by Martin James
This position was most clearly revealed to Guitar World when pushed about the ironic images of metal in popular couture at the time.
“Well, see, that’s something that we’ve been very sensitive to throughout the whole project. Rock music has become kind of in vogue, and rock cliché has become kind of in vogue and the irony of rock has become kind of chic, you know? You start seeing supermodels in Motörhead t-shirts, or pop stars wearing fucking MC5 shirts. But to me, rock ’n’ roll has never been a fashion thing, and metal has never been ironic.
But with this Probot record, all of these people are still making music for all the right reasons, and that’s really important to me. Before Nirvana became popular, I was happy because I loved doing it. If that meant going without food for two or three days, or playing in front of seven people a night, it didn’t matter to me, man. I was just going for it because I loved it. And then after Nirvana became popular, it was the same thing. It still is.” (12)
The sense of family, or community is the most important aspect to Probot. In this project Grohl gets to reclaim his place in the underground while also realigning himself to the ideologies of his past life. It’s an act that reaffirms his position as a free thinking individual who, despite being signed to a major label and playing in a huge rock band, still thinks like someone on the fringes looking in.
With no single stylistic focal point and numerous vocalists on board, the Probot project sounded disjointed at best, and at worst a fantasy folly of someone successful enough to make music without any need for financial reward. Much as he might romanticise about his days being a penniless musician with Scream traveling around Europe in the back of a van for the love of music, it was only with the success of his later bands that he was able to indulge in this fantasy. In fact it’s a fantasy that clings to his role as a fan – a position that has been a feature of his entire career. “The list of vocalists just read like a dream come true, it was my fucking record collection.” Indeed, Grohl has confessed to having listened to Voivod’s 1988 album Dimension Hatross every day for a year, and that it was his dream to go to a C.O.C. or Voivod gig, end up playing drums for them there and then. “I had this fantasy that I would go to their show, something would happen to their drummer, and they’d call into the mike: ‘Is there anyone out there who knows our songs?’ And I would step up and just fucking shred through a whole set.”(13)
Perhaps the truest test of the authenticity, or honesty of Probot lay not in Grohl’s ambitions but in the reactions of those who actually got involved. In many ways the album was as much a way of paying respect to them, as it was a dream work-out for him.
The production of the album would provide few clues as to the reaction of the guest vocalists beyond the fact they’d agreed to do it. Much of the album was recorded via parts being Fed Ex’d all over the world and with Grohl rarely meeting his idols during this process. Very little critical hype built up around the album. The project was limited to rumour and idle talk. Of all of the guests involved, only two made it into the studio to work directly with Grohl: Motörhead’s Lemmy and Wino (real name Scott Weinrich) from the Obsessed.
“The Obsessed were local D.C. area heroes,” explained Grohl with an obvious fan’s admiration. “They were not unlike Motörhead in that they were a band that both the punks and the metalheads liked. You would see the Obsessed on a bill with 45 Grave or Void or local hardcore bands, you know? And everybody had a lot of respect for them, because they were heavy as fuck, man. Wino wound up being in St. Vitus and Spirit Caravan, and the guy is a fucking legend. I mean, he’s unbelievably talented, and his conviction and integrity are still rooted in the local scene and in the underground, which is an aesthetic that I wanted to adhere to with this album. I really wanted to make sure that everything still had that spirit and that vibe.
“I went into the studio with Wino. And there’s nothing cooler than seeing one of your heroes stand in front of a mic with his hands on his belt buckle, singing a song like that. It was unreal!” (14)
Wino himself was equally excited by the Probot proposal. Not simply because it was being put together by his old friend, but also due to the line-up of legends on the album.
“I was pretty honoured that he asked me, but surprised at the same time,” explained the man who is famed for his tattoos and wild stare. “I was proud to be included in his list of inspirational people. I thought the Nirvana stuff was great,” he said “I thought moving to the Foo Fighters was very logical and I was very happy to see him have the success that he has.”
