by Martin James
If the album’s aim was to toy with people’s perceptions of what the Foo Fighters were, then ‘Best of You’ directly challenged the concept of their typical single. The first single on the album, released a month after that infamous Sunderland show in June 2005, employed the quiet/loud tricks of old but with added twists. Screamed vocals start with an impassioned cry and build from there, while the band builds through a series of textured riffs gradually reaching a thundering climax. ‘Monkey Wrench’ this was not.
Interestingly the song was also his most overtly party political track ever – a celebration of the sense of camaraderie he encountered while on the campaign trail for Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry. Grohl was moved to take action following the Bush campaign’s use of Foo Fighters’ ‘Times Like These’. The thought that Bush might get into office again was intolerable to Grohl, but the suggestion that Grohl’s own composition might have inadvertently helped incensed him.
“I’ve never been an outwardly political person. I’ve always voted, I’ve always been active in my community. But I’ve never had it make its way into the music. But I was in John Kerry’s motorcade, and we went from town to town through middle America. I would play acoustic shows at these rallies, and nobody knew who I was. What inspired me most wasn’t necessarily political. It was the strength of community and human will. Seeing so many people come out because they either desperately needed to be rescued or they genuinely wanted change. It really hit me. I’d never been so deeply involved in something so important. It was unbelievably inspirational.”(9)
When Bush did succeed, Grohl was clear in his opinions, saying he was “Fucking pissed, really fucking upset. My immediate reaction was, ‘Fuck it all, let’s riot! Fuck you world! I fucking hate everyone that didn’t vote for Kerry!’ But that’s ridiculous. You have to do something to make things better. As John Kerry said when he conceded defeat, ‘Just keep fighting the good fight.’” (10)
From here the loud album in the double set continues down an increasingly familiar path. ‘DOA’ is another ‘knobs turned up to eleven’ rock out with a sing-along chorus about death. ‘Hell’ finds the band riffing through harmonics before being driven by frenetic drums and winding melody. ‘The Last Song’ employs the Foos trick of the band holding back on a monotone riff before finding a rushing release through a driving drum break tightly wound in the coils of melodic guitar riffs. Lyrically the chorus found Cobain reference watchers rushing to make the over obvious accusation – that Grohl was publicly declaring the end of his link to the Nirvana legacy. It was suggested that this was the moment when Grohl decided to stand-alone from his past.
It was a ludicrous suggestion that ignored the fact that the Foo Fighters had by now out lasted and out-sold his previous band. Also Grohl was at pains to point out that he was Nirvana’s sixth drummer and only in the band for a short time. To him, Nirvana were as much history as Freak Baby, Mission Impossible or Dain Bramage.
The links to Nirvana’s legacy were perhaps made all the more exaggerated by the final release of the long disputed box set of Nirvana rarities, With the Lights Out, six months earlier. Compiling the set was an act of closure for both Grohl and Novoselic, but it reignited Nirvana in the hearts of the fans.
Elsewhere on In Your Honor’s heavy disc, the band retained their resolution to rock harder than before. Only on the strummed intro to ‘The Deepest Blues Are Back’ do they hit a mellow note, but this is soon crushed with the screamed build into the chorus. Other tracks like ‘Free Me’ and ‘The Sign’ are full on riffing hardcore metal juggernauts while ‘End Over End’ and ‘Resolve’ sit in familiar Foos territory – albeit in a heavier form than fans were used to.
If the loud album had contained few real surprises beyond the fact that it featured no acoustic ballads, then the quiet, contemplative disc two was a revelation. And one that the critics immediately picked up on. Far from simply being the Foo Fighters unplugged with songs played on acoustic instruments, the songs here were constructed with the necessary mellowness as a central theme. Whether achieving this end involved the use of strings, mellotron, piano or percussion was neither here nor there – it was a case of using the right sounds for the right effect.
