Dave Grohl, Times Like His

by Martin James

  Dave Grohl is one of those rare people in the music world: a genuinely nice guy. No matter who you talk to or what feature you read, that one fact is crystal clear. He’s cool. Yet beneath that outer surface, there lies a personality that makes him almost pathologically unable to see his own ability and worth. In his mind, he will always be a bit player, the one that no one notices, the guy that pales into insignificance next to the enigmatic personalities in his own bands and those he guests for.

  Throughout his career, his ego has taken a backseat, while he has watched in awe as the Stahl Brothers, Skeeter Thompson, Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, Pat Smear and Taylor Hawkins have done their thing. In fact, its even been suggested that he surrounds himself with these characters to take the spotlight away from himself. He is a fan boy. The one who always watches, but never gets involved.

  And this is what is so frustrating about Dave Grohl. Quite simply, he has achieved an incredible amount. He is a world-renowned songwriter. Foo Fighters are one of the most popular bands across the globe and his face is known to millions of MTV viewers. Notwithstanding the fact that, of course, he was a third of one of the greatest bands ever, Nirvana. Far from being the unknown member of a band, his solo acoustic performances have proven that he can dominate a stage with consummate ease.

  He has a natural charisma that is underpinned by his insecurity. As a result, he has turned self-mocking into an art form, almost to the point of derision. The same is true of his seemingly obsessive need to be seen as a normal person. The reality however is that he doesn’t work nine-to-five in a job he hates just so he can pay the bills and support the kids. He lives an extraordinary life. One that involves travelling around the world doing something he loves and getting paid incredibly well for it. Furthermore he is worshipped by a legion of fans who look upon him in the same way as he views the musicians he admires himself.

  The fact is that Dave Grohl hasn’t been a normal Joe since that day he joined Scream. However, against the odds, he has somehow managed to keep grounded enough to retain a very down-to-earth worldview despite all the countless dramas around him. This is a rare quality in a musician at any level of popularity, let alone one so successful.

  “Luxury to me is sleeping in the same bed for more than two and a half weeks at a time,” he says simply. “That doesn’t happen much in my life. Luxury to me is stability. You have the conflict between that and the opportunity of doing what I do. I’m given these amazing opportunities. And I’ve always said I’d like to do this while I’m still young. Well, I’m nearing the cusp. I don’t feel old. I just feel like I should feel old.”

  Dave Grohl is one of the most driven people in music. He claims not to be career driven, but he has the ability to make the right decisions all of the time. Decisions that end up being career-enhancing. His ambition to become like Neil Young may be the fan boy’s biggest and most aspirational fantasy. To “be like Young” he will need to be able to sit still for longer than ten minutes, work on albums for longer than two weeks, tour once in a blue moon and devote huge amounts of his time to family, farming and other none musical pursuits.

  The reality is that Grohl is an addict when it comes to music. And giving up, or cutting back that particular drug may prove to be almost impossible. Reducing – or cutting out altogether – his Foo Fighters work may perhaps be a realistic option. Especially now that he has taken the band to the top. From here maybe there is nowhere else to go, but back underground, or simply to turn into the Rolling Stones.

  “I can imagine a thousand things I’d rather do. Absolutely … producing other bands or scoring films, learning to make furniture to learning to work on old cars. I have the luxuries and freedom to do them if I like. There are a few I’m really serious about and others that seem they’re meant to take up time.”

  He may have the luxuries and freedoms to pursue other lifestyles, but whether or not he has the burning desire to follow such new paths remains to be seen. Meanwhile, he has his music. Fortunately, for the time being at least, so do we.

  Notes

  1. Let There Be Foo (Clash) 2007

  2. Into The Void by Dom Lawson (Kerrang!) 2005

  3. Inside The Lives Of One Of Rock’s Biggest Bands. (Total Guitar) 2007

  4. A Life Less Ordinary by Ben Mitchell (Q), 2005

  5. 1.Let There Be Foo (Clash) 2007

  6. Ibid

  7. Life, Death and Rock’n’Roll (Hot Press), 2007

  8. Ibid.

  11

  DESERVE THE FUTURE

  What’s the difference between a 12” pizza and a drummer?