Talking to Kerrang!, Voivod frontman Snake (real name Denis Belanger), was similarly non-committal about the Foos, preferring instead to focus on Grohl’s personality and love for the music being represented by Probot. “I think Dave is really good because he made it big and successful,” Snake noted. “But he has so much respect for the bands that were there. He’s a wonderful guy, always has a smile on his face.”(15)
If the inclusion of Wino in the line-up drew a direct line to Grohl’s teenage years, then the addition of Lee Dorrian (Napalm Death/ Cathedral) was his link to the true international underground community of the Eighties hardcore/metal scene. Grohl had first met Lee when Scream played at a gig in Birmingham being promoted by the then-Napalm Death man. As was normal at gigs like these throughout Europe, the band stayed with the promoter – in this case, Lee’s minimally furnished flat.
“Oh god,” Lee recalls, “Dave stayed at my flat when there was no furniture, no carpet, all the windows were broken and we just slept on the floor. I remember Dave from then, he was a cool guy.”(16)
Lee lost touch with Dave as the two of them went on to enjoy differing levels of success with their own bands. A few years later, however, when Dave was playing with Queens of the Stone Age, he sent a message back to Lee via Greg Stahl.
“Greg and I were out in London on one of our wrecking spree weeks and the Foo Fighters were playing with Queens Of The Stone Age. Greg went backstage to say hello and when he came stumbling back to meet me in the pub later he said that Dave wanted me to be on his record. I thought that was just Greg being drunk, but then I got an email. Fucking hell, it was true. Then I heard the music Dave sent me and it was a double ‘Wow,’ because it was proper doom. It wasn’t just some guy making up a track, it was proper … fucking … doom. For someone like Dave to ask me to be on his record and then to come up with music like that, I was overwhelmed a little bit,” he admits. (17)
If any of the guests on the Probot album had any misgivings about the project then they left it to one man to express them. Nordic legend Cronos admitted to being at least a little unsure of the proposal to work with a musician better known these days for his ‘soft rock’ anthems.
“At the beginning, Dave sent me an email, in which the first hundred lines he was talking about how much he loves Venom and how often he’s seen us play live. A real fan letter! Back then he was only playing with the idea of recording a metal album with all his metal heroes and Venom having a part in it. He wrote that he’d have to get something off his chest. I answered instantly ‘Of course, man. Send this shit over! Let’s fucking do it!’ It was very, very strange. I didn’t know what to expect at all. Would this shit be hard or not? Until now I’ve only done the hard sound – and that won’t ever change! But when I got Dave’s package and heard the tape … Fucking hell, this was heavy shit!
This guy has metal balls! I mean, I don’t know what it’s like to do commercial pop music, but he seems to miss something. That has to be frustrating, if you want to scream, but you have to sing. That’s why the Probot record is so fucking heavy as fuck!” (18)
But it was the involvement of Lemmy that quickly took on legendary proportions with Grohl describing being in the same studio as the man “like meeting the fifth Beatle”.
Grohl continued: “I met Lemmy once, years ago, but I was walking out of a strip club and he was at the video poker machine. I said, ‘Hey, man, I’ve got a lot of respect for you’ and then I r
an away before he could say anything. For ‘Shake Your Blood’ he came into the studio and drank a half a [small bottle] of Jack Daniel’s before he even got in front of a microphone. He sang it twice, and it was genius. He nailed the bass in two takes. When we were done he said, ‘Who wants to go look at some tits?’”(19)
The eleven track, self-titled Probot album was released on February 10, 2004. A two-track seven inch single containing the cuts ‘Centuries Of Sin’ (featuring Cronos of Venom) and ‘Emerald Lies’ (featuring Wino), limited to the satanistic joke of 6,666 copies, preceded the album release. As did a video to accompany the Lemmy track ‘Shake Your Blood’ – a song that was criticised as being a dead ringer for Motörhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’ (“I wanna be the drummer in Motörhead for one day, you know? So I wrote a track that’s a simple rock song – straight to the point, no filler or fluff, just something that sounds like Lemmy should be singing on it.” said Grohl at the time).
