Dave Grohl, Times Like His

by Martin James

  Following their North American dates entitled the ‘Deserve the Future Tour’, the band embarked on UK dates in December 2009. Despite never having released any material at the time of the tour’s announcement, the UK gigs sold out within eleven minutes.

  The shows themselves proved to be a huge success with the band snaking through the dark side of psychedelic metal. The fusion of Zeppelin and Queens of the Stone Age may have been ever present but Grohl’s powerhouse drumming also helped steer things into harder rock territory at times.

  On the evidence of their show in Portsmouth, England, it was clear that there was more to this band than just an ego-fuelled back-slapping fest. Here was something entirely new and exciting, with Jones lifting his comrades to new heights. His nimble, flowing bass lines played with the underbelly of rock superstructures while Homme’s own work finds a new spark, drawing fresh shapes from the frontman’s delivery.

  The band’s self-titled debut album came in November and was immediately met with critical acclaim. It proved to be a far more stripped back and direct sound than had been showcased on stage. Where the live show might have had moments of lengthy (but stunning all the same) musicianly indulgence, the album was all about the songs – even if some of these clocked in at over seven minutes long!

  “They can be flash, as the time signature mayhem on ‘Mind Eraser, No Chaser’ suggests,” exclaimed music critic Kitty Empire in The Observer. “They can be pop, as the acid bubblegum of ‘New Fang’ attests. Neither plastic, vinyl nor download can quite capture the exhilaration of ‘Elephants’ played live, but this album is as tight, loud and impressive as rock supergroupery gets.” The Daily Telegraph’s Andrew Perry added, “packed with punchy, malevolent tunes, Them Crooked Vultures is, bar none, this season’s heavy-rock album of choice.”

  Among the UK press, only The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis offered a dissenting voice, arguing, “It never once threatens to move the earth in the way Led Zeppelin or Nirvana did. It’s hard not to wonder if it would attract the same kind of attention were it the work of an unknown new band. Of course it wouldn’t. The appeal of Them Crooked Vultures relies as much on their audience’s willingness to hero-worship the participants as it does on their music. That’s what supergroups are like.”

  The rule of thumb for these kind of side-projects is that the members of the band get together, have a great time, go on the road, fall in love with the idea of the band as all other music projects are forced to the back of their collective minds and then talk inevitably emerges around the prospect of a second album.

  In most cases the prospect never goes beyond the talk stage. In the case of Them Crooked Vultures however, the sessions for the second album started almost as soon as the first gigs had come to a halt. The honeymoon period was being extended way beyond the norm however, for Grohl at least; his other musical marriage was starting to make demands.

  In March 2010 it emerged that Grohl was already working on what he described as “the heaviest Foos album yet”. With Butch Vig at the controls, the band had returned once again to Studio 606 and according to Taylor Hawkins, a huge amount of material had already been demo-ed ready for the album sessions proper in September 2010.

  “Dave’s got fifteen or so song ideas that are awesome and we’ve already demo-ed some of them twice even. It’s a large process for us. It takes a long time to do it. We don’t just say, ‘OK, let’s go make a record and pop in the studio and record it just like that.’ There’s a lot of pre-production that goes into making a Foo Fighters record. We do a lot of demoing to find exactly the arrangements we want, getting them exactly how we want them.” (9)

  Grohl jumped head-first into the first Vultures venture at a time that coincided with the birth of he and his wife Jordyn’s second child. Harper Willow (named after his great-uncle Harper Bonebrake) was born in April, only two days before the third birthday of the couple’s first daughter Violet Maye, who was named after Grohl’s maternal grandmother. Grohl said at the time that his newborn Harper Willow was “loud as hell”. Which is saying something when you consider the fact that Grohl was working on a new band that were as heavy as it gets!

  Behind every hard-working musician is a tried and trusted method for staying awake when exhaustion beckons. For many the answer comes in drugs, others find it in spirituality; for Grohl the secret to getting more out of the day is caffeine!