  The pizza can feed a family.

  November 2008, a small and dark studio in west London.

  The walls are covered in heavy, deep red velvet curtains while the room is dominated by a huge computer monitor, which sits where you’d expect the window to be. On the right-hand side of this pixelated window on the world sits a vintage Korg synth. To the left lies a well-thumbed copy of the book, Tattoo Soup.

  The screen itself offers a view of the English countryside by the painter Constable. A tranquil image of a time lost; an idyllic scene of haystacks and simple country folk, a picture postcard country cottage and fields of golden corn. Look closer however and you can see an old, burnt-out car, a violent rupture in the middle of this green and pleasant land; a city-borne virus scarring the sublime country innocence. This scene is one of graffiti legend Banksy’s reinterpretations of classic paintings, and as an image it couldn’t be better suited to the music that’s screaming from the speakers that sit either side of the screen.

  It’s a brutal, high-octane garage punk techno pile driver of a song, which comes on like a rabid, canines-bared wolf drenched in nicotine buzz and adrenalized by amphetamine snarl. And it’s a song that brings the Dave Grohl story full circle from our first introduction to him crawling up the speaker stacks for a better view of The Prodigy at that festival all those years ago.

  The song ‘Run Like The Wolves’ is the product of a long overdue collaboration between Grohl and Prodigy mainman Liam Howlett and its pounding, juggernaut beats are everything fans of the drummer might have hoped for. A skin pounding, synapse snapping tribal assault that harks back to a far more aggressive Grohl than the one who was last heard strumming Eagles-esque epics over the mega-sound-systems of the arena circuit.

  Sitting in front of me in that hide-away studio is Liam Howlett. Head rocking to the energy, he turns to me with a smile and explains, “I love this track. It just makes me want to smash my head against the wall. It’s kind of like when the riff drops in it’s just violent, you know.”

  The track itself was a late addition to the Prodigy album Invaders Must Die. Liam had almost completed the set when he got a call from Grohl offering his services. “He just called up and said he was at a loose end ’cos he’d finished touring and wondered if we could do something together. I was like, ‘I dunno man, I’m almost finished here but it would be cool to do something soon.’ He just says, ‘I tell you what; I’ll just put down some drums and see what happens.

  To be honest I never thought anything would happen but a week later this hard drive arrives and it’s just loads of tracks of Dave drumming. I was like, fuckin’ hell, I’ve got to do something with this!”

  Prodigy vocalist Keith Flint explains further: “We had the vocal on another track already but they just weren’t working. They had too much venom for the track. But we still enjoyed the excitement of it and what it was saying and this was the ideal opportunity to make it work. Liam redid the track, then we revocalled it and we sent it over to Dave who was like, ‘Yeah, I was really hoping it was going to be something like this!’ He was really excited and worked some more on it.”

  This wasn’t the only drum track to have made it onto the Prodigy album. A more laid-back groove was incorporated into the horn drenched number ‘Stand Up’.

  “It’s like when you’ve been getting battered with a baseball bat and then this comes in… like when you went out an
d the DJ would tease you with one last tune, something warm and uplifting,” says Liam of the track. “It’s a really good way to end the record, uplifting and victorious. This is the real wild card on the album. I think people will go, ‘Is that the Prodigy or isn’t it?’ but it’s got this real victorious feel. It’s a tune I really love and it’s like being wrapped up in a warm blanket before you fuck off home.

  I used some of Grohl’s beats on this too. They really add to the vibe. To be honest there was so much on that hard drive I could have gone on adding his beats in, but I didn’t want the album to become like Prodigy featuring Dave Grohl. He wouldn’t have wanted that either. This way it’s like a short sharp attack. No chance for people to get bored with it… just in your face.”

