by Martin James
In theoretical terms he was touching on an area that has been a popular topic of debate for a number of years as academics have researched into notions of space and place. Typically, many of those investigations have centred on key cities during particular periods of social upheaval. So cities such as Manchester in the late 1970s and Washington, DC in the late 1980s have become the focus of intense interrogation. Grohl’s project took a fresh take in that he was interested in how particular studios have contributed to creating the sound of that city and in what ways those studios were a product of their cultural surroundings. So the Sonic Highways project was unveiled as a series of TV shows in which Grohl interviewed many of the key figures in a sound associated with a city, and then embarked on writing and recording sessions with the Foos in the studios that had been recognised as essential to that sound. The finale of each show would be a new Foo Fighters’ song inspired by, and in homage to, the host city.
The end result promised the Foo Fighters in the role of clairvoyant through which the spirit of each city would be channelled. As a final twist it was revealed that Grohl’s lyrics would be drawn from the interviews he’d undertaken with the musical inhabitants of each city. In any other hands the project might have been written off as a pretentious piece concocted by a bored band trying to discover a way of reintroducing fresh energy. To be fair, on paper it did seem at the very least convoluted. However, Sound City had already revealed Grohl to be an engaging interviewer whose position of fan in awe of his subjects was never far from the camera’s gaze.
Grohl himself described the project as a “love letter to the history of American music” although it is perhaps more accurate to call it a love letter to his chosen history of American music. It is, in a sense, a telling of US music’s history with all the sounds, cities and genres left out, telling you as much about the man as the things actually covered. So, for the ‘album number 8’ project Grohl directed an eight-part series in which the band visited eight cities: Chicago, Washington, DC, Nashville, Austin, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Seattle and New York. The album inspired by those cities, the band’s eighth, would feature eight new songs. In effect, this was the history of US music shaped by the number eight.
Inevitably, this historical reading was primarily distilled through the Foo Fighters’ creative lens so the emphasis is on blues, punk and hardcore, classic rock and country, the music most clearly linked to the Foo Fighters’ oeuvre. Little surprise then that their investigation of Chicago ignored the sound of house music, however, Grohl does explore the influence of the Go-Go dance music sound with originator Chuck Brown, as well as premier Go-Go outfit Trouble Funk’s Big Tony Fisher. The key feature of this sound was the groove featuring the “bounce” beat, which Grohl uses on the song ‘The Feast And The Famine’, created during the Washington show.
The resulting TV shows offered a revealing insight into the Foos as fan boys, with numerous scenes featuring Grohl extolling the virtues of particular places, bands, songs, studios – anywhere that had been an important part of his and his band’s biographies.
Each episode weaves interviews with musical legends such as Bad Brains, Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi), Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Thurston Moore and Chuck D, to name but a few, into the story of the Foos own immersion in their surroundings. Though highly entertaining, the result is as much about celebrating the myth of rock as it is about revealing hidden truths, the biggest myth at work being the notion of geographical location, architecture and environment being central to the story of rock. Far too much is left out of this very stylised account to really address that but, as a creative and unusual take on the Foo Fighters’ own biography, the Sonic Highways series captures the essence of what makes a band function on a creative level. In the need to understand the cultural surrounding of a band it is all too easy to forget that that band was first inspired to make music because of music so if these films celebrate the myths of the music they love, it’s simply because it’s the myths that they fell in love with when they discovered the music. And it’s the same myths that inspired them to become rock musicians.
The project does, however, have a feel of the band trying to recapture what they love about making music and to cull the encroaching boredom. Despite having the chance to take a break instead they took on a huge undertaking that in itself hinted at the fact that they had to find new ways of making life interesting. Talking to the Guardian’s music critic Alexis Petridis, Grohl admitted, “Complacency and feeling stagnant drives bands into the ground. I mean, it’s a creative endeavour and when it becomes the opposite it’s not much fun. We’re 20 years in and it’s a priority that we continue to enjoy it and love it, you know? But every day I have some harebrained scheme to fucking put on a Fourth of July show or a new video idea or a new project, and I have the opportunity and resources to do these things. I can tell my guys: ‘Here’s what I think we should do, it might sound crazy but I know we’ll pull it off,’ and they trust me to do it. I think they just sort of imagine that I’m enough of a hyperactive child and I don’t take no for an answer, so I’ll find a way to make it happen.”(1)
Of the many criticisms levelled at the TV series (the band seeking authentication through association, a promotional gimmick, etc.) perhaps one of the most damning came with the suggestion that women are all but written out of the story of US rock. It’s a similar criticism to that aimed at Sound City, which seemed to cast and celebrate women in particularly subservient roles.
