Dave Grohl, Times Like His

by Martin James

  Far from being inspired by Grohl’s metal musings, it was an album which showed the growing schizophrenia in the band’s make up. On the one hand, they were a rock band who had the desire to play hard and loud. On the other, there was this whole west coast MOR rock balladeering side to them, which they also clearly loved. Grohl may have admitted to feeling like the band had turned into the Eagles on There is Nothing Left to Lose but at least this stage of the band’s career had an honest and clearly definable direction. One by One was nearing Foo Fighters pastiche in that it tried to cover both aspects of their sound, but ultimately took neither to its concluding extreme.

  “It was a traumatic period,” Hawkins explained to Blender. “We were just happy we got it done.” Grohl however was less charitable towards the album. In the same interview he argued, “Half of it is chud. There was a lot of filler. I didn’t realise it when we were recording, or when we were mixing, but I realised it when we started playing shows, and half that album was completely deleted from the set list. That’s just a tell tale sign.”

  Much is made of Grohl’s extra curricular activities at this time but it is important to note that the rest of the band also explored their own projects. Many band members also returned to a pre-Foo Fighters type of music – the need to get back to the roots of why they joined bands in the first place being as real for Mendel in particular as it was for Grohl.

  As the longest surviving member of the Foo Fighters, it is perhaps Mendel’s relationship with Grohl that best illustrates the inter-band chemistry. Hawkins and Grohl, meanwhile, suggest themselves that their friendship is more like that of siblings.

  Grohl: “I’m like the uptight guy, and you’re like the ‘No way, it’s cool!’ guy.”

  Hawkins: “[Bad Religion’s] Brian Baker thinks it’s homoerotic. He thinks we’re lovers.”

  Grohl: “We’re kind of like brothers.” (1)

  Schifflet all too often appears to be distant from Grohl’s leadership, although he has admitted that he was a little unsure of what Grohl thought of his guitar parts on One by One, as the band leader wasn’t actually present for much of the album’s recording – preferring instead to tour with Queens of the Stone Age.

  However, Mendel is the member of the band who appears to feel most comfortable challenging Grohl. This is perhaps due to the pair’s friendship stretching back to their Washington hardcore days, or simply due to Mendel’s longevity in the Foos (he was after all one of the first people Grohl called to play in a band in order to tour his self-played debut album).

  This closeness has resulted in an occasionally tempestuous relationship between singer and bassist with the situation boiling over when the band came together to rehearse for their stint at Coachella. The question was a simple one – how committed was Grohl to the Foo Fighters? The answer wasn’t so simple however.

  Talking to Kerrang! Grohl explained, “There was a moment when I thought, ‘Well, that was fun and we’ve had a good run at the thing.’ I’ve always thought that bands shouldn’t last forever, there’s always an expiration date. So, yeah, for a minute I thought we should call it quits and end it on a high note. But, there’s a lot more to being in a band than just being in a band. It’s such a big part of your life and at that time the band was our life and it had been my life for eight or nine years. I know it’s a clichéd analogy, but it’s like a marriage, an unspoken foundation, and it’s something you know you rely on. Even if you’re not there doing it every day, just knowing it’s there in the back of your mind sort of props you up and keeps you going.

  “When I was out with Queens of the Stone Age, I felt like I was losing some of that and it didn’t feel right; I didn’t feel solid or balanced,” Grohl continued. “To me the band is more than just making records. The studio represents what I love about the band because we can hide away and shut ourselves off from the outside world. Even if we don’t go out on tour for a year and we don’t see each other every day, I really feel like some of my closest friends are the guys in the band. I don’t go looking for new friends or new family because I have them here.” (2)

  Of the family that Grohl had been vacationing from, the first to explore his own side project was Nate Mendel whose band The Fire Theft featured former members of his old group Sunny Day Real Estate. Mendel was joined by singer, guitarist Jeremy Enigk and drummer William Goldsmith. The latter, of course, had also endured a brief and ultimately disastrous time in the Foo Fighters, however the friendship between Mendel and Goldsmith had overcome any initial problems that followed his departure from Grohl’s band.