  In mid-December 2009 in Portsmouth, England, Dave Grohl would tell me that he was “Fucking blown away by it (‘Run With The Wolves’). I knew it would be fucking cool, I’ve always been a fan of The Prodigy and we’d talked about doing something loads of times. So I just set up my drums and played the kinds of rhythms I thought would sound cool on one of their tracks. I could almost hear it in my head when I was playing, man. So when I heard the track I was like a fuckin’ kid I was so fuckin’ excited. Man, who wouldn’t be blown away working with The Prodigy!”

  That Grohl’s down time from the Foo Fighters should take on such an aggressive zeal spoke volumes about where his head was at the time. In fact, it’s hard to believe that the man responsible for this almighty electronic rock and roll racket is the same one whose band would, only a year later, release a greatest hits album that Grohl himself admitted seemed like a death knell to a band.

  Earlier in 2008, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace had been nominated for no less than five Grammy awards. The album was also nominated for ‘Album of the Year’, while ‘The Pretender’ was also nominated for ‘Record of the Year’ and ‘Best Rock Song’. They actually took home awards for ‘Best Rock Album’ and ‘Best Hard Rock Performance’ (for ‘The Pretender’). Not a bad place to be in. After years of constant gigging, multi-platinum selling albums and serial side-projects, Grohl and his band of brothers were still on top when many of their contemporary bands had come and gone. The Foo Fighters had proven all of their early critics wrong and turned into one of the biggest bands on the planet.

  It was of course the perfect juncture to release that inevitable career-spanning compilation album. Or at least this is what the band’s label felt and put together a collection of tracks that Grohl himself suggested weren’t necessarily their best. In the liner notes he wrote:

  “These 16 songs are what we’re calling our Greatest Hits. Not to be confused with “Our Best Songs” or “Our Favorite Songs,” it is a collection of the songs that have defined our band’s identity to most people over the years. The other 65 album tracks… well, some of those might be our greatest songs. ‘Aurora’, ‘New Way Home’, ‘MIA’, ‘Exhausted’, ‘A320’ … depends on whom you ask. Personally, I don’t think we’ve written our greatest songs yet. But that door is always open.” (1)

  For fans of the band, the collection was never going to be a satisfactory release, collecting together as it did a snap-shot of the Foo’s radio-friendly drive time hits. None of the album gems or the B-side classics were in evidence and even the promise of two new tracks held little excitement.

  Those tracks – ‘Wheels’ and ‘Word Forward’ – represented the first fruits of Grohl’s renewed acquaintance with producer Butch Vig, whom he had worked with on the latter’s own band Garbage for their album Bleed Like Me four years earlier.

  Neither of these new offerings added anything too startling to the Foo Fighters’ armory. ‘Wheels’ was a track that had its live debut in front of 1,200 active military troops, their families and President Obama on the lawn of The White House as part of an Independence Day celebration honoring military service members. Hard to imagine that only fifteen years earlier Grohl’s band of heroes Scream had kept the president awake with their antiwar Punk Percussion Protest. But these were different times, and Grohl’s role was in support and celebration rather than anger.

  The song, which was described as ‘tepid’ by numerous critics, was introduced by Grohl at the White House concert as, “the feeling when the wheels touch the ground and you’re like, ‘Oh, God, I’m glad that’s over with, man!’”

  The fan reaction to the track was less than ecstatic when it was released as a single in 2009. Despite the great promise of the Foos/Vig axis, the reality was more geek rock than the heavier-than-hell sounds that fans had hoped for.

  “We kind of took it in this direction that we haven’t gone before, which, as a band, is exciting,” Dave Grohl told MTV News in defence of the track. “You do a song like ‘Wheels’ and people go, ‘Really? That’s the Foo Fighters?’ People get all scared. ‘Oh no, is that the direction they’re going?’ It’s one of those songs that our biggest fans hate. I like that we have songs that lots of different people either enjoy or dislike.” (2)

  ‘Word Forward’, the second all-new track on the album was slightly better. A high gloss rock song with slick crescendos, the track’s lyrics offered a midlife confessional to Grohl’s recently departed friend Jimmy which despite the lightweight wordplay of the title (‘word for word’) found the singer in one of his most revealing moods.

