Foo Fighters

by Mick Wall

  Dave’s self-deprecation only extended so far. One of the most monumental anniversaries of his career was looming, and there would be no room for joking here: 24 September 2011 marked 20 years since the release of Nevermind. It was something that Grohl couldn’t help but be aware of. ‘For me, it’s a personal landmark,’ he told the NME. ‘My life was split in two by Nevermind. I don’t remember the making of it, nor the day that it came out. But it caused a profound change in my life.’

  Amid the non-stop chaos that came with the job of being CEO of Foo Fighters, Inc., the album’s anniversary provided a moment of reflection for Grohl. Not least in terms of the impact his old band had on his own life, let alone their millions of fans. ‘It’s funny – for years I’ve been navigating in and around the shadow of Nirvana,’ he told the Irish Independent. ‘When I say “shadow”, it’s not meant to sound negative. It’s a reality. When [Foo Fighters] first started as a band, I didn’t want to talk about Nirvana because Kurt had just died and it was hard for me to talk about it without getting really upset. Then as time went by, it was easier to talk about. But there was more to talk about with the Foo Fighters. And the Nirvana questions sort of went away. Of course, now they are coming back.’

  To mark the anniversary, Grohl, Novoselic and Butch Vig teamed up for various interviews, and the band’s old record company reissued an extended version of the album, but there was no high-profile reunion gig or mawkish tribute to Kurt Cobain. It was celebratory but respectfully muted. It was everything Kurt Cobain would have wanted.

  As 2011 turned into 2012, Dave’s status as the most well-connected man in rock was put far beyond doubt. If he wasn’t jamming with Eighties rock’n’roll pin-up Joan Jett onstage at the US Lollapalooza festival and co-writing a song, ‘Any Weather’, for her next album, he was rubbing shoulders with members of boy band *NSync at an Elton John AIDS Foundation charity evening, or bonding with veteran blues rock icon Bonnie Raitt, who admitted she was a ‘huge fan’ of the Foo Fighters. Most improbably of all, Dave even appeared in the big screen version of The Muppets – appropriately enough, making a cameo as a replacement for the windmill-armed Muppets drummer, Animal.

  Uncharacteristically, he also found himself embroiled in controversy – albeit of the type that erupts online rather than in the real world. At the 2012 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, the Foo Fighters cleared up, picking up five of the six awards they were nominated for including Best Rock Song (for ‘Walk’) and Best Rock Album (for Wasting Light). It was during his acceptance speech for the latter that Dave – sporting a Slayer T-shirt – celebrated Wasting Light’s proudly lo-fi conception and launched a broadside against plastic pop music: ‘To me, this award means a lot, because it shows that the human element of music is what’s important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do … It’s not about what goes on in a computer.’

  Shortly afterwards, he was forced to backpedal. ‘Never has a thirty-three-second rant evoked such caps-lock post-board rage as my lil’ ode to analogue recording has,’ he said in a statement, going on to explain that as a fan of everything from ‘Dead Kennedys to deadmau5’, he loved all music with a ‘human element’. Adding: ‘Look, I am not Yngwie Malmsteen. I am not John Bonham. Hell, I’m not even Josh Groban, for that matter. But I do the best that I possibly can within my limitations, and accept that it sounds like me. Because that’s what I think is most important. It should be real, right?’

  Minor bumps in the road aside, 2012 was the year that the Foo Fighters established their place amid rock’s A-list, and Dave became a peer of the rock stars he’d idolised as a kid. That summer alone, he played ‘Miss You’ onstage with the Rolling Stones (and jammed with both Mick Jagger and the actress Kristen Wiig at the after-show party), became the most frequent musical guest on Saturday Night Live with his eleventh appearance (one more than Paul Simon) and teamed-up with Neil Young and The Black Keys at the Global Citizen Festival in New York’s Central Park.

  It was at the latter show that Dave announced the Foo Fighters were taking a break. ‘Without making a big deal out of it, we don’t have any shows after this,’ he said from the stage. ‘This is it. Honestly, I don’t know when we’re gonna do it again.’