  The Fire Theft released their eponymous debut album in September 2003. The Hands on You EP followed it in January 2004. Stylistically the band drew obvious comparisons with Sunny Day Real Estate, or more pertinently their Mendel-less third album The Rising Tide. Although obviously still owing a huge debt to the original Emo sound of DC hardcore act Rites of Spring, The Fire Theft introduced a greater sense of melody and dynamic.

  A tour to promote the album followed its release but the band have sadly remained dormant since. There have been rumours of a second album, but the originally muted February 2008 release date failed to materialise.

  During this period, Chris Shiflett went back to his punk roots with the band Jackson. Initially featuring Shiflett, his brother Scott on bass and drummer Pete Parada, they played their first date in April 2003 at the King Kong Club in Los Angeles before releasing a self-titled EP. Soon after, Parada left to concentrate on his other band Saves the Day and was replaced by Cary LaScala. Also joining the band around this time was Doug Sangalang who suggested the name change to Jackson United after the original moniker had proved too difficult to copyright – not least because a band of that name based in Paris had already released a brace of singles on a UK major. As legend has it, the United part of the name was proposed in celebration of Shiflett’s love of football … or soccer as he might have called it.

  In late 2004, the band released their debut eclectic punk album Western Ballads. Ironically, despite Schiflett’s brother having left before its release (his role was taken by Omen Starr), the album actually featured only the original line-up.

  In more recent times, the band has again consisted of only the Schiflett brothers, as LaScala and Starr moved to pastures new when the Foo Fighters were reactivated in 2005. Drumming duties have since then fallen to Taylor Hawkins and Dave Grohl although it is not clear whether either has contributed to the band’s as yet unreleased second album Harmony and Dissidence (originally pencilled in for a January 2008 street date), although the band do promise a huge array of star guests.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his much publicised problem with prescription Vicodin, (the powerful painkiller that has publicly affected the lives of Matthew Perry from Friends and Jack Osbourne among many others) Taylor Hawkins was the slowest to get out of the traps in the solo project race.

  “I did have a hard time with that shit,” explained Hawkins in 2005. “I’ve been to the doctors over the last few years, once recently with lower back pain because of all the mountain biking and drumming I’m doing and not sitting properly. They’re just so eager to give out these really strong painkillers, and it’s overkill, man, because it’s just legal heroin. It has become such a party drug in a way. They should clamp down on it and they should ask questions.” (3)

  Coming back from the harrowing experience provided Hawkins with a fresh outlook on his music career and, taking a leaf from Grohl’s book, he increasingly guested for other bands (including on US prog rock band Coheed and Cambria’s Nick Raskulinecz produced album Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow in 2007). His first non-Foos outing came in 2003 when he got together with bassist Chris Chaney (from the final incarnation of Jane’s Addiction) and guitarist Gannin Arnold. Together the trio started demoing tracks in a home studio owned by friend Drew Hester. Rumours abounded that the band, known as Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders were like ‘Rush meets the Bee Gees’.
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  “I think it [was] Oscar Wilde who said, ‘Why go on vacation when working’s so much more fun?’ I’m no good when I have nothing to do. I really wanted to make a record and have a project outside of the Foo Fighters, because we do take breaks. So I had to kind of create another little environment for myself to keep busy and excited,” he said.

  An album was recorded in 2004, but it didn’t see the light of day until March 2006. Its twelve tracks (including hidden track ‘Perfect Day’) were clearly influenced by Hawkins’ childhood heroes. “I hear a lot of stuff [in my work], I hear The Police, I hear early prog-rock stuff from the Seventies, I hear Queen and Devo – everything I grew up listening to is on there. I don’t think I’m John Lennon, but I like writing songs and making music, I really do.”

  The end result owed much to Hawkins’ love of Eighties music with the tracks shifting between lightweight Jane’s Addiction, west coast rock, later Genesis, Queen and even country and western in an often unfocused mélange. Hawkins’ vocals proved to be less impressive than his drumming thanks to his throaty monotone delivery; however, some of the album’s more experimental instrumental passages do shine through an otherwise lacklustre set.

