by Martin James
So people turn to their record collections and scrap books in a vanity-drenched attempt at cavorting once more with the wide-eyed arrogance of youth. It’s like a first draft of the mid-life crisis script, the demo for the hell that may follow in a few years. The curse of the thirty-something grappling with the reality of responsibility and the sound of their carefree youthful selves sprinting into the distance. It’s the rabbit-in-the-headlights shock of a new generation taking over your terrain, your spaces, but with completely different frames of reference. It’s the sheer white panic of becoming redundant.
Rock ’n’ roll is the worst for this. Despite the fact that the genre is itself an old beast lumbering towards a pensionable age, it keeps its youthful veneer through constant reinvention. And yet its entire make-up is, in youth culture terms, ancient.
Artists deal with these eternal youth obsessions through numerous forms of idiocy. Whether this be via trendy threads and over-worked hairstyles, or through attempts at embracing new sounds from the street, the result is all too often like the effect of the tail wagging the dog. Leaders becoming followers and therefore lose the essence of what made them so good in the first place.
And then there are those who invite the young pretenders into the palace to admire the crown. The artists who get the freshest faces on the block into the studio to collaborate or contribute to tracks, just to provide the desperate air of the zeitgeist in partial effect. Events such as these, of course, become the mainstay of the information hungry music press, desperate to get in on the latest album sessions. However, the reality of the finished product rarely lives up to the fantasy. What makes the new breed so good rarely transposes to the vision of the old guard. It’s all a question of ego.
Such achingly familiar attempts at supping from the fountain of youth more often than not relate to older post-midlife crisis rock stars. The group we’re interested in is the one young enough to remember why they became musicians in the first place. The kids who dropped out and rebelled against an imaginary mainstream in order to embrace the falsified outsider-ness of rock ’n’ roll.
We’re interested in the self-elected outlaws of the community whose romanticised existence was intended to shake the very foundations of society until they woke up one day and realised that their band, their music, their rebellion had become their day job. So they attempt to grasp at the last remaining vestiges of youth they possess and embrace that which they loved when they were starting out.
More often than not, this wave of nostalgia, tainted with a faint whiff of fear, manifests itself in an album of cover versions of songs from their youth. All too often these are dreadful affairs with barely a hint of face-saving integrity about them. In some cases, however, this re-visiting of the artist’s teen self involves inviting older heroes to record with them (thus asserting their own youth while underlining the respect that originals have for their music). Occasionally musicians form supergroups with those people they respect.
Dave Grohl is no exception to the shock of time elapsed. By 2000, he had grown tired of the increasingly mainstream route the Foo Fighters were taking. He still believed in the band and its music, but he had grown to feel that they had become more like the Eagles than the bands he loved to listen to. Inevitably, the man who had once exclaimed that “those early Trouble records fucking changed my life”, now started to question the direction he was taking with his music.
“The early Voivod records and Corrosion of Conformity’s Animosity, and the D.R.I. seven-inch that I bought from the singer out of his van in 1983 – that’s the kind of stuff that laid the foundation of the music that I make today… (There’s Nothing Left to Lose) … was a pretty mellow record for us. It was about exploring low-level dynamics and melody, and simple arrangements and acoustic guitars – it was more about those things than about hitting the Turbo Rat and turning it up to ten. So we went out and played a lot of those songs live, and they were pretty mellow. I would find myself listening to Sepultura’s Chaos A.D. before going onstage, and then singing a song like ‘Learn to Fly’. Which I thought was kind of funny – like, what am I doing with my life, man?” (2)
That the Foo Fighters had come from punk, hardcore and underground metal wasn’t hard to see for anyone – including the man behind the band. So in the days off from touring 1999’s There’s Nothing Left to Lose, he invited Foos producer Adam Kasper to his home studio to record some tracks that were as far from mellow Foos as you could imagine.
“I’m like, man, I’ve gotta fucking record some riffs. I’ve gotta get in there and do something heavy. As much as I love this acoustic guitar shit, I’ve just gotta feel it in my bones again.” (3)
So Grohl and Kasper just kicked back, relaxed and tried to recapture the carefree riffing of their previous selves.