Writing for feminist website Jezebel, commentator Julianne Escobedo Shepherd argued, “As Sonic Highways tells it, women’s involvement in American music has been cursory, at best, with the amount of women musicians allowed to speak in any given episode topping out at around three, regardless of how prominent these women might be. Furthermore, no women of color have a chance to speak…”(2)
It was a fair point but one that possibly says more about the culture the band grew up in, which has always been male dominated. However, to level any accusations of sexism at Grohl and the band merely points to the historically low numbers of female musicians in the US story, let alone the lack of prominence of women in the band’s own musical biographies. Yet Grohl himself has often pointed to the important role that the strong women in his life have played. This recognition of female strength is often revealed in his lyrics too. In putting together the TV series he could have gone some way to redress this balance by focusing on important women in the story of US music, but that would have been insincere for these women may not have been as important a force in his own youthful love of music. What we are seeing here is not a history of US music but a journey through Grohl and the band’s own music histories, the aims therefore personal honesty rather than putting right the wrongs.
Sonic Highways, then, is in essence a biography of the Foo Fighters that is far more telling than the Back and Forth documentary. The album that emerged from these filmed sessions then came across as the band embracing what they loved about each city’s mythical sound, but without losing their own sound. This wasn’t as huge an achievement as it might sound for what becomes abundantly clear throughout the making of each song is just how indebted the band are to their heroes and the music they have loved. Essentially these are the sounds they have always played, and these are the tunes they’ve always moved to.
The album Sonic Highways is less packed with surprises than people might have expected from such a grand project. It sounded every inch like a Foo Fighters album, very much a case of expect the expected. ‘Something From Nothing’ is an anthemic celebration in the mould of ‘Best Of You’, with its trademark slow-burning growth from brooding contemplation to Grohl’s inevitable cathartic roar of “Fuck it all, I came from nothing”, which then erupts into a shredding monster. It’s classic Foo Fighters with added metal dynamics. ‘What Did I Do?/God As My Witness’ is equally anthemic but in the mould of Sheer Heart Attack era Queen. ‘The Feast and the Famine’ follows a similar path but
with stop-start riffing that echoes the early Fugazi years at Dischord Records. ‘Subterranean’ finds Grohl in reflective mood, contemplating the grunge era over a backwash of Pink Floyd-esque guitars, while ‘Outside’ moulds country rock to near-psychedelic hooklines. Album closer ‘I Am a River’ is a seven-minute opus in which Grohl bares his soul to the grandiose strains of an orchestra.
As an album it fails to show the band at their best. At times the songs seem to tread water, with guest appearances failing to bring fresh life to the old sound. Indeed, the powerhouse of the Foo Fighters appears too overwhelming for most guests, whose contributions seem indistinguishable from the host band’s dominant sound. So, guests such as Austin guitarist Gary Clark Jr, former Grohl collaborator Zac Brown and even New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band fade into the brooding storm of the Foo Fighters’ sound. Only Joe Walsh seems to come through on ‘Outside’, thanks to his spiralling, vertigo-inducing guitar solo.
In the space of two albums then the Foo Fighters had embraced the entire mythos of US rock, from garage band to studio jet setters but the driving force that links the two sets is an enduring love of the very music they gave themselves to when they first discovered rock music. Sonic Highways may not have had the same blistering energy as Wasting Light, but it showed the band to be as comfortable exploring sonorous epic rock as down-at-heel hardcore.
A few months before the release of Sonic Highways, on August 1 2014, Dave and Jordyn’s third daughter, Ophelia Saint, was born. Once again, however, the busiest man in rock was unable to take a few months off to enjoy his new baby. Instead he was staring down the barrel of a new Foo Fighters’ tour – one that kicked off with a series of secret gigs under the stagename ‘The Holy Shits’. One such gig was at the Concorde 2 in Brighton, UK, the coastal city where former Nirvana and long-time Foo Fighters UK agent Russell Warby lives. It was Warby and his business partner who, despite being strapped for cash, personally financed Nirvana’s first dates in the UK. From that tour on, Grohl played drums and has since worked closely with Warby.
At the ‘Live & Kicking’ conference at Southampton Solent University in February 2015, Warby suggested that he had a big summer ahead with some major gigs with the Foo Fighters. As the band embarked on a world tour in support of Sonic Highways, it was announced they would be the Friday headliners at Glastonbury 2015, representing a fitting finale to a hugely ambitious few years in which they’ve pushed at the edges of what they are as a band, as people and as a creative force.
Back in 2012, journalist Brian Warner of Celebrity Net Worth reported Dave Grohl as estimated to be the second wealthiest drummer in the world, with a fortune of $260 million. He was just behind Ringo Starr. Most people with such a staggering amassed fortune would spend much of their time enjoying the fruits of their labour, but not Grohl, whose name has been synonymous with “work ethic” since he first came into the public gaze. If anything, he has used his wealth to enable new ideas and put into place a working environment that at times seems gruelling. He remains, to this day, the famed “hardest working man in rock”.
Notes
1. Alexis Petridis, 6 November 2014, Guardian, (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/06/sp-dave-grohl-foo-fighters-sonic-highways-album-tv-show)
2. Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Jezebel, (http://jezebel.com/dave-grohls-sonic-highways-systematically-erases-women-1666309945)
POSTSCRIPT… A REFLECTION
What place for biographies like these? In these days of internet investigation, no stone remains unturned, no rumour unreported for too long. Each morsel, each tiny bite of info is grabbed by the fan and posted for consumption on an imagined community of other online obsessives. Where once the myths surrounding music would emerge from the pages of the music press, today its fansite discussion boards and blogs that create the rumours, state the presumed facts. Today, like never before, stories and lies masquerading behind a mask of truth are published without consideration for reality.
