by Martin James
With Smear’s departure, however, the role of focal point lay squarely on Grohl’s shoulders for the first time since the band’s inception. Or indeed, the first time since he started playing in bands. “When he split, I did feel extra responsibility, but it was strange because he was the focal point, yet he never did interviews. When he first left and you listened to the band, I don’t think you could really tell that he wasn’t there. Now you can tell he’s gone though, because in the last eight months we’ve become the best band we’ve ever been – live and in the studio. I think that Franz’s guitar playing is so much more contained and precise and powerful. When Pat left, I expected people to be holding up ‘Where’s Pat?’ signs; I expected there to be some sort of backlash, or a lot of people that were upset about him leaving, but not once have I seen anyone say, ‘We miss Pat’. That sounds awful, but it’s true. Actually, after he left, the band started getting more popular, so I don’t know what that has to do with! It seemed like he split right at the wrong time, ‘cos everything started going so well for us. But he still gets to sit at home and he gets the cheques, so he’s psyched.” (6)
Grohl’s reticence to step into the limelight not only stemmed from his own insecurities, but also his punk ideologies. He was still fiercely anti-star. In fact, despite living amid the hell of Hollywood celebrity (and reportedly dating Winona Ryder at this time) he had never embraced the celebrity ethos.
As a result he worked overtime at pushing this image that his band were just ordinary people. This translated into rarely having to deal with the problems of being pestered by the tabloids or stalked by the public. In fact, he was able to live a relatively normal life – if spending ninety per cent of your time on a tour bus can be considered normal!
“I don’t get accosted by people, I don’t have a stalker and I don’t have a hard time in public,” he says. “I think one of the reasons I don’t is (a) we’re not that popular a band, (b) I was the drummer of Nirvana with long hair – no one knew what I looked like, even when I was in that band nobody recognised me and lastly (c) most people see me as an anti-celebrity, just a normal guy. Wow, that guy won the lottery, how come he gets to be on fucking Saturday Night Live, how come he gets to be on MTV. He doesn’t look any different to anyone else. So whenever people accost me on the street it’s ‘Hey Dave, how are ya? What’s up Grohl? How’s it going?’ It’s never bodyguards and security.”
The motivation behind his anti-celebrity stance was, he admitted, due to those punk roots. Although, as has already been noted, the everyman image also acted as an effective defence mechanism against the more negative and invasive elements of the media.
“I hate to go back to the punk rock all the time but when I was twelve, thirteen-years-old in the Washington DC hardcore scene, there wasn’t any such thing as a rock star,” he continued. “The people in the bands were the people who were selling you the T-shirts after the show. The people in the bands were the ones driving the vans or hanging out with you or sleeping on your floor. Your favourite bands, the singer’s taking a shower in your house because they couldn’t afford a motel. That idea still sticks with me. That’s the way I’ve always seen the whole thing. There shouldn’t really be any difference. And I still hate to see fucking egotistical rock stars who consider themselves better than anybody else just because they play an instrument. It’s ridiculous. Even horrible bands. It blows me away that anyone would consider themselves any better than anyone else because of something that they do. To consider yourself badass for being a fucking drummer…” he trails off in disbelief at the whole idea.
Despite his claims to be just an ordinary Joe, Grohl did receive more than his fair share of attention from fans. He may suggest that this was typified by people saying, “Hi Dave”, but the reality was a little more akin to pop star worship at times.
Many of the band’s shows or TV appearances became hunting grounds for the more obsessive fans who would scream his name at the tops of their voices, pleading with him to acknowledge them. It was a situation that he clearly found uncomfortable.
“I still never expect it; it just happens. You have to figure, well, these people probably really like your music, so it’s pretty flattering. But it gets a little weird. You hear one of them go, ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe I touched him!’ and it’s like ‘Oh please! Would you just relax? Give me a break! Would you like to come and watch me take a shit?’”
