by Martin James
The romantic notion of the garage band seeps deep into the very psyche of US rock history, while the garage itself is often portrayed in popular culture as the last masculine domain, where men go to “do man stuff”, like tinkering with engines, drinking beer with the guys, watching the game or making blistering rock albums. In marketing terms then, the plan was a masterstroke as it not only reinforced the band’s return to raw garage-punk aesthetic, but also supported their reputation as being “real” people, who are close to their fans.
In total, the competition, which was run as a part of a sponsorship deal with BlackBerry, promised eight winning fans from different cities, which included New York, Seattle and Chicago, the chance to have Foo Fighters play a gig in their garages. The subsequent film of the winning gigs might challenge the popular notion of what a garage actually is (they are all the size of a small house!) but it also succeeds in underlining Grohl’s everyman demeanour. The film shows him at ease with all types of fan, from the obsessive collector to the social climber, from those with real emotional resonance with the songs to the ones who simply love rock music, the point of connection between all being the central theme of the garage. Indeed, through the film an occasional sense of garage-envy seeps into the conversation as Grohl exclaims other people’s great garages to be much bigger than his.
As the action unfolds through each winning entrant, the band are confronted by a different type of fan, each with his own different kind of life story. The fan’s everyday real-life experience takes centre stage, placing the Foo Fighters as guests in their own film. Perhaps the most poignant moment comes with the opening New York gig, where the winning entrant, former NYC firefighter John Sepa, talks of losing friends in the 9/11 Twin Towers’ atrocity. Here, the Foos are cast as regular guys who are as touched by real life as anyone else. The Washington, DC sequence opens with winning entrants Brian and Emily Brooke’s quotes, “Stuff like this doesn’t happen to us” and “If it weren’t for bad luck, we wouldn’t have any” over footage of desolate farmland, compete with animal skeletons. The viewer is presented with a sense of hardworking folk struggling to get by, who have a real connection with the Foo Fighters’ work ethic.
In contrast, Toronto winner Nick Perry is the very embodiment of the über fan. He’s shown thumbing through this huge collection of Dave Grohl memorabilia, carrying the band’s gear and even giving Grohl lessons on how to drive a tractor. Furthermore, he gets to live out the dreams of so many Foo Fighters’ fans through getting on stage and playing along to some of their songs. Between songs, Grohl depicts the lucky fan as a memorabilia stalker, explaining that he recognised Perry as “that guy” who kept turning up at loads of gigs, asking him to sign obscure bootlegs. He then affectionately embraces him and says, “You’re no longer ‘that guy’, you’re ‘this guy’. And I like ‘this guy’ better.”
As a live film it captures the band at its most raw, but what it also does is to present their own story as being intrinsically connected to the lives of their fans. Indeed, the only time the Foos’ own story takes centre stage is in the final sequence when Grohl explains the ideology behind the Garage Tour (2011). It’s a re-enactment of the Foo Fighters’ very first gig in a friend’s loft for just fifty people. And so the fans’ stories become folded into Grohl’s and the contrast between everyday folk and rockstar is diminished.
Garage Tour wasn’t the only film about the Foo Fighters at this time. Coinciding with the release of Wasting Light came the full-length biographical documentary, Back and Forth (also 2011), filmed by Academy Award-winning director James Moll. First premiered on March 15 of the same year at the annual SXSW (South by South West) music industries festival in Austin, Texas, the movie captures interviews with current and past members of the band, as well as providing candid footage of the production of Wasting Light.
Back and Forth proved to be a highly hitherto-guarded account of Grohl’s story, with key releases omitted in favour of an official story. This allowed the director to focus on Grohl’s emotional response to a series of heart-wrenching events, none greater than the death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, which still leaves him visibly moved. Indeed, through countless stories of band members leaving, Taylor’s 2001 heroin overdose and so on, the viewer is left with the impression of Grohl as being someone who wears his emotions, if not on his sleeve then in his eyes, a point compounded by the lingering shot of his tearful face at the now-legendary 2008 Wembley Stadium gig.
