Foo Fighters

by Mick Wall

  His personal life was also a wreck again. He and Melissa Auf Der Maur had split. Dave was forlorn. Even though it had been ‘a big secret we were desperate to keep for some reason’, according to Melissa, their relationship had meant something to him.

  More troubling was the heavy legal dispute now reaching a sickening conclusion between Courtney Love and Dave and Krist, over the rights to old Nirvana material – specifically, ‘You Know You’re Right’, the last track they’d ever recorded with Kurt, when demoing new material in Seattle in January 1994. With a new single-CD ‘history of Nirvana’ compilation planned for the Christmas 2002 market, Dave and Krist were keen to include the track amongst the rarities. Courtney, however, was determined to stop them, insisting it would make a better addition to some future Nirvana retrospective along the lines of the Beatles’ 1 Anthology of the mid-Nineties.

  In order to try and get her own way, Courtney then sued both Dave and Krist on the basis, her legal documents claimed, that ‘You Know You’re Right’ was a ‘potential “hit” of extraordinary artistic and commercial value’. It took a year for Dave and Krist’s lawyers to fight it out with Courtney’s legal team, before getting the outcome they felt they deserved when, in September 2002, it was announced by the Nirvana camp that the lawsuit had been settled, and that ‘You Know You’re Right’ would after all be released on the compilation Dave and Krist were behind, simply titled Nirvana.

  But while Dave and Krist had maintained a dignified silence on the subject, Courtney had taken her grievances public, claiming that Kurt ‘hated’ Dave by the end of his life. And, most ludicrously of all, that Dave was effectively taking food from her child’s mouth.

  ‘I also think she’s a little bit jealous of Kurt and Dave’s relationship, as proper musicians,’ adds Anton Brookes. ‘You know, Courtney’s a good singer and songwriter, she’s a good guitarist. But she’s … she’s a poor man’s Kurt Cobain. And I think, to an extent, there is an inverted jealousy towards Dave. And it just seems to have festered and festered. Maybe there’s financial issues that we don’t know about, where she thinks she should be getting more than Dave or Krist are getting. I don’t know. But I think Dave has just dealt with it admirably. He’s just got on with it. Every so often he gets pissed off and frustrated and he fights fire with fire. But one thing I think Courtney’s always tried to do with Dave, but he’s never, ever engaged in it, is just mudslinging. Especially in this day and age with Twitter and the internet. And Courtney is so astute. Courtney should have been a scientist or something. She’s ultra-intelligent. And Dave’s never given her the time of day.’

  Asked by Howard Stern if such plainly bizarre complaints actually hurt him, Dave confessed that they did. ‘Honestly,’ he said on Stern’s show, ‘the way I look at it is I have my version of what happened [in Nirvana]. And I have my memories. Pat [Smear] and I talk about that stuff all the time. And we laugh about the good times and we talk about the bad times sometimes. But you can’t really let those things get to you … You also have to understand that circumstances were so extraordinary that everybody’s got their version of what happened, you know? It’s such a public event that whole thing. It’s not like, my buddy Jimmy passed away…’

  Hardly any wonder then that when the band got together to write material for another Foos album – Chris Shiflett’s first with the band – things were once again teetering out of control. Work had begun just two months after flying back from London with Taylor. But things did not go well. Nobody seemed quite into it, least of all Dave. Nate developed what he described later as a ‘shitty attitude’ because Dave never seemed satisfied, while as far as the bassist was concerned things were going well. With Taylor now entirely clean and sober but still in the doghouse over his OD, he was content for the time being to merely go along with whatever his boss wanted. While Chris, who had been so looking forward to making his first album with the Foos was utterly dumbfounded, finding himself suddenly in a no man’s land. He recalled how he would show up every day at the studio but never seemed to be called on to do anything. He’d hang out, drink coffee, have a late lunch, drink more coffee … Then go home. ‘It fucking sucked.’ According to Dave there was a snippy atmosphere all round. ‘Infighting, whispers, blah blah blah…’

  They carried on recording though, showing a work ethic if little else. Eventually though it became clear to Dave that he wasn’t nearly as excited by the results as he should have been. In the past he’d been in a hurry to play new stuff for people. Now he wasn’t sure he wanted anybody to hear what they’d been doing. It wasn’t any one thing that could be easily fixed this time, either, like the drums, or the studio, or whatever. It was just … the whole thing. Bad vibes, man. Bummer. When they played what they had to John Silva and he shook his head that clinched it. The album would have to be scrapped, Dave decided. Nobody else except Nate disagreed.