  With the Foo Fighters now locked into their own outside adventures, it seemed as if the band would never come back from the fracturing effects of the disappointing One by One. But Grohl had other ideas. He had to bring the family back together and his way was via a creative hub, a studio complex the band could call home.

  It was an important decision. Up until now all of their biggest disappointments had come through recording in ill-suited studios. Only Grohl’s basement set-up in Virginia had proven particularly fruitful in latter years, but for the band it was always Dave’s place. They needed a group focus and in September 2003 they took over an 8,000 square foot industrial complex in the leafy San Fernando Valley suburbs of Reseda and Northridge, California. An area otherwise known as the porn capital of the USA where any number of the area’s warehouses will at any one time be hosting low-budget skin flicks. Even in their move into band real estate, the Foo Fighters managed to pull off rock ’n’ roll with effortless ease!

  “Before it was built,” guitarist Chris Shiflett explained to Clash magazine, “Dave was saying, ‘Yeah, we can store the gear there, we can rehearse there, make the albums there, we can do press there, photo shoots … blah blah blah’ and it’s really actually turned into that. It is the all-purpose Foo Fighter hub.”

  Studio 606 is exactly that – over £350,000 worth of space, temperature controlled at a constant 72 degrees, where the band can quite literally work, rest and play. Only ten minutes drive away from Grohl’s Encino home, hidden behind a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall and opposite a tyre shop, the studio’s eight-foot gate opens to reveal a highly secured building. In one entrance lies a huge warehouse where the band’s touring equipment is stored. Another leads you into a voluminous room where the band can rehearse.

  The recreation room/kitchen houses toys, guitars, lava lamps and a huge leather sofa festooned with cushions with covers made by Grohl’s mum from his old tour T-shirts including Slayer, Sonic Youth and Genesis.

  “I got that (early Eighties Genesis t-shirt) when I was thirteen. I worked that concert. Actually, what I was really doing was spending the whole day looking for pot” Grohl chuckles. (4)

  In the office area, table tennis and an Addams family pinball machine shares space with Apple Macs while out front, there’s a basketball court. In the corridors the band’s trophies are in clear view. Silver, gold and platinum discs for albums representing an estimated value of thirty million sales, stretching as far back as Nirvana’s Nevermind and including some bands Grohl has guested for – one for Queens Of The Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf, another for Jack Black’s Tenacious D project. Then there are the Foo Fighters’ discs, loads of them from all over the globe, a reminder of just how universally successful the band are.

  But it’s not only Grohl related success signifiers that adorn the nerve centre’s walls. In some areas framed photos and posters of favorite artists take pride of place. Most notable perhaps are the Nirvana photos which sit happily alongside the usual canonic list of rockers like The Who and an abundance of images of Led Zeppelin.

  Zeppelin’s influence on Studio 606 even leaves its imprint in the design of the facility itself. It’s modeled on the Polar Studios, the Abba-owned luxurious wood-panelled rock ’n’ roll playhouse facilities in Stockholm where Zeppelin recorded their swansong In Through The Out Door in the winter of 1978.

  Grohl’s taste for metal is also everywhere to be seen. A poster for the Mötley Crüe reunion tour gazes down upon the overflowing ashtray festooned mixing desk, just above a toy version of Mötley Crüe’s drumkit in pride of place.

  In 1999, veteran Detroit rocker Iggy Pop told me he’d bought a house out in Miami in order to be able to “piss on a piece of my own land”. In Studio 606 Grohl and Co. had a property that they could piss on for the next twenty years and still not cover its surface. As rock ’n’ roll statements go, Studio 606 is near unbeatable.

  The first album to come out of this bricks and mortar symbol of band solidarity was in many ways their most ambitious to date. In Your Honor attacked the musical schizophrenia of the rocker who likes a ballad, the balladeer who likes to rock by splitting the two Foo Fighters character traits right down the middle. A two-disc set, it featured one rock album and one acoustic. And it was an arrangement that allowed the band to exploit their oppositional tendencies to the fullest – in total separation.