Inspired by Tom Petty’s solo work on She’s The One, the acoustic album came from Grohl’s desire to write a movie soundtrack. “After we finished touring for the last record I thought, Okay, I’m in my mid-to-late thirties now. Do I really want to run around festival stages screaming my head off every night? I don’t know, maybe it’s time to start playing some [mellower] music. So I thought that, rather than just jump back into the album cycle, I’d see if I could find a movie that needs a score. One of my favorite albums of all time is Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas. I love that album – I’ve listened to it for years and years. So I envisioned finding a project that I could turn into my own version of Paris, Texas. After about a month of writing I thought, wait a second, this could be a killer Foo Fighters record. I’d hate to have pulled a solo album out of my ass in the middle of the best time of our lives as a band, so instead it became a Foo Fighters project.” (11)
Given the space to breath, the band’s approach to the acoustic album found them embracing space, timbre and texture to a far greater degree than ever before. Opener ‘Still’ featured echoing ambient swathes and picking guitar with a lyric that captured Grohl following an unusually clear narrative.
“‘Still’ is probably the first song I ever wrote that comes close to any sort of storytelling,” he said. “It’s about my being a kid, going to the lake by my house on a Saturday morning and seeing all these ambulances and fire trucks because someone decided to kill himself by sitting on the train tracks. When you’re a child, you’re so naive, you have no idea what’s really going on, and you start to explore and find yourself playing with pieces of the …. it’s a pretty gory story, actually, but it happened.” (12)
Elsewhere ‘Another Round’ featured Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones playing mellotron over a guitar riff and harmonica solo that was distinctly Neil Young in flavour, as was ‘Over and Out’ which featured a six-year-old guitar part and an occasional Young-esque vibrato in Grohl’s voice. ‘What If I Do?’ had all of the trademarks of a classic Foo Fighters ballad; contemplative verse sung over picked guitars and uplifting sing-along chorus, while ‘Miracle’ recalled late Eighties grunge precursors The Smithereens, albeit an acoustic version (and with a beautiful, melancholic violin refrain) in the same way that ‘On the Mend’ recalled Grohl’s own ‘Touch’ soundtrack and Nirvana’s quieter pop moments as on ‘Polly’.
Final track ‘Razor’ presented Josh Homme’s picked minor chords and Grohl’s sombre vocals celebrating the beauty of the razorblade. Orginally debuted acoustically at the January 2005 Tsunami Benefit at the Wiltern in LA (Grohl introduced the track by saying he’d just written it that morning), ‘Razor’ is a breathtakingly beautiful song which was perhaps the only moment that the project truly recalled Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas opus.
Standout moments of the album come courtesy of the surprise elements. First of all ‘Virginia Moon’ jumps out due to the fact it’s a bossa nova, and through the inclusion of guest vocalist Norah Jones.
“When I mentioned her name, everybody was like, ‘Really?’ I think the only person who wholeheartedly approved was our guitar tech, who’s had a borderline stalking crush on her for years!” Grohl said at the time.
“But she came in, did her thing, and it fit perfectly,” Hawkins added. “We didn’t use it [just] because it’s her. I mean, if you listen to it, it works.”
The band had in fact demoed the song some years back but decided it was wrong for them at that time. Here it was back again and sounding decidedly coffee bar.
“It’s just my lame attempt at recreating ‘The Girl From Ipanema’” he told Guitar World Acoustic. “We’d actually tried to turn that into a rock song back when we were making ‘There Is Nothing Left To Lose’, and it just sounded completely ludicrous. There wa
s no way it would work.”
Perhaps the obvious other standout is the reworking of his Late! song ‘Friend of a Friend’, a track originally written about his new band Nirvana in the first few weeks of living with Cobain. Inevitably the inclusion of what was the first song Grohl had written on acoustic guitar brought even more questions about his previous band. Not least because it included the word ‘nevermind’ in the lyric, despite the fact that it predated the album considerably.
“I was nervous about putting it on the record. Pretty much any song I write people are usually willing to pick it apart for specific references, obvious references. Whether it’s Courtney or Kurt or Nirvana or whatever. And it’s not that simple. There are a lot of other people in my life that I love and hate. It’s not just the two.