That Grohl can still present a genuinely emotional side to his public persona is to be applauded in the context of the industry of which he is part. Indeed, both Wasting Light and Back and Forth collectively present an image of absolute male authenticity in the face of an increasingly fake business. As we saw in the Garage Tour film, it’s the reality in the Foo Fighters’ story that touches fans so deeply. That perception is summed up by former NYC firefighter John Sepa when he exclaims on camera, “These are regular guys. They just happen to be rock’n’roll stars!”
The “regular guys” ideology that surrounds the Foo Fighters is ironically a million miles removed from their early days as the punks who regular guys would want to beat up. But that’s part of the band’s appeal, that they can straddle the paradox of the mainstream and the margins through their lack of pretension. They may be the band that firemen, farmers and jocks drink beers in their garage man-caves to, but they’re also cool enough for the underground punk kids to also love. That kind of honesty is a difficult and rare trick to pull off in today’s intolerably accelerated culture, but it certainly worked with Wasting Light, which not only showed they could write great in-car rock anthems but also proved they could still shred like a bunch of adolescent youths. Little surprise then that the album debuted at number one in twelve countries, including their first number one in the US on the Billboard 200 chart. Furthermore, it was nominated for five different accolades in the Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, and won Best Rock Album. ‘White Limo’ also won best Hard Rock/Metal Performance and ‘Walk’ won Best Rock Song.
Amid all the excitement for Wasting Light, the Foos released another album under the radar of mass-media gale. On April 16 2011, they released an album of cover versions, Medium Rare, in celebration of Record Store Day, an annual celebration of indie music stores. The limited vinyl release was largely compiled from existing B-sides and rarities, although new recordings of Thin Lizzy’s ‘Bad Reputation’ and The Zombies’ ‘This Will Be Our Year’ and the live version of Mose Allison’s ‘Young Man Blues’ were unique to the album. A CD of Medium Rare was also released as a free covermount with Q Magazine in the UK.
Notes
1. Exclusive: Butch Vig Talks ‘Primal, Raw’ Foo Fighters Album (MTV.com)
2. Foo Fighters Wasting Light – First Listen’ by Dan Martin (NME.com)
3. Unknown/Q Magazine
13
IF I WERE ME
What do you say to a drummer with a camera?
You might want to take the lens cap off.
If Wasting Light found Dave Grohl rediscovering the thrill of the authentic garage band experience of his early years, then his next venture would take him on another nostalgic journey equally etched into the mythology of rock music; the legendary analogue and reel-to-reel studios that gave birth to classic albums of the pre-digitisation age. Those studios where bands would set up camp for weeks and write entire albums under the watchful direction of a producer and the diligent eye of an A&R man. Studios where band relationships would be pushed to extremes through the pressure cooker environment, the push and pull of the hangers-on and the ever-present array of liquor and narcotics. Whether The Beatles at Abbey Road or The Clash at Wessex Studios, the link between classic albums and particular environments is etched into the story of rock music.
In 2012, Grohl turned historian and focused his growing interest in filmmaking onto a documentary about Sound City Studios in LA, a studio that spawned some of US rock’s greatest albums, including Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours a
nd, more pertinently perhaps, Nirvana’s Nevermind.
In the retelling of rock music’s history there is a tendency to focus on particular narratives. These are usually built around record releases, sales charts, a group member as a tortured genius, a transitioning band line up, and so on. Such well-worked storytelling devices are then supported by tails of rock’n’roll debauchery, personal tragedies and ultimately tales of triumph. It’s the exact approach that was applied to the Back and Forth documentary through which the Foo Fighters story was mediated in an official form. The Foos are presented as a tale of triumph over adversity, with the guest roles taken by the scenarios of suicide, drug ODs, unethical band member sackings, unending tours, inter-band tensions and relationship breakdowns. The final triumph is depicted as being Grohl and his band rediscovering the spark that made them want to make albums and tour in the first place.
As a storytelling approach it places emphasis on an almost pathological behaviour associated with the psychological profile of the rock musician. This subsequently becomes lived through other musicians’ stories and a mythical history of rock music is presented as a singular, linear narrative. Although the approach was deployed in Back and Forth, Grohl proclaimed his despair at this kind of biographical mythology when talking to Andy Morris of Q Magazine about his own film endeavour.
