by Mick Wall
There was a much happier outcome a few months later, when Dave was invited to perform at Dimebash, the annual tribute concert to ‘Dimebag’ Darrell Abbott, the former Pantera guitarist who was shot and killed onstage during a gig in Columbus, Ohio, in December 2004. Dave and Dimebag had crossed paths countless times during the early Nineties, sharing bills as readily as bottles of Crown Royal whiskey, and the late guitarist was just as garrulous a host as the Foo Fighters frontman. Since his death, Dave had become close to Darrel’s long-time partner, Rita Haney.
The charity gig took place at a Sunset Strip hangout, The Key Club, and featured a line-up that included members of Slayer, Dio, Puddle of Mudd and Marilyn Manson’s band. It was organised by Rita, who persuaded Dave to join the fun. ‘He was all down for it,’ she says today. ‘He said, “Yeah, I’m gonna be in town, so we’ll come out and do some songs.” But a few days prior to the gig, I went to touch base with him because I hadn’t heard from him. I was thinking, “Don’t pull out on me now!” He finally got back to me the day before and said, “Look, I’ve got a problem…” He sent me a picture of him on a mountain bike. He had wrecked and scraped his whole chest and fractured a couple of ribs.’
While Dave’s injuries were hardly life threatening, they did preclude him from playing drums at Dimebash as originally planned. Instead, he wound up jamming with Lemmy and Motörhead’s guitarist Phil Campbell on ‘Ace of Spades’. ‘That was one of Lemmy’s least favourite songs to do when it’s a jam but it was really cool,’ says Rita. ‘I remember Lemmy saying, “I don’t normally do that song, but I will.” So they did that tune and then Dave came out and played bongos with [Slayer’s drummer] Dave Lombardo on [Black Sabbath’s] ‘Planet Caravan’. It was so awesome! It turned out to be way more memorable than what we had planned.’
For Rita, Dave’s appearance sums up his attitude to the people in his orbit. Many other stars of his magnitude wouldn’t even consider turning up to a club gig for free, let alone with fractured ribs. ‘Dave was like Darrell,’ she says. ‘He can take over a room very quickly and make you feel at home, like you’ve known each other for ever, within just seconds. To have that thing inside you that you can pull out and draw everyone in is amazing. Dave has that trait and it’s genuine, and that’s why you feel so comfortable – because you know it’s genuine. A lot of musicians or actors inhabit this persona of what they think people will expect. When they create this persona, sometimes they don’t realise that they’re trapping themselves and they can’t be who they want to be offstage. I mean, you know you’re not going to see him or someone from Slayer out picking flowers!’
Dave’s appearance at Dimebash was doubly impressive given that work was already well underway on the Foo Fighters’ seventh album. Them Crooked Vultures had barely walked off-stage after the final gig of their tour in July 2010 when Dave reconvened the rest of the Foos in Los Angeles. Except this time there would be some significant changes – luckily, all of them positive. For one, Pat Smear was officially back in the band as a full-time member. Dave dropped some sizable hints when he tweeted photos of his on/off band mate in the studio. No less significant was the return of Butch Vig. Dave had followed up his offer of getting the Nevermind producer to work on the new Foos album.
But the most radical departure of all wasn’t who was recording the album, but where they were recording it. Rather than hire out an expensive studio facility, or even record in the Foos’ own Studio 606 West complex, Dave opted for the most unlikely location of all: his garage. ‘He calls me and says he’s got some stuff he wants to play for me,’ Vig recalled in Nylon Guys magazine. ‘I get to his house and the first thing he says is, “I really wanna do this in my garage.” Then he said he wanted to record on tape with no computers. They’d just played some shows at Wembley Stadium, and he told me, “We’ve gotten so huge, what’s left to do? We could go back to 606 and make a big, slick, super-tight record just like the last one. Or we could try to capture the essence of the first couple of Foo Fighters records.”’
For Dave, the driving motivation behind the new album would be to take the band back to basics. Aware that among diehard Foos fans the orthodoxy now was that the first two FF albums were still their best, his aim was to try and re-create the speed and spontaneity with which that material was created. Then get it down on tape – literally – in as old school a way as possible. Enter Butch: ‘I truly believe that the environment and the atmosphere in which you make a record should dictate and define what the album sounds like,’ said Dave. ‘If you’re being real, then the way you feel comes out.’