Another interesting aspect to his anti-star position was the fact that he felt little affinity with his contemporaries who were being hailed as stars. For him ‘stars’ at this time (1998) had little to do with music, but image and PR. He did however have some respect for the old-school rock stars. “I’ve always thought of the rock star term as fucking derogatory man, it’s gross. When I think of rock stars of yesteryear, they sort of seem like superhero cartoon characters. When I think about rock stars today, I think they’re arseholes! When someone is termed ‘one of the last true rock stars’, to me it seems like they’re saying they’re one of the last true arseholes’, you know? In order to be a good rock star today you have to be arrogant, very career-driven and everywhere all the time – in all the right places and dealing with all the right people.
It used to be that rock stars had something to do with music; they were people that were exceptional and really excelled in whatever they were doing. Whether it was John Bonham, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne or Tony Iommi or whoever – they were doing something that was new and meaningful and wonderful and different. Today it just seems like this person got lucky ‘cos they had a hit single and their face is on the cover of every magazine, and that gives them licence to fucking mouth off, which grosses me out. It should be secondary – it doesn’t have anything to do with the music anymore, it has to do with the image. That’s what I think is wrong.” (7)
On January 21 the anti-star Foo Fighters arrived in Tokyo, Japan to play two dates at Blitz. The opening night, the first of the Pacific Rim stage of the tour, went without a hitch. However, the following night Grohl became violently ill nine songs into a nineteen-song set and was forced to leave the stage. He never made it back again.
Missing a gig through illness was almost unheard of for Grohl. In the years since he first started playing in bands he had never missed or abandoned a gig for anything. In fact, had he been a blue-collar worker, he would have been the one clocking in the hours and popping cold remedies rather than take a day off work. To say his approach to being in a band was almost the epitome of the protestant work ethic wasn’t an overstatement. Witness the fact that he has always found it almost impossible to take a holiday. Sure he’s hyperactive, but he’s also the one who takes care of things, the provider. And if he gets ill, everything around him suffers.
In support of the winter 1998 tour, Foo Fighters had released their third single from The Colour And The Shape. ‘My Hero’ was perhaps an obvious choice of single thanks to its radio friendly hooklines. The CD release in the UK proved to be the beginning of the band’s use of new technology as CD extras. The single included a cross platform enhanced CD portion, which featured the full-length ‘Everlong’ video, thirty seconds of the ‘Monkey Wrench’ video, and screenshots from a Brixton Academy show in November 1997. It was one of the first enhanced singles (the very first having come from south London dance-rock crossover act Transcendental Love Machine a year earlier).
Other tracks included on the single were ‘Dear Lover’ from the album sessions and ‘Baker Street’, the Gerry Rafferty song recorded by the band for their 1997 Radio 1 session. ‘Baker Street’ would later appear on the EMI artist’s compilation Come Again.
Following their Japanese dates the band flew to Australia for shows in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide and Perth before playing two dates in Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand. The band then travelled to New York for a one-off date at the Roseland Ballroom and an appearance on The Howard Stern Show.
During their rare few days off in March, they opted to go into th
e studio! Their first session was to record a new version of ‘Walking After You’ at Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood. This was followed by a session at Sound City Studios, Van Nuys, California, to record the new song ‘A320’.
The reasons for the new version of ‘Walking After You’ was that it had been licensed for use in the X-Files movie. Grohl had wanted to provide the track with more emotion, having been unhappy with the original vocal track. However, he also had high hopes that this love song about his separation from Jennifer Youngblood would be the catalyst for, and soundtrack to, Mulder and Scully finally getting together!
“Having watched the show so much for so many years, you fall in love with the characters,” he says. “And I guess you sorta expect them to fall in love with each other. ‘Walking After You’ is basically an intimate sort of love song where you’re so dependent on someone else that you know, if they walk out on you, then… then you’re walking after them. Because you need them. So I guess my dream was to give this to the X-Files and have them use it in a scene where Mulder and Scully finally get together (laughs). The love scene! It would be amazing to see that happen with a song that meant a lot to me playing in the background. That would be pretty beautiful.” (8)
‘Walking After You’ would be released as a limited edition single in May 1998. The flipside featured Ween playing their song ‘Beacon Light’. ‘A320’ on the other hand would eventually turn up on the soundtrack to the movie Godzilla.