  By Harper’s first birthday however, Grohl was touring with the Vultures, recording their second album and demoing Foos tracks at the same time. Little surprise then that at this time of extreme sleep deprivation, his caffeine intake went through the roof. In early March 2010, John Paul Jones posted a video online outlining the coffee-drinking habits of his new band’s drummer. The video, which features studio footage of the band at work on their second album, included the claim that, “Two weeks after this video was shot, Dave was rushed to doctor due to the onset of unwanted physical effects caused by too much caffeine. For reals. He was kind of a mess. Since then he has reduced his intake of the super delicious hot beverage to a healthier level.” (10)

  Due to the jokey nature of the video post, many thought the claim was in jest. On March 22, 2010, immediately after the band had played a Teenage Cancer Trust gig at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Grohl admitted to Absolute Radio that the story was indeed true.

  “We were in the studio making a record and I was drinking a lot of coffee,” he confessed. “I was doing Vultures stuff at night, Foo Fighters stuff during the day and I had a newborn at home so I was sleeping two/three hours a night on an air mattress in a guest bedroom. And yeah, I had too much coffee, I started to get chest pains so I went to the hospital and they told me to stop drinking the coffee.” (11)

  Notes

  1. Dave Grohl in Foo Fighters Greatest Hits sleeve notes, 2009

  2. MTV News, 2009

  3. Mojo, 2005

  4. The Only Drum Interview by Louise King (Rhythm Magazine), 2010

  5. Them Crooked Vultures Interview by Andrew Perry (The Independent), 2009

  6. 24 Minutes with Brody Dalle of Spinnerette by Johnny Firecloud (www.antiquiet.com), 2009

  7. Paul McCartney: Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl Turned me Down by Ann Lee (Metro), 2010

  8. Them Crooked Vultures Interview by Andrew Perry (The Independent), 2009

  9. Taylor Hawkins Discusses new Foo Fighters Album (www.kroq.cbslocal.com)

  10. Dave Grohl ‘rushed to hospital’ during Them Crooked Vultures album session (NME), 2010

  11. Ibid.

  12

  THESE ARE MY FAMOUS LAST WORDS …

  What does a drummer use for contraception?

  His personality.

  It only took one throwaway quote from Grohl. A single sentence to a journalist that was intended to capture the essence of where he was at that time. But as soon as Grohl exclaimed that the demo process was promising that the seventh Foo Fighters studio album was going to be a snarling, shredding monster and their “heaviest album yet”, Butch Vig had offered his services as producer.

  It was a reunion that had been talked about for a number of years but it was only when Vig fully understood Grohl’s desire to recapture an essence of the raw punk he once was by taking everything back to basics that Vig realised they were once again on the same wavelength,

  “He mentioned to me, when they played Wembley [Stadium in the U.K.] at the end of last tour, they were like, ‘Holy shit, I can’t believe how big we are,’ … and he was thinking what to do next, and so he said, ‘I want to do something really primal sounding.’ And he had me up to his house, and when I got there he opened up his garage door and went, ‘I want to record the record in here.’ And I said, ‘Uh, OK …’”(1)

  In effect Grohl turned his back on the band’s impressive Studio 606 in order to free himself from the constraints of that environment. “[Dave] has an amazing studio not too far from his home, in the Valley, and it’s a great, kick-ass studio, but I think he felt that if he went in there, what wou
ld he do different on this record? They’d be recording in the same room, using the same board, getting the same sort of vibe,” continued Vig.

  It was a back-to-basics approach that had reinvigorated numerous bands in the past; indeed the Red Hot Chili Peppers had developed and demoed their return to form album Californication in a garage in the Hollywood Hills. But for Vig, the real excitement about the project was that Grohl wanted to turn his back on digital recording and return to the analogue techniques of times past. Not only that but Grohl wanted a warts-and-all recording that showed their imperfections as much as their abilities.

  “You know what? It sounds great. They’re fucking badass players. It’s an honest record. It sounds real,” Vig confirmed.