Of any song that I’ve ever written, ‘Friend Of A Friend’ is most blatantly about my time in Nirvana,” he concedes. “I wrote the song about Krist [Novoselic] and Kurt and me. I don’t even think I ever played it for them. It was just one of those things.” Talking about the extreme loneliness of time that inspired the song he added, “God it was quiet, I had nothing better to do than think with a guitar in my lap. And it was a dark, rainy winter. The sun would come up at 8.30 in the morning, and go down at two in the afternoon, and those were the hours I slept. I didn’t see daylight for months. It was fucking depressing.”(13)
The final standout moment came with the Hawkin’s sung ‘Cold Day In The Sun’ which is Eagles-lite, a pure slice of west coast rock fluff. To some critics, it was perhaps one of the worst songs the Foo Fighters had ever recorded.
In Your Honor was met with huge acclaim from fans and critics alike with discussions raging about the stronger acoustic aspect to the double set. In many ways the album represents the first time that the band had achieved exactly what they’d set out to do.
The main criticism was that the acoustic set becomes too anodyne after a while, its sweetness outshining the darker shadows and ultimately creating a slight blandness. The very thing that Grohl set out to do was to separate the heavy and the soft in order to reveal more in the music. Ironically in the end he arguably masked the styles through too much sameness. Listening to the album through the iPod in shuffle mode, brings out more power and texture than does the official schizophrenic approach.
However, of all of the Foo Fighters’ albums, it’s the acoustic set in which Grohl claimed to have the most pride at this time. Rather than a sideline, he considered it to be a huge achievement that heralded a fresh approach and proved the band could have longevity long after their stadium anthems might have lost their appeal.
“Have you any idea how proud I am of this album?” Grohl asked at the time, “and the thing I’m most proud of is the fact that it opens doors for us musically. When I listen to some bands who have been around for ten or fifteen years like, God bless ’em, the Ramones or Green Day or AC/DC, those bands have made a career out of making music that wrestles with one dynamic. And they’re known as being the kind of bands that can do that one thing. But fuck that, I don’t want to be that band. I want to be a band who can do fucking anything. Because we can do fucking anything.” (14)
In the short term, however, the band had to get on the road to promote the album. They all relished the straightforward rock gigs, however, the muted acoustic shows found Hawkins perhaps a little less excited, fearing, “People would throw piss at us.”
Happy or not, the acoustic live show would mark the next phase of the Foo Fighters’ growth.
Notes
1. Punk’d Rock (Blender), 2005
2. Into The Void by Dom Lawson (Kerrang!) 2005
3. Lucky Man – Taylor Hawkins; My Story (Metal Hammer Presents…Foo Fighters), 2005
4. Street Fighting Man by Jessica Hundley (Dazed & Confused) 2005
5. Learnt To Fly by Jamie Hibbard_(Metal Hammer). 2005
6. Street Fighting Man by Jessica Hundley (Dazed & Confused) 2005
7. Punk’d Rock (Blender), 2005
8. Into The Void by Dom Lawson (Kerrang!) 2005
9. Grohl With It by Craig McLean (The Independent Magazine) 2005
10. Ibid
11. How The Other Half Lives (Guitar World Acoustic)
12. Ibid
13. Grohl With It by Craig McLean (The Independent Magazine) 2005
14. “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.
10
WHAT IF I SAY I’M NOT LIKE THE OTHERS?
What’s the first thing a drummer says when he moves to LA? “Would you like fries with that, sir?”
It is said that you haven’t made it in rock until you’ve been the subject of a death rumour. The history of music is littered with them. From Paul McCartney to Michael Jackson and taking in Bruce Springsteen, and Paul Weller among many others, the rumours have been a continual feature on the landscape of pop mythology.
In May 2006, Grohl himself became the subject of one such rumour mill. Slightly bemused by the story, he explained, “I got a phone message from a friend saying ‘Er, I guess… Jordyn… this is maybe… for you. I’m so sorry to hear what happened.’ I heard this message and went ‘What the fuck?’ They were leaving a message on my cell phone saying ‘I’m sorry Dave died.’
That was weird, but I guess I’ve finally graduated to that status of being an internet rumour. It weirded me out a bit, but it’s stupid. I’m like a cockroach, don’t worry, I’ll be around for a long time.”
Strangely Grohl was the subject of a second death rumour in February 2007 when his band’s Wikipedia entry was amended to include the date of his passing.