  The rumour mill immediately cranked into action and speculation sprung up that the Foos had finally reached the end of the line. For the second time in a few months, Dave had to issue a statement clarifying what he’d said. ‘I was serious,’ he wrote. ‘I’m not sure when the Foo Fighters are going to play again. It feels strange to say that, but it’s a good thing for all of us to go away for a while. It’s one of the reasons we’re still here.’

  Proving there was a world of difference between what Dave Grohl considered a hiatus and what the rest of the world thought of as a proper break, he then announced his most ambitious idea yet: a big-screen documentary on the fabled LA studio Sound City.

  ‘A year in the making, it could be the biggest, most important project I’ve ever worked on,’ Dave concluded with that big goofy smile. ‘Get ready … it’s coming.’

  14. For Everlong

  On 12 December 2012, the biggest concert of the decade so far took place at New York’s fabled Madison Square Garden. More than 18,000 people had crammed into this cavernous venue to witness an all-star benefit gig dubbed 12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy Relief, designed to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Sandy, which had ripped through the northeastern states of America, leaving $65 million worth of damage in its wake. Like Live Aid and Live Earth before it, the bill featured a line-up of A-list stars, among them the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, The Who and Kanye West. Closing the show was Sir Paul McCartney, who, as an ex-member of the Beatles, was the biggest star of them all.

  Five songs into his eight-song set, McCartney introduced three guest musicians to the stage: Krist Novoselic, Pat Smear and, of course, Dave Grohl. With Grohl behind the drum kit and McCartney on a cigar box guitar, this ad hoc supergroup launched into a song McCartney announced they’d recently written together.

  The song itself, titled ‘Cut Me Some Slack’, was a heavied-up garage rock jam that channelled the Beatles’ proto-heavy metal anthem ‘Helter Skelter’ and the kind of raucous noise with which Grohl and Novoselic made their name. While the song might have been unfamiliar, no one watching could fail to note the significance of the occasion: it wasn’t the first time Dave and Krist had shared a stage, but it was the first time they had done it while Dave sat behind a drum kit since the crazy daze of you know when. For the 18,000 people in Madison Square Garden, and the millions watching the live broadcast on TV at home, this was the closest they’d come to a Nirvana reunion – and a Nirvana reunion with a Beatle standing in for Kurt Cobain at that.

  Charles Cross, who witnessed a later performance from the same line-up in Seattle, has a typically unique perspective on the occasion. ‘When Dave and Krist played with Paul McCartney, everybody thought that was the greatest. More people cite that as the greatest show that ever happened in Seattle than they cite any of the Nirvana concerts. The idea of suddenly you have a linkage between the Beatles and these other two guys … it was the rawest Paul McCartney ever has been. It’s by far and away the greatest show Paul McCartney ever gave, short of any show he ever gave next to John Lennon. You could literally witness Paul as just kind of like, “Where the hell are we going next?” It kind of brought Paul back to the club in Hamburg. And it brought Nirvana back to these early kinds of things where nothing was planned. They had rehearsed it but it seemed as though it was being created in that moment. And that was one of the keys to great Nirvana.

  ‘If I were going to say something negative about the Foo Fighters, I guess it would be, sometimes in concert, that aspect of it was there early on but I’m not sure if it’s always there now. In the early Foo Fighters shows, when you saw them, you felt like what you were witnessing was being created at that moment. Who
they were, where it was gonna go, whether it was gonna be chaotic or fun or focused, you could see that all happening.

  ‘One of the problems when you become a superstar band playing festivals to 100,000 people – how do you manage to do that? How do you manage to keep that alive? That’s quite a challenge. But Dave had that onstage with Paul McCartney and Krist Novoselic. There is a special connection between Novoselic and Dave. When those two guys are together it truly is better than any other rhythm section that Dave has been in. And it’s not because Krist is the world’s greatest bass player. It’s because they have a musical intuitiveness that is there. And that gets lost when people talk about Nirvana or even when they talk about the Foo Fighters.’