“I would sit on the couch, drinking beers and watching TV with the fucking Explorer and a little Peavey practice amp next to me, just playing around. If I came up with something that sparked my interest, I’d say to Adam, ‘Come on, let’s go downstairs!’ I’d sit down at the drums and go through a quick arrangement off the top of my head. I didn’t adhere to any sort of conventional song structure. I just thought, Well, maybe that’s a verse; maybe that’s a chorus. I don’t care, let’s just record it! And then I’d get out of there and put some bass on it, put some guitar stuff on it. Forty-five minutes later, you’ve got a track. I didn’t really take it that seriously. So then I’d go back upstairs, grab a couple more beers, come up with another riff, go downstairs and do it again. Within three days, I had seven songs that were basically just riff instrumentals, with no suggestion of melody or vocals or anything.” (4)
Thus was the aforementioned Probot finally realised. Sonically it was like Neil Young’s musicians that Grohl has so openly admired, making the leap from the laidback melancholia of Harvest to the somnambulist rock of Zuma and then on to the angry feedback assault of Rust Never Sleeps in a matter of two years rather than decades. Neither There’s Nothing Left To Lose nor the less acoustic, but equally mainstream album, One by One (that arrived during the four year process of recording Probot), could have prepared the listener for its sheer visceral, snot-nosed adolescent attack.
In February 2004, the world finally got to hear the results of Grohl’s heavy-metal project, Probot – the name of an obscure character in Star Wars Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back. “I had no idea [about that],” Grohl said at the time. “I was in Las Vegas and I was walking through one of these memorabilia stores that has signed movie posters and knick-knacks and collectible crap. I walked past this one display that had a lot of antique toys in it, and there was an original toy from The Empire Strikes Back … it was a gun turret and Probot. I lost my mind! I had no idea that it was anything at all. I never knew what it was. I thought I made up the word. And the only reason why I’m calling the record that is because when I recorded the first seven songs I wrote the word ‘Probot’ on the spine of the reel in my basement so that it wouldn’t get lost among all my other Foo Fighter tapes.” (5)
Albeit accidentally named after a piece of film memorabilia, Probot was the perfect monicker for Grohl’s long talked about nostalgia project. Not so exciting, however, was the choice of musical genre that he was intending to rediscover. Rather than go to the punk and hardcore tracks of his early teens, he searched back to the heavy metal soundtrack of his post-punk wake up call. The records that many punks denied ever liking.
“I discovered all of these bands through the punk rock scene, so in 1982, when I started listening to hardcore, anything that was fast and loud, screaming-out-of-control rebellious, I would listen to – whether it was MDC or Flipper or Bad Brains – and then that gave way to Venom and Slayer and getting really into Motörhead.” (6)
The man whose near-hyperactive manner leads him to tap out drum patterns on his legs when he’s being questioned, found a natural affinity for all that is dark and hard in metal. He even admits to having been mildly attracted to the satanic aspects of the music
genre!
“Did I sacrifice virgins at an altar and drink the blood of a lamb? Well, no, I didn’t. But I thought it was kinda cool that someone did. And a lot of those bands shared the political ideals that punk rock bands did – Sepultura, Corrosion Of Conformity, D.R.I. were socially or politically motivated, somewhat. And then [there were] bands like Venom that just wanted to get wasted!” (7)
So often the butt of jokes in the music community, heavy metal shares with Goth an assumed affinity with ‘outsiderness’. It embraces the oppositional stance that most rebels against the perceived mainstream. So metal fans worldwide have often garnered negative attention from a media who increase sales through the invention of moral panics. The oppositional position that metal takes is often geographically and socially defined. As a result, U.S. metallers like Slayer will take a stance against right-wing Christian beliefs and attack mainstream morality as a way of attacking the heart of the American dream. In 1996, the parents of Elyse Marie Pahler took satanic death metal band Slayer to court in the US after their fifteen year old daughter was murdered in what was alleged to be a satanic ritual imitating the band’s lyrics. The case was dismissed by a Californian judge in 2001.