  ‘We had kind of a general blowout on that record,’ he recalled in 2013, ‘because the album sucked and we had to redo it. But it was during that process of discussing the album sucking that everybody really had a chance to air their grievances. Dave was like, “Hey man, why’s it such a drag for you to come in and re-record these songs?” And I said, “Well, because I thought that the part I did was good.”’ But he soon came around to Dave’s way of thinking. ‘Having that conversation made me realise that I needed to approach what I was doing in the band differently. The good thing about that was that I think I’m a better player for the band now. I’d always relied on my instincts and said, “OK, whatever I think is going to be interesting here is going to be right for the song” and that’s not necessarily the case. It changed my perspective and I would listen to the drummer more and think about what was happening with the vocal melody and think about what the general purpose of the song was. My playing became simpler, but also more effective and direct and tighter, too.’

  What nearly finished all of them off though was what Dave did next: deciding he would rather become a member of Queens of the Stone Age. Holy shit …

  For Chris, this was terrible news, worse than the limbo he’d endured in the studio. He’d joined the band, seen his ‘dream come true’ – now it looked like it was over. He could not get his head around it at all. But then neither could any of the others. Taylor, in particular, took it very badly, personally, like a slap in the kisser, payback time, maybe, he thought, for being such a fuck-up on the road. For once, Dave didn’t even pretend to care. He didn’t have to be there, struggling to keep the Foos on the right track. He could just go and do something more interesting, right then. So he did.

  Formed in 1997 by the ex-Kyuss singer-guitarist Josh Homme, QOTSA were then one of the coolest bands on the planet rock. Neither their eponymous debut, released independently in 1998, nor their major-label debut, Rated R, in 2000, was a big chart success, but the band’s critical reputation preceded them. If Kyuss, from Palm Desert in the Coachella valley, had been one of the forerunners of ‘stoner rock’, mixing wild peyote-wisdom with deep desert-sand blues, then Homme’s vision for QOTSA went several steps further, advancing the prickly-cactus rhythms of Kyuss to exaggerated heights of technical expertise and dreamlike trance-music that both rocked and ruled, majestic in its decadent splendour.

  In short, though they lacked any of the Foo Fighters’ commercial success, QOTSA were, right then, a far more exciting proposition, musically, than any Dave had been involved with since the brilliantly real, frighteningly nightmarish In Utero. Always far more of a musical collective than a stand-alone group, with each album always featuring several guest performers, from Rob Halford to Mark Lanegan, Dave joining the Queens in the studio to record their third album, Songs for the Deaf, was a surprisingly easy move for him to make. Excited by the idea of simply becoming a drummer again on someone else’s album, he took to his new role with such enthusiasm he virtually became a full-time member of the band, playing on the whole album and appearing in the video for the album’s lead single, ‘No One Knows’.

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bsp; For someone like Anton Brookes, who had known Dave since he was the newbie in Nirvana, there was less surprise in this latest development in the Foo Fighters’ story. ‘When the Foo Fighters supposedly split up or when the Foo Fighters ditch an album and go back in the studio, Dave’s always gone with his instincts, and his instincts, 9.9 times out of ten, have always proved right,’ says Anton. ‘From sacking musicians, to bringing musicians in, when he went off with QOTSA, everybody was like, “Oh my god, what’s happening here?” But that was part of his development. I still think that was probably part of the throwback from Nirvana. Like, what am I doing with my life? He was still a relatively young man when he drummed on [Songs for the Deaf]. I remember going to see them play at the Astoria 2, in London, and I’d not seen Dave drum since Nirvana. I might have seen him drum on the odd song for the Foos or something, and I saw him on TV drumming for Tom Petty. But to watch him drum live again … To this day, I still think that’s the best QOTSA album, and I think that’s partly down to Grohl. What he contributed to that record, it cannot be taken lightly.