In many ways, the video could be the one aspect of the entire Probot package that smells of ironic pastiche. In an attempt to capture the frequent sexism of the metal scene, the band (Grohl on drums, ever the fanboy in a Motörhead t-shirt, Lemmy on bass and turtle neck growling vocals, Wino on guitar) perform the song amid seventy scantily clad, tattooed women all recruited through the Suicide Girls website. With the girls performing various forms of S&M on each other and generally “making out” the scene was one of pure adolescent fantasy – and ironically the very thing that the other guys in Nirvana found uncomfortable about the metal genre.
Grohl made no apologies for it though. He was, after all, living out a lifelong dream of drumming with Lemmy. Talking to Guitar World he exclaimed, “Dude, I could’ve wrapped my car around a tree on the way home, and I would have been totally cool with it!” (20)
Despite any obvious cynical observations, however, Probot was largely a success with metal heads appreciating it for what it was. The album was perhaps understandably less well received by fans of the Foo Fighters who had grown used to a far more sanitised, anodyne form of rock. Following TV appearances on MTV and Fuse TV, Grohl returned to the Foos camp newly invigorated, and the experience of laying down some hard and heavy tracks suggested a change in direction for the day job.
“I believe Probot is good for Dave, to break out of the rock star-routine. Because he simply is a rock star,” suggested Lee Dorrien. And its certainly true that the pressures of being a recognizable star had had a profound effect on Grohl, the man who preferred to step out of the spotlight and hang out in normalsville with his mates.
“I don’t wanna be like (a rock star)” he has said, “even when I was young, I wanted to be a rocker, but not a rock star. I could’ve never been a part of U2 or The Police. What I make … there is just no option to become famous. There’s people that want exactly that, who behave like stars. I have never dealt with that. I mean if you listened to Bleach would you have thought that Nirvana were gonna be huge? I didn’t. I didn’t know anyone who knew it. In our wet dreams we thought of 700 people in a full club.” (21)
So with the Foo Fighters about to enter the recording arena once again, Grohl was displaying the dichotomy of his position for all to see. At heart he’s the fanboy, still in awe of those artists whom he worshipped as a teen (“If you would have told me that I could take a photo of Cronos and me when I was sixteen, I would’ve shit my pants”). He’s still the underground troubadour with a desire to make honest, no bullshit music. But to many his band epitomises mainstream MTV rock. It was a thought that had even crossed Grohl’s mind in the two years leading up to the release of Probot.
Back in 2002, as the band headlined the main stage at the Carling Weekend Reading and Leeds Festivals, Grohl was struck by the dilemma posed by 55,000 people singing his band’s songs back to him. Exciting as it felt at the time, later in the day he started to consider the other side of the coin. “We had reached this peak and suddenly we were enormous. We were playing arenas in the UK, we were headlining Reading. We went to Australia and we headlined the Big Day Out festival over there. We had this huge, big, long set list of songs that everyone knew. We had this massive production that we dragged around the world. We had moments in the show where people would sing along. And it was great – of course it was – but do you know what? I never imagined it reaching [such a] point. Not for a second. And when it happened it got me thinking… about what it meant for us. We’d reached a level and it meant something. It was just a question of what? Did it mean it was time for us to take one of those four year breaks? Or did it mean it was time for us to try something different?” When asked if that included splitting up he confided, “Well, yeah, that was one of the things I wondered about. I did think about going out at the top.”(22)
The only way for Foo Fighters to move forward would be to take the lessons learned with Probot, the boredom endured through the nightly performances of ‘Learn To Fly’ and the experience of feeling like his band risked turning into the Eagles, and turn them on their head.
If the Foo Fighters creative position appeared to be slightly schizophrenic at this point, then what followed would not only exaggerate the suggestion, but also confound all but the most adoring fan.