“I don’t want to say that most rock bands live these formulaic biography existences – but they kinda do. There’s always a divorce. There’s always an OD. There’s always a bad business manager. That story has been told a thousand times. When I meet young musicians and they fuck themselves up because they’ve read too many rock’n’roll biographies, it makes me a little sad. There’s other ways of doing it – you don’t have to get strung out on heroin to write a good song. There are times when I hear that story again and again – and I just think ‘You idiots. You don’t have to follow that ridiculous routine time and time again.’ That, I’m sick of!”(1)
While Grohl was focusing here on the way in which musicians themselves become affected by the clichés of how bands are supposed to behave, he also inadvertently points to the fact that by giving prominence to certain voices, others become lost. However, those missing voices often tell an altogether differing set of stories about the band. The Foo Fighters had already pointed to this through their Garage Tour film, in which the fans were presented as an important part of the band biography. This is in keeping with Grohl’s love of the documentary on early eighties punk rock in Los Angeles called The Decline Of Western Civilization, in which bands and audience are all given voices in the narrative.
“People say, ‘Well, wait a minute, you were in Nirvana and you sold a billion records.’ Well, f***king who cares how many records I sold?”(2) Grohl is reported to have said in NME regarding the continued emphasis on the usual markers for defining a band’s place in history. For him music is made up of a bigger sum of parts than the members of the band. His Sound City project became a foil for the telling of other all-too-oft overlooked aspects in the histories of music – the importance of the equipment, environment and communities involved in the actual creation of that acclaimed album.
When garage band Nirvana first drove into the car lot behind the dishevelled Sound City Studios in the Van Nuys district of Los Angeles in May 1991 they arrived as snotty punks with an album of songs and a dream of recording in the place where Fleetwood Mac and Neil Young made some of their finest records. It was a kids’ rock’n’roll fantasy that was immediately challenged by reality of the ever present, gag-inducing puke-like smell of the nearby Budweiser Brewery and the ragged surroundings of the studio itself. This was certainly not the fantasy. But Nirvana connected with its dishevelled anti-star ambience and only sixteen days later they’d recorded an album that would go down in history as an epoch-defining collection that tapped into the consciousness of the times. Sound City’s faded beauty was doubtless a huge part of that success.
At the time of that Nirvana session Sound City was on the verge of closure, however with Nevermind’s impact came an upsurge in interest from a new school of bands like Rage Against the Machine, Tool and Weezer, all looking for some of that studio magic. But it wasn’t only the rock’n’roll pretenders who started booking time there; legends like Tom Petty, Metallica and Johnny Cash also recorded there, thanks to producer Rick Rubin, who described the studio as “really not a nice place to be. It was filthy… It almost seemed like you had to really be an edgy person to let it be like that.”(3)
Despite the ambience of neglect, Sound City once again became the studio where, as studio manager Shivaun O’Brien notes, “real men came to make records.”
The Sound City documentary then is the story of the studios’ place in the evolution of many bands. It’s about the communities of people whose lives revolved around the studios and offers a glimpse into a rock music lifestyle that already seems distant. That sense of a culture fading from view offers the film its focus, while the subtext running throughout is of encroaching futures that continually threaten a way of life. Initially, this technological challenge came with the studio’s need to compete with others in the 1970s by upgrading their mixing desk to the Neve 8028. From here on, the film presents the desk as being almost magical as it takes a central role in the story, mythologised by a series of musicians who eulogise its powers. The Neve 8028 seemingly takes the role of the leading lady, a fading starlet who, upon being challenged by a new digital breed of Pro Tools performers, is rescued by a bunch of men on a mission to cherish, embrace and ultimately own their muse. It’s a tale that has Hollywood writ large all over it.