  ‘And when you go and see him onstage … the Queens, they’re proper musicians, a proper band. And they’re a cool, cult phenomenon. There’s nothing throwaway about QOTSA, and to play with them, to do something with them, you’ve got to be on top of your game. When Dave went behind the stool onstage, or when you see him in the video for ‘No One Knows’, and he’s drumming. The look on his face, the tempo of the song and he’s breathing hard, you know, you can tell he’s had to train to get there as a drummer, he’s had to go back and put some time in to get there. But I think as a musician, when he recorded with them, he just went in and did it, one or two takes.’

  With the rest of the Foos left in limbo for the duration, news of an appearance together onstage at the 2002 Coachella festival in California, in April, was seen as a sign of light at the end of the tunnel until it was explained to them that Queens of the Stone Age would also be appearing – with Dave on drums. Suddenly, Coachella was seen as a make-or-break date by all of them. ‘We nearly broke up,’ Taylor recalled in 2005. ‘We didn’t know what we were going to do. I wasn’t surprised when we binned the demo: I was thinking, “Should we even be making records?” It was such a disorganised, unfocused time. I don’t think Dave was sure of what he wanted to do and, you know, he is the leader. I think he was still in love with the Queens of the Stone Age stuff; he really wanted to go and play with them.’

  The closer the date of the two-day festival approached, the more the tension grew among the freaked-out Foos. With Dave rehearsing some of the time with QOTSA, the rest of the time with his own band, the atmosphere in the Foos became unbearable. Nobody was talking any more, they just gritted their teeth and braced themselves to get through the show. When, at one rehearsal, Chris joked about how you could cut the air with a knife, a huge fight broke out between the warring members. Mainly Taylor and Dave. They finally had it out. All of it. For ever. Finally. Fuck it. Done.

  Taylor hated it that Dave had gone off to play drums with QOTSA. Dave couldn’t have insulted him more if he’d fucked his old lady. But Dave was now playing the long game. Foo Fighters was his band. His band; his rules. His moves. Taylor and the others would just have to suck it up. But when Taylor made a point of not going to see Dave play with QOTSA at Coachella, Dave predictably got upset, though what he expected Taylor to do, nobody knew. Taylor: ‘I was supposed to be happy that Dave was having such a good time.’ But he wasn’t fucking happy at all. Why should he be? This was a piss-take, right? Right, Dave, man?

  Says Paul Brannigan: ‘The Foos were in a pretty bad shape.’ Dave working with QOTSA was ‘a bit of a fuck-you to his band mates. Like, if you’re not bothered then I’m gonna go and do what I wanna do, you know? And it spiralled into something it wasn’t supposed to be. Obviously then that sparked confrontation within the band. It led to Dave laying down the law and basically saying, this is my band and we do it this way, or we don’t do it at all. Or rather, you don’t do it at all.’

  There was another quarrel between Dave and Taylor the following day, just hours before the Foos were due on stage, over the set list, during which Dave told Taylor if he didn’t like it he could fucking leave. To which Taylor replied that he would be doing exactly that – right after the show.

  Then came the show. Queens had gone down exceptionally well the day before, but they had been twelfth on the bill, coming on mid-afternoon. The Foos, third on the bill, and onstage early evening, went down an absolute storm, all the tension and friction causing them to virtually explode into the set. Their first show since the desultory V Festival in England eight months before, and they played brilliantly. Dave was on fire. Taylor was out of his skin. Chris and Nate just had to keep up for it to be one of their best shows ever.

  When it was over, Dave asked Taylor to take a walk with him backstage, where for the first time since the drummer’s OD they talked as friends again, brothers reunited. Dudes. The following morning it was agreed they band would meet up again at Dave’s studio in Virginia, and see what happened when they revisited some of the material from the aborted album.