  The release of the compilation album was completely over-shadowed however by the next installment in Grohl’s ongoing work regime – a rock super group by the name of Them Crooked Vultures, or TCV as they quickly became known to fans.

  TCV was the coming together of three rock heavyweights spanning as many generations. Dave Grohl, the drumming genius who rose to popularity at the start of the 1990s and took the grunge dream into stadium domination throughout the Noughties; Josh Homme, whose output with Queens of the Stone Age rewrote the metal rulebook in the years that followed their formation in 1997; and bass playing legend Jean Paul Jones who practically wrote the original heavy rock rulebook in his days with Led Zeppelin.

  The idea for the band harked back to 2005 when Grohl suggested, “The next project that I’m trying to initiate involves me on drums, Josh Homme on guitar, and John Paul Jones playing bass. That’s the next album. That wouldn’t suck.” (3)

  At this time however it seemed little more than a pipe-dream for a man who’d already played with almost all of his teenage heroes. Of course the Homme connection went back years, but to bang on the door of one of rock’s greatest living legends pushed the venture deep into the realms of fantasy. It was almost as if Grohl had been ticking off a list, but was now entering a place that he might have marked ‘hallowed ground’ and put a line under Led Zep. Notably, John Paul Jones has commented that he was not really looking to be involved in a band again, yet when the call from Dave Grohl first came through, he was immediately interested.

  Amusingly Grohl had arranged for Homme and Jones to meet for the first time at his own 40th birthday party at Los Angeles restaurant Medieval Times, where sword fights and jousting are the order of the night.

  The trio decamped to Homme’s studio in Burbank, California to start playing together. Within a couple of days they all knew that the project was more than just an indulgent supergroup. Everything felt more natural than that.

  “I sat down and started playing, John [Paul Jones] locked in, Josh joined in and that was it – we knew that we had something,” Grohl explained soon after. (4)

  “Early on,” Homme explained, “Dave and I were like, It’s gotta be songs, man. If we just jammed around, it would suck. They’ll call it self-indulgent to go with the ‘supergroup’ word – and they’ll be right. Rock ’n’ roll only sounds good when it’s lean, hungry and wants to grab you. It doesn’t sound good when it relaxes.” (5)

  By April 2009 the band was a fully realised unit writing together under the name Caligula. Talking in July to Johnny Firecloud of Antiquiet, Homme’s wife Brody Dale said of the project, “I’m not at liberty to talk about it… but I think [it] is pre
tty amazing. Just beats and sounds like you’ve never heard before.” (6) It later emerged however that the line-up might have been a very different affair had one ex-Beatle had his way. Following their appearance together at the February 2009 Grammys, Grohl and Paul McCartney went out for a meal. “We went out for a bite to eat afterwards and Dave told me he was starting this band with Josh [Homme],” Macca told the Daily Mail. “I asked him who was playing bass and he rather sheepishly told me he’d approached John. So you read it here first; Paul McCartney was nearly the bass player in Them Crooked Vultures.” (7)

  The recording for Them Crooked Vultures’ debut eponymous album was on the face of it a pretty easy affair. The three musicians gelled immediately and songs just flowed. Recording commenced in July; however only three days into the session Josh Homme was arrested. “I got arrested on the third day of our session. It was total bull, because I really was just hanging out, you know?” he explained at the time. “When I got out of jail, we were recording that day. So I told the guys, ‘Look, I haven’t had that much sleep, it’s going take me a sec to get my thing together.’ And to not have one look of judgment was very cool. I gotta be just who I am, because I don’t know who else to be.” (8) Homme did not reveal why he was arrested; for him, the music remains more important and he understandably guards his private life.

  In August 2009 the trio emerged from the shadows and augmented by multi-instrumentalist Alain Johannes (who had previously worked with Queens of the Stone Age), Them Crooked Vultures performed its first show at the Metro in Chicago on August 9, 2009 at the witching hour. They quickly went on to perform at festivals in Europe before supporting the Arctic Monkeys at London’s Brixton Academy on August 26. This date acted as a warm-up for shows at Reading and Leeds Festivals in the days that followed.