  But Dave, as usual, had another surprise up his sleeve. Taking to Twitter after the New York performance, he revealed that ‘Cut Me Some Slack’ would be the first song from the soundtrack album to an upcoming documentary he was directing, Sound City. Not content with the Foo Fighters becoming one of the biggest rock groups on the planet, the man at the centre of that empire was now moving into film. Why not? He’d been everywhere else.

  It had been only a matter of time before Dave made the transition from musician to filmmaker. His career had been marked by a combination of fierce ambition and restless drive. The Foo Fighters always had fun with their promo videos, but it was Back and Forth – the career-spanning documentary that accompanied the Foo Fighters’ seventh album, Wasting Light – that truly sparked his interest in making his own films, one that would plug into his love of music and its history.

  In May 2012, six months before his historical onstage collaboration with McCartney and his old Nirvana colleagues, Dave had announced that he was producing and directing a film about what he described as ‘America’s greatest unsung recording studio’. The film would take its name from the studio in question: Sound City, a legendary facility in Van Nuys, California, where such illustrious artists as Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and dozens more had made their breakthrough records.

  For Dave, there was a personal connection to the ramshackle Sound City. It was there, in the summer of 1991, that Nirvana had recorded Nevermind with the producer Butch Vig. Dave had long been impressed by the studio’s analogue mixing console, a vintage Neve 8028. The Neve was utterly out of step with twenty-first-century digital recording techniques, but Dave just loved its warm sound and the fact that it provided a link with both the studio’s past and the history of American music from the late Sixties right up to the present day. When it came to recording Wasting Light in his studio, Dave contacted Sound City to see if they could buy the Neve board.

  ‘They were like, “I’d sell my grandmother before I’d sell that board,”’ he recalled. ‘I was like, “Okay, just saying.” [But] it was only a matter of time before they closed, and they asked me if I was serious about buying [the console]. It didn’t cost as much as you think.”

  The Neve board became the seed of the story for Grohl’s subsequent film. It provided a springboard for him to look at the studio and many of the bands that recorded there. But it was also an opportunity for Grohl to celebrate what he called ‘that feeling you get when you put five guys in a room, hit “record” and the hair on the back of your neck stands up’.

  ‘When Sound City closed [in 2011], it was a very sad day,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘That place was like a church. The list of people that recorded there reads like a virtual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Cheap Trick, Slayer, Rage Against the Machine, Weezer, Metallica – and Nirvana … That funky old place had the best drum room in the world. The drum sound at the beginning of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – that’s Sound City.’

  For Grohl, the film was a labour of love. Initially conceived as a YouTube clip, it grew into a year-long project that involved him taking responsibility for interviewing many of the bands and artists who had recorded there, from Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich to easy listening kingpin Barry Manilow. As a first-time producer and director, it was a baptism of fire. ‘When I did the first Foo Fighters record, I did it in six days and played all the instruments,’ Dave reminisced. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing. I like that record because it’s so naïve and it is what it is. It’s not the greatest record in the world, but to me, it’s, like, cool. Same thing goes for the movie. I don’t know how to make movies, but I could tell you the story of Sound City like that’ – he snapped his fingers. ‘So why would I need anyone’s help? We rounded up the coolest people we knew and it was fucking great.’

  Dave’s hands-on involvement gave the film an extra dimension that separated it from every other music documentary. As part of the film, Dave would also write songs with various collaborators, which would then appear both in the finished movie and on a subsequent soundtrack album. Among the people he worked with were the Eighties AOR pin-up Rick Springfield, Slipknot’s frontman Corey Taylor, and Fleetwood Mac’s singer Stevie Nicks, the latter of whom sang on ‘You Fix Me’.

  ‘I’m still a nerdy rock fan and these were huge experiences to me,’ Dave told Kerrang!. ‘But logistically, the project was nuts! That’s when I needed help! The Stevie Nicks song was something I wrote for In Your Honor, but we didn’t use it because the music sounded too much like Fleetwood Mac. The song was just sitting there, so I sent it to her and asked what she thought. She said, “I love it!”’

