by Martin James
“I spend hours upon hours just talking to her,” he continues. “It’s kind of embarrassing, I think she’s gonna look like her mother and act like me, which is fucking trouble! I’ve wanted a child for a long time. I can change a diaper in fucking five seconds, but the first couple I was fumbling and got shit all over myself!” (1)
Despite the huge Hyde Park show, it was perhaps the band’s Live Earth performance that really cemented the Foos as a genuine generation-leaping mainstream phenomenon. To see Grohl sprinting around the stage, engaging the audience, delivering his addictive songs, it only took him twenty minutes to become the household name he always threatened to be. Basically he stole the show.
“Well, I mean, when you only have twenty minutes, it’s easy to run it into the red the whole time,” he later told Clash magazine. “I think that the Live Earth show was special in that everyone was there for the right reasons and the songs made sense in the context of the evening; ‘Best Of You’, ‘Times Like These’ and ‘My Hero’ – I think all of those people were singing those songs with me for the same reasons. It was just that time of the night where everything needed to come together and fortunately we were there to witness it happening. But it was fun man, that was a fun gig. I was a little nervous, going on after the Pussycat Dolls and before Madonna. I missed a lot of the show – I only saw a few of the bands – but you walk out from that curtain and you see Wembley Stadium with all of those people and it’s like jumping into a cold lake, like ‘Holy fuckin’ shit this is HUGE!’ Not to mention two billion people watching it on television! So you walk the lip of the stage and you take a look around and then you look back at the three guys and you think, ‘Alright, well it’s just us, it’s just a show.’ And then I see my daughter on the side of the stage and I’m like ‘Yeah, this is fuckin’ cool.’ It’ll be alright.” (2)
Grohl wasn’t the only proud father to ignite the crowd at the Live Earth concert. Taylor Hawkins, himself father to a new baby son – Oliver Shane – joined forces with Roger Taylor of Queen, Cad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and forty drummers from around the world including the Dhol Foundation, Taiko drummers and a drum corps from Shotts, in a one time drum supergroup called the SOS Allstars. The drumming collective, built around the lead trio of Hawkins, Taylor and Smith, delivered a track written for the evening by Taylor and based on the Morse Code for SOS before finishing with the drum intro to Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’. As fantasy drum master classes go, it was pretty untouchable.
By 2007, it was clear that the Foo Fighters had come a long way since Grohl’s first demo turned album. Despite continued attempts by critics to keep the link alive, the band were now far removed from the spectre of the Nirvana legacy. The Foo Fighters had hooked into a generation of fans who cared little for his previous band but did feel an affinity for the Foo Fighters’ brand of melodic, angsty rock. Presidents used their music for campaign rallies, sports shows used their music as a soundtrack, daytime radio rocked to their singles, MTV held special Foo Fighters weekends and their Skin and Bones Hollywood show seemed to be broadcast continually throughout the world. Like it or not, the band were now situated squarely in the very public mainstream.
This position clearly reflected Grohl’s state of mind. Now in his late thirties, he had found a new sense of calm in his life. Happily married with a beautifiul daughter, financially very secure, the owner of the workplace of any musician’s dreams, a list of friendships with childhood heroes, a long standing extended Foos-related family and shelves boasting far too many industry awards than is usual for anyone, Grohl was in the enviable position of being master of his own destiny.
Despite the ever-prying eyes of the internet and Grohl’s apparently easy going demeanour, the band revealed him to be a very private person who only lets in the people that he wants. It is perhaps this key aspect to his psychological make-up that has helped Grohl survive for so long in such an insecure and fickle industry.
“I know a thousand people but I think maybe two of them know me,” Grohl once explained. “I remember reading this horoscope when I was twelve or thirteen years old, that said you have to be careful not to alienate everyone because there’s a great chance that you’ll wind up completely alone later on in life. I have a tendency to do that. I can be cordial and polite and somewhat open to most people, but I don’t want everyone to know me.”
Another aspect of his private life that has helped him retain a very centered approach has been his sessions with therapists, arguing that he thinks it is important to have “someone with an objective opinion who’s trained in ‘the ways of the mind’ to talk to.”
Grohl sought the objective support of a therapist when his first marriage was in crisis. “I was seeing that therapist when Kurt died, so fortunately I had already established a relationship with this person so I had someone to talk to when that happened. I’ve never been on medication or anything like that and I’ve never been overly depressed, but there have been times when I need advice from someone else. I don’t ask for advice that often.” (3)
Grohl also revealed that he continued to see a therapist today to help him understand band problems, getting older, problems with the volume of work and general life changes. “You go, you talk to the person once a week for a couple of months and it helps for some reason. If you’re a junkie, you go to a drug counsellor. If you’re a rock musician, what do you do?” he said. (4)
Early in 2007 Grohl found his music being broadcast to approximately ninety million Americans who had tuned in to Super Bowl XLI. It was an unexpected airing, but one which raised a number of eyebrows. During his half-time performance, Prince delivered a high octane version of ‘Best of You’, in a belated response to the Foos 2003 cover of his ‘Darling Nikki’ (from his 1984 album, Purple Rain) and released it as a B-side on the Australian version of their ‘Have It All’ single (it eventually became a set-closing staple at Foo Fighters’ 2004 shows).