  “That was pretty conscious and we knew we could do it, ’cos we were making the double record, so both acoustic and rock dynamics had to be extreme. We wanted them separate so we went as far as we could in each direction. After we’d recorded the acoustic record, we realised it had kept getting bigger and bigger, so we had to push the rock stuff even more to keep that distance between the two of ’em. We even went back into the studio with the rock record to make the rock stuff more rock!” (5)

  Despite retaining a radio friendliness throughout, the album was the sound of the band exploring these extremes. Sure they might be able to take things further out as individuals (although the solo efforts suggest not) but collectively the Foos never wander too far from the easy-to-listen-to mainstream. Not unlike Nirvana in fact, a band whose obsession with the classic pop tones of the Beach Boys was as important as their love of punk rock.

  “I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older, or if I’m just becoming a fucking snob, but I’m so disappointed with what people are being fed musically these days,” Dave explained of his inspiration for the new album. “It’s junk food, it’s so bad. And bands that people rely on are starting to fail. I wish every band could do what we’re allowed to do, because we’re allowed to simply be ourselves.”(6)

  Drawn from a possible forty recorded songs, the end result was the band sounding harder and softer than ever before. But never do the two extremes meet. A Foo Fighters concept album if you will, albeit one that investigated the band’s creative psyche. Inevitably critics immediately drew comparisons to Guns N’ Roses’ indulgent Use Your Illusion twin discs as well as other double set concept pieces. The double, or triple, album is all too often seen as proof of an artist’s self-important indulgence.

  “It’s inevitable that, in every band’s career, they get the itch to do the pretentious, White Album freak-out. But it was time to flex a little bit. Besides, you know how bands say they’re making a double album, but just release one and then another six months later … Well, we just saved you eighteen fucking dollars!” (7)

  Of course such generalisations about multi-disc releases ignores the fact that bands come up with certain gems that may not fit into the confines of a single album. In fact, the single disc can be so creatively restrictive as to be more conceptual than the double, or triple, set. In Your Honor however, was more like two separate albums, each tightly defined, with no room for flab or filler. Less the so
und of a band not knowing when to stop than the sound of Grohl and friends furiously working in a focused way for the joy of the actual process.

  As a statement of intent, the album’s opening title track couldn’t have been more perfect. A full throttle droned guitar assault that explodes one minute forty seconds in, when a drum finally piles on some militaristic rolls. It’s only in the final third of the track that guitars start to riff towards the crescendo. With no clear chorus or identifiably typical Foos structure, ‘In Your Honor’ screams at you to listen and, above all, feel. It’s a song of celebration, defiance and anger, and it offers the first real sign that Grohl’s extra-curricular activities (which by this stage had grown to include stints with Garbage and Nine Inch Nails) had had a huge impact on his approach to capturing power with the song structure.

  If previous Foo Fighters releases had been restricted by a self-imposed style hierarchy, then this song found Grohl defying even his own best judgement of what a Foos song should be. As such, it is perhaps the band’s bravest statement. Grohl, who always had a self-conscious concept of what a Foo Fighters tune should sound like defended the song by suggesting that at the end of the day it was still the same four people playing “so it just is a Foo Fighters song, whether it sounds like Carcass or fucking Ry Cooder.”

  Talking specifically about ‘In Your Honor’ to Kerrang! Grohl argued, “It’s really fucking cool to have just three minutes of noise and then rolling drums for a minute and a half and then into full-on thrash! It’s fucking awesome. I remember when we were rehearsing it, our guitar tech came in and said, ‘What the fuck is that?’ I said ‘That’s the song we’re opening the show with for the next two years and he said, ‘Wow, after ‘All My Life’ I didn’t know how you guys were going to open a show ever again!’” (8)

  With the track that followed, ‘No Way Back’, the band were in more familiar territory, despite Grohl’s trademark melodic vocal delivery (from a whisper to a growl, but always with a tune) and typically addictive chorus – the song maintained an unusual aggression.