  ‘Theoretically, that should have been the end of the Foo Fighters – their staring-at-the-abyss moment. Once they managed to negotiate that then suddenly everything was a bit easier. Everybody knew their place. Everybody knew how things operated. But that fight was their defining moment. Once they got that out of their system then everyone understood how things operated and whatever Dave chose to do, they always had the faith in him that he was coming back. These are the things that Dave wants to do and we’ll just chill here until he comes back,’ says Paul Brannigan.

  Their first day back at 606, Dave walked in with a brand-new song. It was called ‘Times Like These’ and it seemed to say it all, with its heightened message of ‘a brand new sky to hang the stars upon tonight’. A song that Dave admitted had been about the choice he’d been wrestling with all year: ‘Do I stay or run away?’

  For Dave it was a musical rebirth. They re-recorded the whole album in a week, out at 606, as before with the third album. Only this didn’t sound anything like that. This sounded darker, heavier, less sure, yet more powerful, more passionate than ever before. They called it One by One, as if in homage to their new stated belief in taking things one day at a time. One second at a time. One breath in and one breath out. This was the way it would be from now on, Dave was sure. The others, most of all Taylor, could only agree. What else could they do? What else would they want to do? It was get onboard the bus time or get off – for good.

  In the end all the fussing and fighting meant the album would cost over a million dollars to complete. For Dave, it was an easy decision to make. The most monumental track on the album was ‘All My Life’, one of the few survivors from the original aborted sessions. First time around it had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and taken weeks to try and get right. The newer, post-Coachella version took half an hour and was done and dusted in the 606 basement, and, according to Dave, ‘became the biggest fucking song the band ever had’.

  Stupendously anthemic, like something The Who might have done in their ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ prime, ‘All My Life’ became the calling card of the new album, one of the cornerstones of the Foo Fighters’ live set that remains so to this day. It also became their biggest single in the UK since ‘This is a Call’ when it reached No. 5 in September, before repeating its success around the rest of the world, including the US, where it became another mainstream Top 40 success and went to No. 1 on the Alternative Rock chart. As a result, One by One became the Foo Fighters’ biggest-selling album yet: their first No. 1 in the UK, Ireland and Australia; and by far their biggest chart success in the US – No. 3 – so far.

  Released just two months after Songs for the Deaf had become the Queens of the Stone Age’s big commercial breakthrough, the knock-on effect for both bands was extraordinary. While Dave’s added profile had brought QOTSA greater mainstream visibility – not le
ast with the brilliantly executed ‘No One Knows’ video – there’s no mistaking either the obvious influence working with the Queens had had on Dave’s own approach. Unlike its lack-lustre predecessor, One by One positively bristled with nailed-on power, achingly tight rhythms and unashamedly me-first drive.

  There were some more self-consciously balladic moments – the juddering ‘Disenchanted Lullaby’, the turgid ‘Tired of You’, the discursive ‘Lonely as You’ – but the main thrust of the album’s 11 tracks was determinedly ‘up’, decidedly shiny and new and almost unnervingly bold. In the final analysis, One by One sounds like what it is: two halves of two quite different albums bolted and sheened into one, the best moments all to be found on the singles, with ‘Times Like These’ justly following ‘All My Life’ high into the world’s singles charts.

  If Chris Shiflett’s influence is anywhere to be found it was not immediately obvious, although he shared band writing credits with Taylor and Nate. The main message was: we are back, bigger and better than before. Well, they were certainly bigger. Over the course of the next two years the band would tour like there was no tomorrow, making hay it seemed while the sun still shone, headlining a brace of sold-out shows at London’s Wembley Arena; then the 16,000-capacity Colour Line arena in Hamburg; the 17,000-capacity Arena in Berlin; the 25,000-capacity Showground Arena in Sydney; and, back in the States, giant rock landmarks like the 17,000-capacity Cobo Center arena in Detroit. At the same time, they now became everybody’s favourite rock band – especially for the people that didn’t feel they especially liked rock.