Recording cover versions had become a standard thing for the band to do when they were winding down from recording an album; however, this particular cover allegedly did not meet with Prince’s approval, with that star telling Entertainment Weekly he didn’t appreciate the Foos (or anyone else) covering his work, and suggesting that Grohl and his band should “write [their] own tunes.”
“We wanted to put it out here in the States, but Prince wouldn’t let us,” Hawkins said. “I heard that he didn’t like our version. Or maybe he just didn’t like us doing it.”
On January 29, 2007 a studio version of Prince fusing ‘All Along the Watchtower’ with ‘Best of You’ made its worldwide debut on Howard Stern’s Sirius satellite radio show. The medley was soon the subject of positive discussion in the blogosphere and a month later the Eighties legend was doing his thing on stage at Miami’s ProPlayer Stadium when ‘Best of You’ was given a Prince style working out one more time.
“Dude, I have no idea why he did it, but I’d love to find out,” Hawkins laughed at the time. “I mean, the thought went through my head that maybe he was doing it as a sort of ‘Fuck you’ to us, or maybe he really likes the song. Either way, it was pretty amazing to have a guy like Prince covering one of our songs – and actually doing it better than we did!”
With the Foo Fighters now embarking on the demos for their next album, rumour was rife that once again the band would cover a Prince song. But they had more important things to consider. The apparent fall out of the Skin and Bones album had left the band reconsidering their own music. Early demos for the new album revealed the acoustic sessions to have had a lasting impact, but the need for this next set was to bring the extremes together. To reunite the split personalities of their music and take the Foo Fighters to fresh creative highs.
With usual producer Nick Raskulinecz unavailable due to commitments producing the new Rush album, Grohl once again brought in Gil Norton, the producer behind what is still considered by many fans to be the band’s finest album The Color and the Shape (which itself was reissued wit
h extra tracks in 2007 as a tenth anniversary edition). However, if fans had hoped that the reuniting of band and producer would result in an album of power pop rock classics, then they were sadly mistaken. The resulting set, Echoes, Silence, Patience And Grace which arrived in September 2007, was the band’s most complex, brooding and uncommercial outing yet. If the last seven years, from the beginning of the Probot project to the execution of the acoustic performances had been all about Grohl growing up in public, then Echoes, Silence, Patience And Grace was the sound of a man coming to terms with getting older. Finally his work had the maturity and sophistication to truly match his aspirations to be like Neil Young.
Yet the album was anything but the sound of contentment. Despite Grohl’s public persona of the happy-go-lucky, grinning workaholic, on this album he appeared to be allowing the world in on his more private self. There was a sense of a man working through his dilemmas and confusions, both personally and musically. He was no longer afraid to reveal his true self in public, thanks largely to the strength he had gained from fatherhood. Furthermore, the band’s own security from a musical perspective had grown through time spent in Studio 606, where they have been allowed to develop without the scrutiny of the public, and that had resulted in a less ‘fan-aware’ sound. Some might call this self-indulgent, but by this stage in the band’s career it is probably fairer to say that they’d developed a greater sense of self-awareness.
“At this point, having done it for as long as we have, it becomes a little more introverted. As a musician you need to do the things that satisfy yourself,” Grohl suggested.
The end result was an occasionally harrowing, often moving journey through multi-hued, multi-textured terrain, where the light and dark, public and private melt into and support each other to create a sensitive but muscular powerhouse. An album which draws heavily on influences such as Neil Young in both his Crazy Horse (especially on ‘Summer’s End’) and acoustic incarnations, Todd Rundgren’s early non-prog stuff (his ‘Just One Victory’ begs to be covered by the Foos) and even a hint of Paul McCartney’s Wings.
“I think any rock ’n’ roll album is inspired by McCartney and Lennon,” Grohl explained. “I probably wouldn’t be sitting here if it weren’t for those guys. I grew up listening to The Beatles, I grew up listening to Neil Young, I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, those classic rock guys as much as I was into the hardcore scene in the Eighties, so it’s inevitable that those things shape the way you compose and arrange. We were down at Abbey Road a couple of weeks ago recording a song for the BBC – we were recording ‘Band On The Run’ and Paul McCartney showed up! To me that’s like having the Pope walk into your living room or something. It was a real moment for me.” (5)
From the controlled Zeppelin-esque power of the opener ‘The Pretender’ to the closing piano ballad ‘Home’, the album explores avenues that finds the Foos pushing themselves far beyond the riff and the hook and for the first time shows them to have real longevity. With tracks like mid-paced southern rocker ‘Statues’ you can truly imagine the band lasting long after fashion has left mainstream power rock behind.