Italy has a strong Satanist scene in music, fuelled by such outsiders’ feelings towards the Catholic church. Even Norway – famously liberal and easy-going – was shocked by the murder and violence surrounding the country’s Black Metal scene and bands such as Mayhem, as well as the various arson attacks on churches. Ozzy Osbourne’s ‘Suicide Solution’ is a more obvious mainstream example – but suffice to say, metal has long been used as a folk devil for society’s moral panics.
Okay, so it could be argued that the above instances of extreme behaviour are out of the ordinary. It could also be argued that some of these bands played death-metal, a particular strain of the genre that took the fantasy aspects of the sound out of comic books and turned them into reality. The fact is that by the time Grohl launched his Probot project, the metal genre had become best known for either its extreme stupidity, or its tendency, in the shape of the more mainstream acts, towards big hair and bad videos. So why would Grohl choose to deliver a metal opus now? Was it a case of potential career suicide?
Grohl maintains he never lost his love of metal. True, as a youngster he agreed with a friend that they would never listen to that kind of music again after they’d first heard punk. But when he found his friend playing an old metal album a few months later, he realised that such a narrowly dogmatic approach to music was a bad thing. He dug out the old albums and embraced his love for metal once more. He even used it as a badge to underline his punk credentials.
“In suburban Virginia where I grew up, I was one of only two punk kids at the high school. I used to do the morning announcements right after first period, and you could start with a little music, so I would slip in a little Metallica at fuckin’ eight o’clock in the morning. I think people thought it was kinda cute.” (8)
Years later and Grohl was still trying to be the cute kid slipping some Metallica in between news bulletins. But this time Metallica was Probot, and the news bulletins were Foo Fighters records.
“To this day, I’m almost 35 years old, and I still feel like I’m seventeen,” he told Guitar World in 2003. “My world really hasn’t changed so much. I mean, I might walk down the street and meet people all day long that recognise me, but man, I still deliver bagels to my mom in the morning, and I still do beer bongs at night. And the passion for music hasn’t changed, either. It still really burns inside of me, and I think the same thing goes for all of the people on the album. It’s just a love of music that drives you, you know? It’s like an addiction, and it’s the greatest high in the world.”
The actual Probot project was very much Grohl writing as a way of showing respect to the hardcore and metal of his youth. He played all of the music with the exception of a few guest over-dubs and approached a wish list of singers to be involved. Those included on the finished album were Cronos (Venom), Lemmy (Motörhead), Max Cavalera (Sepultura/Soulfly), Tom G Warrior (Celtic Frost/The Apollyon Sun), Mike Dean (Corrosion of Conformity), Kurt Brecht (D.R.I.J), Snake (Voivod), Wino (Saint Vitus/The Obsessed/The Hidden Hand), Lee Dorrian (Napalm Death/Cathedral), Eric Wagner (Trouble) and King Diamond (Mercyful Fate). An extra hidden track included a vocal performance from comedian and friend Jack Black.
The only singers from Grohl’s wish list not to appear on the album were Tom Araya of Slayer and Phil Anselmo from Pantera, and latterly of Down and Superjoint Ritual.
“Everyone of these people who I asked,” he explained, “has a lot to do, and some of them live on the other side of this planet. I sent packages with tapes and hoped that that addressee would like them. That’s why it took three years from the first take until the last take. I also sent a tape to Tom Araya, but it didn’t work in the end. It wasn’t easy to fill his place. It had to be someone who fits into the family. It took a while, but then I thought of Kurt Brecht from D.R.I., Corrosion Of Conformity and the Cro-Mags – these were the three best bands from the punk or hardcore side, that in reality were making metal.” (9)
This last statement from Grohl gets to the heart of the problem that runs throughout Probot as a long-term proposition. Grohl’s approach to genre is extremely liquid. As a musician he sees the natural links between all types of metal, hardcore, punk and so on. However these musical forms are all too often followed vehemently by musical obsessives who will separate out genres into small sub-genres, which are defined by something as arbitrary as guitar sound or drum patterns. Each genre subsequently develops its own life beyond the musical form and subsequently perceived subcultures and scenes develop.