  But the biggest coup of course was the involvement of Paul McCartney. The Foo Fighters had played onstage with McCartney during the celebrations for Liverpool’s year as the European Capital of Culture, while Dave had also joined the legendary Beatles star at the 2009 Grammys. Nearly 20 years earlier, Dave had also been part of the band who re-created the Beatles’ music for the biopic Backbeat. But McCartney’s involvement in the Sound City documentary would be the first time the two parties had ever been in the studio together.

  It was Grohl who invited McCartney to jam at Sound City Studios when he was next in Los Angeles. In the mind of the Foos frontman, they would blast through some classic rock’n’roll staples like ‘Long Tall Sally’. ‘He was the one that said, “No, no, no, no – let’s write a song. Let’s write and record a new song in the three hours we have there,”’ Dave recalled. He had also invited Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear along to the clandestine session. Inspired move, lucky break, opportunistic wheeler-dealing, looking back on it a few months later, Dave still couldn’t believe it had actually happened.

  ‘I love Paul so much,’ he told The Times. ‘Not only because he is a great person, but because he is a fearless musician. He walked in here with the bass and the Les Paul: two of the most iconic instruments in music history. And he decides to play a cigar-box guitar in front of everyone, to record a song. Not a lot of people would do that. To sit down and start from scratch and three and a half hours later have this raucous fucking jam come together – it was huge. It really was a huge, full-circle moment.’

  The result of this superstar jam session was ‘Cut Me Some Slack’, which echoed both the Beatles and Nirvana. Yet it wasn’t until halfway through the session that McCartney realised the history of the people in the studio with him. ‘It was magic for me, playing with these guys,’ said McCartney. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t kind of know who they were … Then, during the session, I hear them talking: “Wow, we haven’t played that since Nirvana.” So I found myself in the middle of a Nirvana reunion, and I was very happy.’

  The events surrounding the ‘Cut Me Some Slack’ session made up the climactic final quarter of the Sound City documentary. The rest of it told the story of the studio through the artists who recorded there and the staff who worked there. Grohl spoke to more than 150 people in total (though not all made it into the finished movie). There were archival appearances from Johnny Cash and, naturally, Kurt Cobain. The end result was more than just the story of the vintage Neve 8028 soundboard – it was a loving tribute to the cradle of so much great American music, and al
so a tantalising glimpse of a creative process that normally remains hidden from the general public.

  Sound City premiered at the Sundance Festival in Utah on 18 January 2013. It was during Sundance, at the Park City Live venue, that Dave unveiled the Sound City Players, a band-come-collective featuring a rotating cast of musicians who appeared in the film. Among them were Stevie Nicks, Rick Springfield, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty, Lee Ving of punk rock band Fear, and Krist Novoselic. The Foo Fighters themselves were the core band – a task that entailed them having to learn 50 songs in just ten days.

  Such was the demand for the gig that tickets changed hands for $1500 a piece. The crowd certainly got their money’s worth – the band played for more than three hours, making it through 35 songs. Dave would subsequently take the Sound City Players on the road with him to New York, Los Angeles and London. Despite the all-star line-up, there was one band whose songs he was conscious to avoid: Nirvana. ‘You know, that’s hallowed ground,’ he explained to The Times. ‘We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right. And we did have an idea for the London gig that maybe we would do a Nirvana song, but it didn’t pan out. The person we wanted to do it with wasn’t available.’

  The film, the Sound City Players shows and the subsequent album of collaborations recorded for the documentary, Sound City – Real to Reel, were all rapturously received. This was Dave Grohl the music fan in his element, his love for his chosen subject – music, in all its forms – shining through. ‘I consider this to be the most important thing I’ve ever done, artistically, of all the albums I’ve made, of all the bands I’ve had the pleasure of being in,’ Dave told the audience at the film’s premiere. ‘I really feel like the Sound City movie, its intention is to inspire the next generation of kids to fall in love with music as much as I did.’