Notes
1. The Fan Has Won by Jochen Schliemann (Visions) 2004
2. Man of Steel by Dan Epstein (Guitar World) 2004
3. Returning To His Roots With Probot by Ken Micallef (Modern Drummer) 2004
4. Man of Steel by Dan Epstein (Guitar World) 2004
5. Building The Perfect Probot by Jason Adams (LISTEN2THIS) 2004
6. Metal Gods (Kerrang!) 2004
7. Metal Gods (Kerrang!) 2004
8. I, Probot by Jon Wiederhorn (Revolver) 2004
9. Man of Steel by Dan Epstein (Guitar World) 2004
10. Release the Probot by Ben Thompson (Independent) 2004
11. Reinventing The Steel by Ian Winwood (Kerrang!) 2003
12. Man of Steel by Dan Epstein (Guitar World) 2004
13. Dave Grohl’s League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Marion Garden (Terrorizer) 2004
14. Man of Steel by Dan Epstein (Guitar World) 2004
15. Dave Grohl’s League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Marion Garden (Terrorizer) 2004
16. Ibid
17. Ibid
18. The Fan Has Won by Jochen Schliemann (Visions) 2004
19. Building The Perfect Probot by Jason Adams (LISTEN2THIS) 2004
20. Metal Gods (Kerrang!) 2004
21. Man of Steel by Dan Epstein (Guitar World) 2004
22. I’m A Geek. I’m the Guy Next Door. Alright, Alright! I’m The Luckiest Bastard In The World! by Ian Winwood (NME) 2005
9
ALWAYS WAS THE LUCKY ONE
Why do drummers have kids?
They’re not too good at the rhythm method.
May 2005, Radio One Big Weekend, Herrington Park, Sunderland, United Kingdom.
It’s mid-May, a month that promises the first hints of blue skies and summer warmth. Here in Sunderland however, the Gods of the weather are waging a war on Radio 1’s mini festival. In the space of a few hours, the North East of England is whipped by gale force winds, burned by sharp spells of sunshine, blistered by pelting hail stones and half-drowned in rivers of mud. It’s like Woodstock, Glastonbury and a mud wrestling championship on a small scale. All that’s missing is a bloody great tsunami to wash Herrington Park out to the North Sea.
In his band’s bus, Grohl sits ashen faced. He is suffering from severe laryngitis and his doctor has ordered him to refrain from talking for at least a week. Already he’s been forced to cancel a secret warm-up date and an MTV shoot for the Foo Fighters. His only thought is to keep quiet to allow his voice enough of a return for him to play in Sunderland’s newly acquired swamp. Not even the sight of self-styled Foo Fighters uber-fan, Radio One’s eternal student Jo Wiley, can tempt him away from his vow of silence.
With lank hair falling across his unshaven face and hoody sleeves pulled over his hands, he h
uddles into his chair. Only able to manage a shrug and a faint smile in acknowledgement of visitors as he tucks into his warming medicated drink.
A few hours later, he announces to a baying crowd that the doctor’s had warned him not to sing tonight, but all he wanted to do was play some loud rock ’n’ roll to the people of Sunderland. And that’s exactly what he does. For the next thirty minutes, the Foo Fighters are the single most electrifying band on the planet. They steamroll through a greatest hits package that reminds the crowd of what a potent force they are live. When they introduce ‘Best of You, you can be forgiven for forgetting that only a year earlier this band had seemed on the brink of collapse. It’s the first time the forthcoming new single has been played live to a UK crowd and already it sounds like classic Foo Fighters. Suddenly the Foo’s future looks bright.
But to understand the place where they are with ‘Best of You’, it’s necessary to look back again. Back to the days when Grohl was missing in action on his numerous guest sessions, and more importantly, back to Probot – the sound of the man letting off steam and getting back to some kind of nostalgic reality.
The four year period between initial recording and final release of Probot represented a shaky time for the Foo Fighters. The band’s leader Dave Grohl was increasingly smitten with the idea of drumming again and found himself being willingly spirited away to supply drums for a series of bands. Furthermore his love for Queens of the Stone Age was starting to out shine his feelings for the day job. Perhaps unsurprisingly the album recorded in the middle of this malaise, One by One, proved to be such a hit and miss affair, with the band later universally claiming it to be a turkey.