Grohl’s approach is, however, far more pragmatic in that it allows for the fact that no one remains within one strain of a genre. Furthermore, no single form of music is separated from another; genre isn’t as simple as the racking of styles in a record store. It’s also true to say that no subculture exists in a vacuum untouched and uninvolved with mainstream culture. Music culture cannot ever be seen as being homologous, and Grohl understands this. Which is why he can make the switch from extreme to mellow and back to extreme, noise so swiftly. It’s all a part of the same thing to him. It all comes from those bands he grew up with.
There was another contradictory aspect to Probot in that it presented a challenge to the perceived ideas of rock music history. The music press likes to present a notion of genres having a defined moment of birth and death. Subsequently they obsess with finding the first recorded music of a new genre and then declare its death with the onset of new sound, or a fresh style. Grunge and metal are good examples of this.
Grunge was clearly defined by the media as having emerged at a particular moment in time, in a clearly isolated geographical place and somehow separated from anything but the coolest antecedents. It was the sound of Generation X living out slacker realities through a soundtrack that drew on hardcore punk, the Stooges, MC5, glam era Bowie and at a push, the bluesier elements of Led Zeppelin. Furthermore the arrival of grunge was mediated as being the final death knell of Eighties heavy metal. As Independent journalist Ben Thompson suggested in 2004, this meeting of the zeitgeist and the newly redundant was most clearly represented when Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses almost got into a fight at the 1992 MTV awards.
Thompson quite correctly argued however, “There was much more at stake than just the usual clash of rock-star egos. The confrontation between old-school, macho Goliath and new-school, dress-wearing David seemed to mark a historic shift in rock’s balance of power.” (10)
For Grohl now to be seen to embrace that which his band had come to overthrow, seemed to many to be somewhat hypocritical. But this accusation would ignore the fact that Nirvana (like many of the grunge élite) had always admitted to liking a far more diverse selection of musicians than the media would allow into the very narrow definition of grunge. Not only did these catholic tastes extend to aspects of hardcore and metal, but even to the
opposite extremes of disco! Indeed Cobain’s journals clearly depict his pen drawn image of Parisian disco musician Cerrone ‘saving the world!’
Marc Cerrone explains the effect this had on him personally, “When I first saw this I felt like… wow! I remember that in the period that Kurt was big I was frustrated. Everyone thought disco was has-been music. So when this guy’s diaries are published, I discover that back at the time when I was thought of a has-been, this guy, who everyone loved, was doing cartoons of me. I was like… wow!”
This wide open view to the machinations of genre and understanding of histories are what also marks Grohl’s own musical position out. He realises that genres aren’t born separated from history, he also understands that music doesn’t die, rather it occasionally fades away. This is how he can so easily make generic shifts. However, the point he does make, and one that reveals much about the true motivation behind Probot, is one of authenticity. A concept that he brings down to the simple duality of a good/bad taste culture.
“To me, there was good metal and there was bad metal. Good metal was Voivod and Motörhead and Trouble and Merciful Fate and Sepultura. And then there were a few bands whose time was up, and none of them had anything to do with that scene at all. When it comes to good metal and bad metal, it’s pretty obvious which bands were ready to trade their guitars in for shovels.” (11)
This need for authenticity extends deep into the make up of the Probot concept. It was his reaction against the mundanity of radio friendly rock, a position that in itself would have abhorred the younger Grohl. Indeed the Foo Fighters’ stadium sized tours and mainstream hits would have represented the epitome of what he would maybe have been against.
So authenticity lies at the very heart of the album, from its choice of singers to its marketing through independent metal label Southern Lord. It was every inch the embracing of ‘real’ musical values over the fake values of the industry. He even declares that he didn’t care if it made money or not, that money wasn’t a concern to him. Neither was it a concern for his favourite musicians from his youth.