But there was another bonus to recording it in Dave’s backyard. It ensured that he could spend valuable time with his growing family. He may have wanted the next Foos album to crackle with the same energy it did when playing live, but the days of pretending the wishes of the others really had anything to do with the big decisions were over – and both sides were now happily reconciled to that. Dave’s eldest daughter, Violet May, frequently wandered into the studio while her father was working. ‘I’d come up [to the studio], clean up all the fucking beer bottles and vacuum this room, mop the fucking floor,’ he pretended to complain in Classic Rock. ‘And I’d work until six o’clock, go down and have dinner with the family, read them stories and give them baths and put them to bed. And come back up here, work until ten p.m. and then go to sleep. That was it.’ Well, not quite. He still had his wife, nanny, pool guy, housekeeper and extended family to help out occasionally too. Plus his own band and producer to do his bidding as well.
Dave had been working on songs for the new Foo Fighters album when he was on the road with Them Crooked Vultures, honing the demos the band had recorded on their last tour in various hotel rooms around the world then hooking up with Hawkins whenever he returned to Los Angeles. If there was a mission statement for the new album, then it would be, according to Dave, ‘fucking heavy’.
‘I love mellow music,’ he told Hot Press. ‘I can write sleepy, beautiful fucking ballads all day long. But then I thought: “Fuck that!” I’m forty-two now, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make this record when I’m forty-six or forty-eight or forty-nine. So I thought: “All right, well, it’s my last chance. So I’m going to go for it.”’
Despite Dave’s ongoing desire to keep things moving forward, there was an unavoidable edge of nostalgia to the sessions in his garage. Working with Vig again was, as Dave put it, ‘not unlike going back and fucking a girlfriend you had twenty years ago’. Though it was, he added, ‘perfectly natural and totally comfortable – he’s the same person he was twenty years ago’. Again, though, this was a fairly rose-tinted view of the 46-yearold producer. In the intervening years Vig had enjoyed his own roller-coaster ride to success with his post-Nirvana band Garbage, selling over seven million albums worldwide. He’d also continued as a producer, recording multi-platinum albums for Smashing Pumpkins, Soul Asylum and Green Day, among others. This would be a meeting of minds between the two; a joint statement on how far they had come and how deeply they both felt the need to prove themselves once again.
The producer wasn’t the only blast from the past. For one of the songs they were working on, ‘I Should Have Known’, Dave tapped up his old Nirvana band mate Krist Novoselic. The pair had stayed in touch in the years after Kurt Cobain’s death, and Novoselic had even added backing vocals to a Foo Fighters song, ‘Walking a Line’, recorded during the One by One sessions. But this was the first time the pair had actually played together in the studio since Nirvana. Factor in the presence of Butch Vig and Pat Smear, and this was the closest anyone would get to a Nirvana reunion – albeit, with one glaring absentee. For Vig, seeing the pair in the same room for the first time for nearly 20 years was an intense experience. ‘Krist was standing there saying: “Hey, how’s it going?”’ Vig told Esquire. ‘My brain is going “Holy shit!” Dave opens up a bottle of wine, a friend had sent me a bottle of bootleg whiskey, we started sipping on that, and just sat down and told storie
s. We were there until about two in the morning. It was powerful, all those memories came flooding back.’
Working with Novoselic and Vig inevitably sparked memories both conscious and subconscious for Dave. He admitted to the Daily Telegraph that he dreamed about their late band mate. ‘I’ve had a few dreams where Kurt shows up and I’m so blown away. “Wait, you never died?”’ he said. ‘For whatever reason, he’d just been hiding. And the three of us get together to be a band again. It’s totally weird.’
Novoselic wasn’t the only guest Dave invited to appear on the album. The dense, bristling ‘Dear Rosemary’ found him trading vocal and guitar lines with Bob Mould, former frontman with the influential Minneapolis hardcore punk pioneers Hüsker Dü, a band who inspired both the impressionable young Dave and the oversensitive young Kurt. For the Foo Fighters frontman, it was a chance to work with yet another hero and pay back something that was owed.
