked by a glowing red object two nights later. They were flying over The Rhine.

  With reports of these “Foo Fighters” becoming more frequent, authorities attempted to dismiss them as a naturally occurring by-product of mutual electrostatic induction called St Elmo’s Fire. However, reports continued to be filed until, in May 1945, five orange balls were sighted flying in a triangular formation near the eastern edge of Pfazerwald.

  With the end of the war, “foo fighters” would pass into air force folklore, until, in the 1950s UFO sightings brought the subject back into the public domain.

  Dave Grohl’s label name, Roswell, had a similar extraterrestrial inspiration. On July 4, 1947, a UFO was reported to have crashed near the small town of Roswell, a farming and ranching community in south-eastern New Mexico. According to some reports, the bodies of four aliens were found near the ship. In other reports, one or more of the aliens survived for a period of time.

  In the years since, the Roswell incident provoked rumours and countless conspiracy theories about government suppression of the truth of extraterrestrial life. However, in July, 1994, the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force concluded that the predecessor to the US Air Force, the US Army Air Forces, recovered debris from an Army Air Forces balloon-borne research project codenamed MOGUL. Furthermore the report stated that many of the accounts appeared to be descriptions of unclassified and widely publicised Air Force scientific achievements. Of the widely reported alien bodies retrieved from the Roswell site, they concluded that they were actually anthropomorphic test dummies that were transported by US Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research.

  Of course, this report didn’t satisfy the Roswell obsessives who continue to argue the existence of UFO materials and alien bodies. For Grohl however, the use of the names “foo fighter” and “Roswell�
� would only enhance his reputation for being a sci-fi nut. The subject would become a regular feature of his interviews. He would also go on to have a walk on part in the hit TV show, X-Files. However, his appearance was so brief that even Mulder and Scully would be hard pressed to notice his existence on film. Makers of the programme insist that “he is out there”, somewhere. The Foo Fighter would also submit a track for inclusion on the X-Files movie soundtrack.

  On July 20, Foo Fighters headed off on a US tour with Shudder to Think and Wool (featuring the Stahl Brothers from Scream). In the middle of the tour they made their television debut, appearing on The David Letterman Show, to play ‘This Is A Call’.

  The US tour subsequently made way for a European Festival tour taking in Lowlands Festival, Holland on August 22, Pukkelpop Festival, Belgium on August 29 and in between these two dates on August 27, Reading Festival in the UK, where Nirvana had made that historic appearance only three years earlier.

  The Reading Festival show proved to be a huge success. Foo Fighters headlined the Melody Maker stage to a euphoric response from fans, many of whom tried on numerous occasions to reach the stage. The band were subsequently forced to interrupt their set a number of times to stop those at the front from being crushed. Some even scaled the huge poles inside the tent to get away from the crowds and to obtain a better view.

  After four numbers, they were asked to stop playing. “OK, we’re being kicked off the stage now,” said Grohl to the annoyance of the crowd. “Er, I mean, we’re taking a break,” he added to calm things down a bit. Fortunately, there were no injuries, but a number of fans were treated for heat exhaustion.