“It (Godzilla) was fuckin’ lame,” laughed Grohl. “So we sat through the whole movie wondering where the hell they were going to put our song. It wasn’t even in the movie! (Soundtracks are) more to promote the movie and act as a recovery fund if the movie does really poor.” (9)
‘A320’ was produced by Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads fame. It was a mid-tempo track that boasted gorgeous, Bowie-esque outro featuring Petra Hayden on violin, Benmont Tench on organ and Harrison on piano. It also offered an early glimpse at the more introspective nature of the tracks they would go on to record for the next Foos album, There Is Nothing Left To Lose.
‘Walking After You’ was issued on Atlantic Records as they owned the rights to the X-Files soundtrack. However there were other label changes going on in the background at this time. Grohl had severed ties between Roswell and Capitol, taking Foo Fighters with him. He was now looking for a new deal for his imprint. The generally accepted reason was that Grohl had included in his deal a “key man” clause that stated should company president Gary Gersh ever leave, then he could too. So when Gersh left in 1998, Grohl remained true to his word, and upped sticks.
As this was unfolding, however, Foo Fighters continued on their exhaustive world tour including the summer’s many festival dates, which included a gig with Ozzy Osbourne at the legendary Ozzfest on June 20.
“I didn’t realise what the gig was going to be at first,” laughs Grohl at the memory. “I was just asked, ‘Do you want to play with Ozzy?’ and I was like ‘Fuck yeah!’ So I thought we would be supporting. Then I found out we were in the line-up for Ozzfest! The biggest fucking heavy metal festival! So I thought, ‘fuck it, let’s do it.’”
Although the audience were pretty hostile towards Foo Fighters, Ozzy himself treated them well. This hadn’t been the case when the band had supported the Rolling Stones however. This date – which had after all caused so much friction – turned out to be a nightmare. The Stones attitude to their support act only underlined Grohl’s dislike of the rock star mentality.
“They didn’t give us a guest list, they reserved a hundred tickets that we could buy for $64 a piece,” he exclaimed. “So if I wanted my sister or my girlfriend to come, I had to buy a fucking ticket. And they didn’t give us a dressing room in the venue; we had to sit in the trailer out in the parking lot. That was fucked up, that was bullshit.” (10)
Foo Fighters were a little less demanding however. In an industry famed for its excessive rider requirements, the Foos were unusually restrained. “We’re not really too big on deli meats,” said Grohl. “We like Kinder eggs – we end up just making the toys and throwing away the chocolate. Cigarettes are probably the weirdest things I insist on. I have friends who work at clubs, and they keep the riders that bands send and tack them on the fuckin’ wall so I see the most ridiculous riders – fifteen boxes of Kleenex, a box of rubbers, some clean white socks, some underwear… buy your own fucking socks, man!” (11)
To play a heavy metal festival like Ozzfest wasn’t such an unusual concept for Grohl. In the days pre-punk, he was a huge heavy metal fan and still harboured a love of many of those bands. His passion for the music stretched as far as speed metal, thrash, death metal and so on.
Not that this love of metal had effected his own stage persona. True, he was given to striking James Hetfield poses in moments of on stage self-depreciating humour, but the old punks still inspired his actions. For example, at the Midtown Music Festival in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 2, he stopped the band mid-song to make sure an apparently injured fan was all right. And when a girl mosher had her shirt torn off, he gave her the shirt off his own back!
In June, Foo Fighters joined the Edgefest Tour of Canada. The country had long held a strong fan base for the Foos, with Foo Fighters shifting in excess of 200,000 units, which represented double platinum sales. The Colour And The Shape was on the way to similar sales.