  That honesty was hinted at by the unveiling of a snippet of the track ‘Bridge Burning’ on the band’s own online interactive FM radio – on which people could tune the dial across the frequencies in order to find pastiches of different kinds of radio shows, a brief clip of a live performance of ‘All My Life’ and, more importantly, new tracks being revealed as a part of a staggered campaign.

  ‘Bridge Burning’ itself explodes with a stadium-sized intensity and Grohl’s full-throated exaltation as he screams, “These are my famous last words”. Coming from certain people this might have been seen as a hint at retirement to come, but from this newly rejuvenated Grohl it seemed to herald the rebirth of the band.

  As a track it also clearly revealed the full impact of Vig as well as the other reunion featured on the new material – the return of Pat Smear on guitar. Here were the Foo Fighters once again sounding vital and fresh, with any hints at their AOR tendencies of recent times being limited to the trademark hand in the air choruses (which tap into the US blue collar consciousness in the way that ‘Born in the USA’ did for Bruce Springsteen). There’s no mistaking it: Grohl’s gargantuan choruses were made for beer-soaked, loud-mouthed sing-a-longs – a fact that has much to do with his appeal and is very much where his honesty is sited. In the teaser version however, the fans were only treated to twenty-eight seconds of that track, which over 500,000 took advantage of. They’d have to wait for the full release to enjoy it in its full splendour.

  Teaser campaigns using social networking sites linked to content ‘leaks’ were the defining aspect of the album’s initial campaign. Information was sparse, no track titles, no album title and only Grohl’s Twitter comments to go by. In terms of promotion, this album was in every way a product of the post-social network age. Quite ironic given the back-to-basics nostalgia of the recording process.

  In the last of week January 2011, photos of the band in rehearsal started being uploaded to Twitter, the social networking site that Grohl admitted he had become addicted to! Messages accompanied the pictures proclaiming the band’s eagerness to play the new album live, until the band posted a picture of a sombrero next to a Foo Fighter flight case. It was the clearest indication yet that the band was about to hit the road.

  On Friday, January 28, Grohl posted teaser pictures of himself as he drove up the west coast of the US. One photo featured him with the ocean to his left with Santa Cruz Island in the distance, while another included the North 101 sign. Clearly these were intended to be messages for the fan base to decode. And decode they did because by the time the band announced a special show at the tiny Velvet Jones club in Santa Barbara later that Friday night, over 50 people were already in line for tickets.

  Supported by cult band Mariachi El Bronx, the Foo Fighters – including Pat Smear – emerged on stage to play the entire album in sequence followed by a greatest hits set. As a live spectacle the new album gained massive critical plaudits, with one reviewer, Johnny Firecloud, suggesting that ‘White Limo’ could have been “a highlight on The Colour And The Shape”. Indeed the reviewer appeared to be least impressed by the leaked track ‘Burning Bridge’ which he described as “far more pop-rock friendly than the initial indications suggested”.

  In a later commentary NME called the same track a “stadium-punk riot”. What was clear however was that it offered no hint as to the ferocity of the next track that would be leaked. On February 14, as a Valentine’s gift from the Foos to their fans, a video viral was ‘leaked’ through Twitter. That track, ‘White Limo’, proved to be one of Grohl’s heaviest moments with the Foos, featuring screaming distorted vocals and a guitar-shredding assault worthy of Grohl’s Probot output. It was about as far as you could imagine from the acoustic singer-songwriter works that had almost dominated the last three Foos albums. As if to underline the track’s hard rocking credentials, the video features Probot guest Lemmy as the Foo Fighter’s whiskey drinking limo driver. It would seem that trademark Grohl humour hadn’t been discarded with the old studio and the ballads.

  Early in February 2011, NME announced that Grohl was to receive a gong at their annual awards event. That award was to be for the bizarre and grandiose title of ‘Godlike Genius’. In the lead up to the event, at which the Foos were to preview the new album and play another greatest hits set, NME joined in the teaser campaign. On February 22 they announced the album title as Wasting Light and followed it with a track-by-track review by Dan Martin.