However, Grohl was most certainly alive and well and in the year that followed In Your Honor, the Foo Fighters pursued an equally schizophrenic path. Their famed live show embarked on the customary world tour, with arenas getting larger and larger. Notable among these dates was the June show at London’s Hyde Park. “When they asked us to play Hyde Park I was, like, ‘Wait! Isn’t that place huge?’” he said at the time. “But I thought, ‘Well, if we get 30,000 people, it’ll still be the biggest show we’ve ever played.’” As it turned out, 85,000 watched the band run through a storming set that included ‘Breakout’, ‘All My Life’, ‘Monkey Wrench’, ‘Best Of You’ and ‘Learn To Fly’. Motörhead’s Lemmy joined the band for a run-through of Probot’s ‘Shake Your Blood’ and Queen’s Roger Taylor joined them for a storming ‘Tie Your Mother Down’. If any doubts remained that the Foo Fighters had become the live band everyone loved to see, then this was the decider.
Given their status as the world’s favorite rock band then, it was somewhat ironic that they chose to present their first live album, not as a representation of the adrenalised rock Foos, but the mellow acoustic version. In November 2006, Grohl’s band released Skin and Bones, an album recorded live in Hollywood during the summer when the band were on a short acoustic tour in support of Bob Dylan – the man once charged with selling out his folk roots when he went electric.
There were inevitable comparisons with MTV Unplugged. Indeed, the performance drew an almost accidental line direct to an era when MTV Unplugged represented unmissable and eminently watchable TV. In an era where bands are encouraged to offer acoustic versions of songs for cell phone adverts and live DVDs are as obligatory as the quirky cover version, it’s hard to imagine the cultural worth of MTV’s show. However, it was valued as a performance where the artists could stand or fall on talent alone and no amount of orchestration could hide the egg on the artist’s ego when things didn’t work out.
Of course, one of the classic Unplugged shows was by Nirvana, the live CD of the show largely considered to be essential listening. If Grohl was tired of the comparisons with his old band then he seemed to sleep walk into this one.
Sadly, for many observers, the Foo Fighters acoustic outing had the opposite effect to the Nirvana one. Where the latter’s acoustic performance revealed an almost painful frailty betwe
en moments of near-transcendental beauty and hitherto hidden depths, Skin and Bones revealed a band with limitations. Many of their songs appear inch deep, surface glossed for the adult ear. Normally powerful hooks are reduced to slow riffing while Grohl’s voice feels one-dimensional throughout, his husky charm lost to the faux chocolate box arrangements.
“It seems like I’ve joined a new band because it’s very different to anything we’ve ever done.” Grohl said on the eve of the acoustic tour. “Plus we have an extended band, including a keyboard player, a violinist, and Pat Smear playing guitar. It’s like our own little mini orchestra. The few times that I’ve played acoustic by myself it’s been really moving and we’re trying to capture those moments throughout the set.”
If the album had been intended to be a powerfully moving statement, then it failed. Not only that but it denied the band’s fans what they really wanted, the full throttle live experience. Admittedly a download only version of the Hyde Park show was made available a couple of weeks later, but this hardly compensated for the disappointment.
Skin and Bones was accompanied by the release of a double DVD that featured both the Hollywood and the Hyde Park shows. Not as good as their patchy 2003 live DVD Everywhere But Home (which included the highlight of the band’s old style acoustic performances as extras), the Skin and Bones set revealed the extent to which the band’s intimacy seemed to have been lost.
In many ways the performance was testament to the inherent problems on the preceding double album. In its attempts to remove the two sides from the coin, the band lost a necessary edge. It became obvious that the band now had to find a way of bringing the two extremes back together in a happy marriage.
The apparent sleepiness inherent in Skin and Bones may have also had a lot to do with the mellowing effects of fatherhood. On April 15, 2006, Dave and Jordyn Grohl had a daughter, named Violet after Dave’s grandmother. “Her name is Violet Maye Grohl,” he beamed a few weeks later. “She was six pounds, fifteen ounces, she’s got blue eyes, dark hair and she’s fucking cute. She’s six weeks old and she’s already smiling and laughing.