On the opening night in Montreal, Grohl took two $100 notes from his pocket before the band played ‘Big Me’ (which he described as “a stupid love song”) and waved them in the air. He then asked for a girl and a guy to get on stage to see if they would kiss for the entire song. When they succeeded he gave them one hundred dollars each and then screamed “get the fuck off my stage!” repeatedly. Self-effacing humour or not, Grohl was turning into something of a showman.
Following the Edgefest tour, the band returned to the UK for what were to be their last gigs of the year. The first, a secret gig at London’s Subterranea as a warm up for their performance at Reading Festival the following night. By playing a Reading Festival warm up at the Subterranea, the Foos were following in something of a tradition. Over the years bands that have used the small west London venue for secret pre-Reading gigs have included Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction.
The venue would also have been of interest to Grohl because in its previous incarnation as Acklam Hall, it was something of a punk and post-punk hangout; playing host to many of the bands Grohl had been into since discovering punk.
With the completion of the Subterranea and Reading Festival shows, the tour for The Colour And The Shape was finally over. The band returned to the US with thoughts already turning to recording the third album. However, Grohl had other things on his mind. First of all, he had agreed to produce Capitol Records artists Verbana. Secondly, he was growing tired of Hollywood and wanted to get out.
Verbana consisted of Anne Marie Griffin on guitar, bass and vocals, Les Nuby on drums, and Scott Bondy on guitar and vocals. Grohl had become a huge fan of theirs when they had supported Foo Fighters during their 1997 tour of the US: “…a return to good rock music… they have a great spirit and energy along with really catchy tunes. It’s like a nasty, sexy Rolling Stones meets Debbie Does Dallas tuned down to a C.”
Grohl produced the band’s Into The Pink album, which echoed Nirvana’s Bleach as much as it conjured up memories of early punk bands – with loads of pop melody thrown in for good measure. Sadly, the album was a huge disappointment, never fully moving beyond the monotony of a recording that was so one-level as to be virtually flat-lining.
Life in Los Angeles had become increasingly difficult for Grohl to come to terms with. The city was built around the concept of the velvet rope, which went against everything he held true. He hated the plasticity and many of the city’s most celebrated characters left him completely cold and alienated.
As a result, numerous dilemmas which he had suppressed over the years came to the surface. Issues like his inability to face problems head on
; his tendency towards an emotional distance; of course the psychological fall out from his break-up with his ex-wife Jennifer; and the ever-present post-traumatic shock which followed Cobain’s death. He still thought about the Nirvana singer everyday, but more to the point, was continually forced to think and talk about it by journalists who would find ever more slippery ways of getting him to open up on the subject.
It was a period in which Grohl started asking a number of questions of himself. Inevitably perhaps, given the city he was living in, he sought answers through counselling. “I’ve gone to a few different therapists,” he explained. “I’d go to one and they’d tell me one thing and I’d go to another and come out of it and my friend whose idea it was to go would say ‘what did your therapist say?’ And I’d say ‘my therapist said this,’ and this person would say, ‘oh, you’ve got the wrong therapist. Go and see another one.’ And they’d say an entirely different thing. I’ve never been a fan of therapy, although I can understand how it can be helpful but I had bad experiences with it because I just felt like I was being judged more than anything. I felt like I was in a confessional and that to me didn’t seem very healthy.”
Grohl subsequently returned to his hometown of Virginia “just ‘cause of family. My mom and dad live around here and all my friends from high school.” Grohl bought a house in Alexandria, Virginia and set about building a basement studio. To help in the process, he enlisted the services of long-time friend Adam Kasper.
“Well he’s from Seattle and he had worked on some Nirvana stuff. He worked on some mixes for In Utero and recorded us a couple times.” (12) So Kasper moved to Grohl’s house and got down to the hard work of creating the studio. It was completed by November 1998 when the band decamped to Virginia to start work on demo-ing new material.