  In view of the investment the magazine had made in Grohl and his band in that month, it was hardly surprising that review was an extremely positive affair. In truth the review was largely functional, however it was with his pay-off that Dan Martin really underlined how important this album would be to the band’s legion of fans and to the Foo Fighters’ legacy. “So this restores Dave as the every-person’s Rock God, but it also recasts the Foos as more of an actual, collective band than ever. We’re just going to say it. This is the best Foo Fighters album since The Color And The Shape.(2)

  With Foo Fighters frenzy at an all-time high, radio stations started to play the first single from the album, ‘Rope’. As a track it proved to be different yet again from what had preceded it. From stadium punk to white noise metal, and now to fractured Queens of the Stone Age-styled rock, with stop/start riffing through the verse, promptly followed by a huge, trademark chorus. For an added blistering metal attack, the middle-eight featured a stinging wah-wah guitar solo.

  As signifiers to the album’s range, the three pre-release tasters proved to offer a near-accurate portrayal. The only aspect to the Grohl canon unheard came on ‘Dear Rosemary’. In this bittersweet love song Grohl touched on his poppier style thanks to lilting harmonies and an unforgettable chorus. The Beach Boys touches that first emerged in his harmonies for Nirvana’s Nevermind were still a feature of Grohl’s output after all these years.

  The ghosts of Nirvana were never to far away from this album. Although far from providing a dark mood of contemplation, Grohl was in celebratory mood. ‘Arlandria’ offered as close a pastiche of Nirvana as yet delivered by Grohl and Co, but done so as a joyous expression of greatness, rather than a stab at claiming back a bit of his own legacy. However, the clearest link to Nirvana came with ‘I Should Have Known’, a dark and epic near-ballad, which features old Nirvana sparring partner Krist Novoselic on accordion and bass.

  “We’ve always been in touch. One of the things about the expanded Nirvana family, it doesn’t matter how much time has passed, when you see each other. You’re immediately connected by that, by the good and bad things,” Grohl told Q Magazine. “When I see Krist, I hug him to celebrate our lives, but I also hug him to console him, y’know. There’s a song called ‘I Should Have Known’ that I thought would sound great with his bass-playing and accordion-playing. It’s probably the darkest song on the album.”(3) Elsewhere Wasting Light traversed the roads of country (‘These Days’), driving rock (‘A Matter of Time’ and ‘Miss the Misery’), and even teasing pop punk (‘Back and Forth’, part-sing-a-long, part-Vaudeville).

  Another significant addition to this family affair was in the reintroduction of Pat Smear to the recording process. He may have returned for the Foos’ live shows in 2006, but he hadn’t been involved in the album recordings until Wa
sting Light, when he’d once again come to be regarded as a core member.

  As a body of work then, Wasting Light wasn’t perhaps quite the massive return to former glories NME had claimed. Neither was it a huge change in direction; there were no new twists in the Grohl repertoire, with every track held together by those victorious, celebratory, chest-beating choruses. What was clear however, was that the album had a new-found energy that had seemingly left the Foos building some time ago. To some observers, the previous album may have suggested that despite the maturity in the song-writing, the band’s days were numbered. By stark contrast, this new album comes blazing into town like a gang of teenagers hell-bent on painting the place red before burning it down. And all the while there are those monumental choruses that stick in your head like discarded chewing gum on the soles of your sneakers.

  The problem of course is that these teenagers are closer to being middle-aged than ‘down with the youth’. There is an argument that youth is extending beyond its previous time restrictions well into middle-age. Some have described this as ‘middle youth’, and if you go to gigs, festivals or any rock event, it’s these notquite-ready-to-get-old-yet middle youth adults that dominate things. Far from being a return to the past then, and not yet ready for a mid-life crisis, Wasting Light is the sound of Grohl and company cranking up the gears on middle youth and giving the middle finger to anyone who’d written them off as FM-style adult orientated rock.

  If the idea of turning his garage into a studio smacked of Grohl yearning to rediscover some of the edge of his earliest recording adventures then some of the promotional activities only underscored this in bold. Perhaps most interesting was a competition for fans to host the band playing live in their garages. All they had to do was describe their garage (with dimensions) and explain why they’d love the band to play there.