‘I was a huge fan of Hüsker Dü,’ Dave told Mojo. ‘Their album Zen Arcade is one of the most underrated American rock’n’roll records of all time. I met him for the first time last summer and said, “You know, I’d be nowhere and nobody without your music, right?” And he very politely nodded and said: “I know.” I had this song that I imagined would be a duet between us, and he obliged. What an honour to have that sort of moment with one of your heroes.’ Mould was no less effusive in his praise, likening Dave to the former US President Bill Clinton. ‘[Dave has] amazing people skills,’ Mould told Nylon Guys magazine. ‘And he never forgets anyone’s name. Dave’s in this position now where he wants to share the riches of his success. He wants people to know about the artists who’ve made an impact on him. It’s really touching.’
The informal atmosphere fed into the recording, and they worked fast. The album was finished in early December, just 11 weeks after they started. The band and Vig, plus the engineer Alan Moulder and filmmaker James Moll, celebrated by playing a secret gig at a Los Angeles karaoke bar, Paladino’s, the very night they wrapped up the record. ‘Honestly, we finished the last mix and an hour later we got in Alan’s car and drove down to the club and I walked right up onstage,’ Dave told the NME. ‘It was like this sappy Hollywood ending with me, Butch, Alan and James walking down the driveway knowing that we weren’t coming back to make the record tomorrow. It was so Gone with the Wind it was ridiculous.’
The seventh Foo Fighters album was released on 12 April 2011. Titled Wasting Light, after a line from the jagged, pointed ‘Miss the Misery’ (‘Don’t change your mind / You’re wasting light…’), it was deservedly more positively received by the critics than Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace. When Spin hailed it as ‘Dave’s most memorable set of songs since 1997’s The Colour and the Shape’, it was as if Dave had written the review for them. This was exactly what he wanted to hear. While even the stuffy British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph called it ‘tough but accessible, reliably catchy, yet also as surprising as the last’.
If Dave’s plan was to strip away the baggage of success and reconnect the Foo Fighters with their musical roots, then he had achieved his desire. His insistence that it was also the ‘heaviest’ Foos album was borne out in tracks like the serrated ‘Rope’ and the titanic ‘White Limo’. The latter, a gnarled noisefest with barely decipherable lyrics (written as quickly and unthinkingly as anything on the first Foo Fighters album), was the first full track to be unveiled from the album. Fittingly for such a heavy monster sound, it was accompanied by an amusingly low-budget video featuring Motörhead’s mainman, Lemmy, as the Foo Fighters’ personal chauffeur, driving the band around LA in – yes – a white limo.
‘That was another goofy idea from Dave,’ Taylor Hawkins guffawed. ‘He was mocking some of his favourite old-school punk rock videos. You know, the ones guys used to make on the cheap back in the early Eighties with a couple of handheld VCR cameras.’ Asked what he thought of Dave, Lemmy echoed pretty much everyone else who had ever met him: ‘Great guitarist, great drummer, great singer – what more do you want? Dave has shown the world it’s possible to be a success and a nice guy at the same time.’
Lemmy may have become a buddy, but there was another, altogether more bizarre celebrity encounter shortly after the album’s release. In April 2011, Prince booked a string of 21 dates at the LA Forum. The Foo Fighters’ relationship with Prince was a strange one: the singer had blocked the band from releasing their cover of ‘Darling Nikki’ almost a decade before, only to cover ‘Best of You’ during a memorable half-time performance at the 2007 Super Bowl. Despite all that, Dave was a huge fan of the musician, and attended one of the shows (arriving on what he called a ‘party bus’). At the venue, he bumped into a roadie friend, who told him: ‘Prince knows you’re here. He wants to jam.’
‘The end of the night, I’m standing next to this black curtain,’ Dave would later recall in Rolling Stone. ‘I pull it back – there’s Prince with Sheila E. I go, “Hey, man, great show.” He says, “When do you want to jam? How about Friday?” “All right, cool!”’ On the allotted day, Dave returned to the venue and in the backstage catering area bumped into Prince, who immediately invited him to jam on a ‘bad-ass’ ten-minute version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Dave played drums while Prince pulled out his best Jimmy Page moves. At the end of the jam, Prince told him: ‘We should do that, man! What are you doing next Friday?’ Sadly Dave didn’t hear from Prince again and the promised follow-up jam never happened. In fact, some of his friends didn’t believe the original one took place either. ‘I swear it happened!’ Dave insisted. ‘I swear. And nobody saw it.’