In this collapse between truths and realities, lies and stories, any sense of unquestioned history becomes forgotten. What happened is less interesting than what might have happened, what was reported as having happened and what is disseminated as the version of how people might have hoped it had happened. Numerous histories emerge, histories on the verge of collapse through loss of critical voice.
Once these biographies attempted to be the conduits of truth. Once they would be the only places to glean the new knowledge and to explore the previously uncovered myth. Today, however, biographies have a different use. Today biographers are tour guides. We pick our way through the detritus of popular culture, explore the irrelevant, celebrate the facts, but above all attempt to find a path through the multiple versions of history, the histories that exist.
To this versioning of history we add a critical perspective – sure, it’s our opinion, but then enjoyment of music was always about opinion. Music journos are always the first to express those opinions. This is how it should be.
The biographer can never be outside of the story. We are implicated in every word, every story line followed and every fact written. Our opinions, backgrounds and ambitions colour these texts. We are critics and this is our work.
The stories, rumours and lies can take care of themselves on the internet. Biographers should attempt to grasp the burning embers from the fires of historical confusion and culturally locate them in the here and now.
Which is why Grohl is so fascinating to me. In many ways he seems to embody the cultural obsessions of the age in which we live. His music isn’t overly deep, but instantly memorable and at times as deposable as pop. But then he delivers some of the most touching records on the commercial landscape. He comes over as a nice guy with few hidden depths, but then surprises us with his ability to cut to the quick with acute lyrical meaning. He seems politically unmotivated, a typical Generation X-er, but then he makes a statement, either musical or personal, that is steeped in the politics of people. In this age of celebrity he is a private man, but with celebrity leanings. He will turn up to awards ceremonies, gets pictures of his personal life in the pages of the celebrity press and yet he has little to do with the machinations of the throw-away PR machinery. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that at a time when family is in a state of breakdown, Grohl talks endlessly about exactly that, family. From his mum, to his wife and children, from his band to those people (techs to PRs) who have worked for him for years. All are his family. And that is a very revealing aspect to his moralities, ethics and ideologies.
He’s the family guy and all of the confusions that this idea presents.
DISCOGRAPHY
FREAK BABY
DEMO (no label) 1984
Includes: Different
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
DEMO (no label) 1985
Includes: Different (new version)
Single
SPLIT 7" with Lunchmeat (Sammich Records) 1985
Helpless / Into Your Shell / Am I Alone?
Compilation
ALIVE AND KICKING (WGNS / Metrozine)
Helpless / I Can Only Try
DAIN BRAMAGE
DEMO #1 (no label) 1986
In The Dark / Watching It Bake / Cheyenne / Space Cat / Bend
DEMO #2 (no label) 1986
Flannery / Give It Up / The Log / Eyes Open / Home Sweet Nowhere / We’re An American Band / …And There’s A… / Success / Baltimore Sucks (But Booje Needs the Bucks)
Album
I SCREAM NOT COMING DOWN (Fart Blossom Records) 1987
The Log / I Scream Not Coming Down / Eyes Open / Swear / Flannery / Drag Queen / Stubble / Flicker / Give It Up / Home Sweet Nowhere
SCREAM (with Grohl)
Single
Mardi Gras – 7" (DSI) 1990
Mardi Gras / Land Torn Down
Albums
NO MORE CENSORSHIP (RAS Records) 1988
Hit Me / No More Censorship / Fucked Without a Kiss / No Escape / Building Dreams / Take It from The Top /
Something in My Head / It’s About Time / Binge / Run to the Sun / In the Beginning
Notes: Grohl drums on all tracks but ‘Hit Me’. Grohl wrote ‘In the Beginning)
LIVE AT VAN HALL IN AMSTERDAM (Konkurrel Records) 1989
Live At Van Hall In Amsterdam
Who Knows – Who Cares? / U Suck A / We’re Fed Up / Laissez Faire / This Side Up / Human Behavior / Iron Curtain / Total Mash / Still Screaming / Chokeword / Feel Like That / Came Without Warning / Walk by Myself
FUMBLE (Dischord) [Recorded December 1989 – released July 1993)
Caffeine Dream / Sunmaker / Mardi Gras / Land Torn Down / Gods Look Down / Gas / Dying Days / Poppa Says / Rain
Notes: Grohl wrote and sung “Gods Look Down”. Album artwork by Grohl.
YOUR CHOICE LIVE SERIES O10 (Your Choice) 1990
C.W.W. PT. II / I.C.Y.U.O.D. / The Zoo Closes / Hot Smoke and Sasafrass / Fight / American Justice / Show and Tell / Sunmaker / No Escape / Take It From the Top / Dancing Madly Backwards / Hit Me
Notes: Recorded live May 4, 1990 at Oberhaus in Germany
NIRVANA (with Grohl)
Singles
SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT (DGC) US 7"1991
Smells Like Teen Spirit / Even in His Youth
SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT (DGC) US 12"1991
Smells Like Teen Spirit / Even in His Youth / Aneurysm