“It’s essentially a love story, in which the main character is a 40 year old mixing desk with a great sound, and where all the sex scenes are 50-something rock stars having a bit of a jam together,” wrote Marc Burrows for Drowned In Sound after the film’s London press screening on February 18 2013.(4) It’s a comment that hints at a side of the rock’n’roll life that is perhaps best left in the past – the misogyny. Throughout the film, only four women are focused on. One, Stevie Nicks, represents a key part to the Sound City story as she and her then husband Lindsey Buckingham recorded their pre-Fleetwood Mac album Buckingham Nicks there, managed by studio owner Tom Skeeter. The other three were would-be vocalists and musicians, who were working as receptionists.
Perhaps the most significant subtext of Sound City is that it’s also a fan’s story. Or rather, it’s the story of Dave Grohl the fanboy, in which he not only acquires the Neve mixing desk and sets it up in his own Studio 606 complex but also gets to live out his fantasies of interviewing or playing with many of his musical heroes. Of the litany of guest interviews that Grohl conducted were Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, as well as Tom Petty and Neil Young, the latter proving to be the hardest person to lock down to the interview.
“Neil Young was the first person to agree to do it and the last person to do his interview – there was a year in between. I eventually just had to fly to Hawaii. Someone said, ‘I’m so sorry – he really wants to do it but he’s got the next five days off and you’re going to have to go.’ I flew everyone down with all their gear, talked to him for an hour and a half and the rest of the time I just drank beer in the ocean. So cool – there’s nothing better than having a bottle of beer in your hand in the waves,” Grohl told Q Magazine’s Andy Morris.(5)
The true fan-boy element of the film really came into focus on December 12 2012, when Grohl performed at the Hurricane Sandy Benefit concert. At what was to become billed as a “Nirvana reunion gig”, for the first time in eighteen years Grohl was joined onstage by Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear. To complete the lineup, the trio were joined by Paul McCartney, who performed as stand-in for Kurt Cobain. Together they played a new track, ‘Cut Me Some Slack’, which they also announced had been recorded for Sound City’s accompanying album, Sound City – Real to Reel. Hints at the new song had already been provided by a Twitter campaign on the Sound City Movie account, in which the song’s name was spelt out o
ver a few days, ransom-note style.
Talking to Fuse after the event, Grohl said, “When I first called Paul to see if he’d come jam with us, none of us wanted to do a Beatles’ song or a Nirvana song, we wanted to do a new song. So we wrote and recorded a new song in a day and it’s heavy as fuck!”(6)
The recording of the Sound City – Real to Reel album takes up the final sequence in the movie after it becomes clear that Grohl has bought the Neve desk in an auction. After transporting it to Studio 606, the desk was lovingly cleaned up and faithfully rebuilt. In many ways it’s in this section that Grohl and friends set out to try and tap into the desk’s alleged magic. This process involves Grohl lovingly writing songs that complement his guests’ own musical nuances. As a result the album shifts between post-grunge epics, country-esque whirls, slow-building moody rockers and eighties metal stompers. Much like the sound of the Foo Fighters indulging in their favourite styles of music with mates like Slipknot’s Corey Taylor, punk legend Lee Ving, Josh Homme, Trent Reznor and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.
Perhaps the finest moment on the album comes with the aforementioned McCartney recording in which the former Beatle plays a slide solo on a guitar made from a cigar box. However, one of the most enlightening songs is performed by Stevie Nicks. ‘You Can’t Fix This’ finds Taylor Hawkins and Dave Grohl faithfully recreating 1980s Fleetwood Mac on a song that the Foos had apparently written a few years earlier, only to shelve it for sounding too much like Fleetwood Mac!
Reviewing the album in NME, pop journalist Mark Beaumont argued: “Grohl marvellously mimics the various styles of his singers… Hence the album ends up as a tribute to each of the individual singers rather than Sound City itself.”(7) It is a fair point and one that calls into question the need for this addition to the documentary itself, as it was to all intents and purposes a different project. Indeed, it was through these collaborations that the focus is diverted from Sound City itself and onto Sound City’s Neve desk. In so doing, Grohl pushes the technological aspect of the project to the fore. With the previous album recorded entirely in analogue and this film and album apparently fetishising analogue technology, was he making a statement against digital production and the age of Pro Tools?