In between the comedy promo videos and superstar jams, the Foos had an album to promote. In typically down-to-earth fashion, they opted to launch it with a tour of fans’ garages. ‘We’d recorded Wasting Light in Dave’s garage,’ explained Nate Mendel, ‘so we thought, “We’ll go play in other people’s garages.”’
For Dave, there was ‘poetry’ in the idea of a band that could sell out Wembley recording an album in a garage. To him, it wasn’t just a neat gimmick – it was about the idea of taking rock’n’roll out of the stadiums and back to where it belonged. It was also a brilliant marketing gimmick that attracted better than usual publicity. If, musically, Wasting Light was a direct reaction to the success the band had attained over the past few years, then promotion-wise this was Dave at his most up to date and cutting edge, taking nothing for granted. He may have been the nicest man in rock, but he was still the cleverest too.
‘Kids got too smart and crafty,’ he said in Q. ‘There’s part of me that feels like rock musicians aren’t as crafty and criminal as they used to be. My generation were stoners, dropouts and petty thieves. We played music on the weekends to forget about the shitty jobs we had to work. There was never any career option, because, what, you’re playing in a little hardcore punk rock band and you’re going to sell a million records? No. You just did it for kicks.’
The album’s release was accompanied by a documentary, Back and Forth. Filmed by Oscar-winning documentary maker James Moll and named after one of the highlights of Wasting Light, it was a look back over the Foos’ illustrious career, from the tragic end of Nirvana through to the deliberately lo-fi recording sessions for the new album. But amid the footage of the band and their kids larking around in the swimming pool chez Grohl, there were other elements that made for less comfortable viewing – not least the less-than-amicable departure of their original drummer, William Goldsmith, and the band’s near-dissolution in the wake of Taylor Hawkins’s drug overdose.
‘It hasn’t all been fun,’ Dave admitted. ‘We’ve had moments when we didn’t want to be a band any more. The director, James, he’s not a music guy. So his focus was the personal relationships and the people. He got us to say things we might not even say to each other. Which I believe is one of the reasons we’ve managed to stay together – we just don’t tell each other everything. Some bands hire therapists to help them work shit out. That would completely destroy our ban
d. From the beginning, we wanted to make it clear that this was not like drama club. We did not want any bullshit.’
‘I could tell Dave had to digest it and figure out a way to come to terms with it,’ said Nate. ‘The part about William leaving the band, he felt really beat up about that. That’s something that’s never been resolved between us. Hopefully the film dealt with it. Everything that needed to be said was said.’ If the Back and Forth film was a heavy-duty experience for the Foo Fighters personally, the Wasting Light tour that ran through spring and summer of 2011 was the exact opposite. The band worked up a list of a staggering 75 covers that they, as Dave put it, ‘want to fucking goof off in front of 70,000 people’.
The work they put in paid off when the Foo Fighters played a two-night stand at the 65,000-capacity Milton Keynes Bowl – their biggest UK shows since headlining Wembley Stadium nearly three years before. On top of what was effectively a greatest hits set, they covered ‘Young Man Blues’ (a song written by Mose Allison but made famous by The Who on their classic Live at Leeds album), roped in support acts John Paul Jones and Seasick Steve for a version of the latter’s ‘Back in the Doghouse’, and called Alice Cooper up for a rapturously received one-two of ‘School’s Out’ and ‘I’m Eighteen’. As such, the two Milton Keynes shows were the perfect snapshot of what Dave now wanted the Foo Fighters to be. ‘The most important thing to me is that we do what’s right, we do what’s real, and that we’re a fucking blazing live band,’ he told Nylon Guys. ‘When I show up at a festival and we’re the headliners, and I’ve got grey hair in my beard, I want the kids who played the twelve slots before us to look at us and be like, “Damn, those guys are old but, fuck, they’re really good.”’