“Five years ago those songs wouldn’t have been on a Foo Fighters record because I would have been too concerned that it was too much of an abstract direction; it was too much of a shift in the band. And now, I just wanna make music. So a song like ‘Statues’, or a song like ‘Home’, I think those are two of the best songs that the band have ever written, just because after thirteen years it’s still changing; the band is managing to evolve somehow – we’ll just change rather than suffocate in the same fuckin’ cage that a lot of bands get trapped in.” (6)
There are less interesting moments where the band relax back into the tried and tested, like on ‘Erase/Replace’, ‘Long Road To Ruin’ and ‘Cheer Up Boys (Your Make Up is Running)’ where they again resort to powerhouse riffing with quiet, melodic verse and grinding, chanted chorus. ‘Stranger Things Have Happened’ also wanders through familiar territory, despite its acoustic form. And yet none of these songs can be viewed as fillers, more that they don’t reinvent the template quite as willingly as other tracks.
One of the album’s most poignant moments comes with the instrumental ‘The Ballad Of The Beaconsfield Miners’, which was written for and dedicated to two miners who were trapped for a fortnight in a collapsed gold mine in the town of Beaconsfield, Northern Tasmania in April 2006. While trapped, the miners sent up a request to have MP3 players with the Foo Fighters’ music sent down to them. Grohl issued a message via fax that read, “Though I’m halfway around the world right now, my heart is with you both, and I want you to know that when you come home, there’s two tickets to any Foos show, anywhere, and two cold beers waiting for you. Deal?” In October 2007, one of the miners took him up on the offer after a show at the Sydney Opera House.
“Music has obviously had a profound impact on my life over the years, but to consider something that I’ve done to have that same impact, that power, is strange, personally. I don’t think about it that way. But when I heard about the Beaconsfield guys, someone sent me an email from Australia and told me what was going on, I mean the back story is incredible, but these guys are good guys, y’know? And they made it through a situation like that because they’re good guys. So I was honoured to be able to put that song on the record.
And that was a huge moment for me because for once … it was really the first time that I felt like what we do is maybe bigger than pyrotechnics and lasers and beers backstage. It felt like what we do had been legitimised. I was really touched, was very moved, and I wanted to pay tribute to honour these guys for giving me something that no one else has ever given me before.’“ (7)
The track itself is a dueling picked guitars affair that has a touch of the film Deliverance about it. It reflects Grohl’s need to express much wider concerns than on any previous record.
“When Violet was born, I suddenly had a picture of her as an adult standing by my deathbed. I was thinking, ‘Who’s going to be with me when I die? My daughter and maybe my grand-daughter?’ I never used to think about these things. Most people think the world begins with their birth and ends with their death, but at some point you realise there’s a much larger world out there that will continue existing long after you have made your exit. So I started to take in the big picture and these realisations had an influence on the new album. There are songs about birth, death and life because my perception of these things has changed radically.” (8)
Perhaps the song more obviously affected by the birth of his daughter is the haunting ‘Come Alive’ with the lyrics over a plaintive acoustic round which grows towards a huge rolling crescendo.
The most interesting aspect of Echoes, Silence, Patience And Grace is that at no point do you imagine Nirvana in the proceedings. Indeed, their ghosts appear fully exorcised from Grohl’s perspective on life. Lyrics on the track ‘Let it Die’ would, on previous outings, have sent Nirvana conspiracy theorists running to their blogs to argue about the presence of Cobain in the words. This has much to do with the deeper and more connected nature of the lyrics on this set. Previously any mention of life, death, disappointment and the other big issues in life would have jumped out at you. Here they’re all up for discussion.
As a whole, Echoes, Silence, Patience And Grace represents the band’s most accomplished album to date. Despite (and possibly due to) the lack of obvious hook heavy singles, it sits as an artifact unto itself. An album that needs to be enjoyed in its entirety and in that respect a record that harks back to the pre-download days of the album experience. To download only certain tracks from this set is to miss the whole picture and for the first time on any Foo Fighters album, the entire spectrum of that multi-coloured picture is essential to the enjoyment of the album.
In 2008, with Echoes, Silence, Patience And Grace following the global success enjoyed by their previous albums, the band find themselves in perhaps the best place they’ve ever been. Musically assured, with a stable lin
e up and an ever growing army of fans who seem ready to take on the new directions the band throw at them. Thankfully these new directions are all pretty closely linked. There is little chance of the band discovering techno or pushing their brave new dubstep sound, but this only makes them stronger – their own men.
Today the Foo Fighters sit in an enviable position. They draw fans from all backgrounds and age groups. Their music sells to blue-collar workers as much as it does to white-collar professionals. They play in the mainstream arena but get full respect from the underground. They call some of the greatest musicians in rock their friends, but also enjoy links with rock’s cutting edge newcomers. They’re loved by daytime as much as specialist evening radio. They’re uncomplicated enough to be mainstream stars, but deep enough to be awarded respect from even the most introverted music scholar.
Quite simply they’re the mainstream every-Joes it’s okay to like. As for Grohl? Today he exists in a place that few ever attain. He’s as successful in his home and personal life as he is his work and creative worlds.
A few years back Grohl told me that in his wildest dreams he couldn’t imagine still being in the Foo Fighters after ten years.
“I used to think I’d retire at 33, anything over that is too old. It’s obscene. But now I just think ‘I’ll keep going – see what happens.”
Now, thirteen years on from that first Foo Fighters album, Grohl is in the perfect place. Hell, he even got to play the part of the devil on drums in a Tenacious D video… How much more joy can one man get?