This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘I remember there being a lot of emphasis put on the meaning of that album, or what that album represented,’ he recalled, speaking to me some fourteen years after the fact. ‘I would read reviews and it seemed like to a lot of people it was more than just a demo tape that was recorded down the street, that it was some sort of token continuation, and as with most things I do, I try not to over-think things, or think too much about something like that. I knew what it meant to me to be able to go down and make music. After Nirvana, it was hard for me to even listen to music for a while after Kurt died. So to go into a studio and take thirteen or fourteen songs that I liked the most and book fucking six days, which I considered an eternity, to record those songs, was a big deal to me: it was important that I did that at that time in my life. But I remember there were people that really resented me for having the audacity or gall to fucking keep playing music after Nirvana. It was the most ridiculous thing. I was fucking, what, 25 years old? I was a kid, man. I wasn’t finished.’

  ‘No one has every said anything to my face, like “You were a fucking asshole for doing this,”’ Grohl told writer Tom Doyle in 1996. ‘But every so often you sense a tinge of resentment. I’m sure that the thing I was supposed to do was become this brooding, reclusive dropout of society and that’s it. Nirvana’s done, I’m done, that’s the end of my life. Fuck that. It was a blast. I miss Nirvana with all my heart; I listen to live bootlegs because I miss it so much. I miss Kurt. I dream about him all the time – I have great dreams about him and I have sad, heart-wrenching, fucked-up dreams about him. I miss it all a lot. But if you’re dealt a fucking hand you deal with it. And I’m not about to drop out and stop living.

  ‘When Nirvana ended, I wasn’t finished. I’m still not fucking finished.’

  My poor brain

  Because my life was fucking going down the toilet I would sit at night in my sleeping bag in the back room of Pete Stahl’s house and I would list out all of my problems, like: 1. Homeless. 2. Divorced. 3. No access to a bank account … Because if I thought of all those things at once I surely would have had a complete nervous breakdown …

  Dave Grohl

  Advance promotional copies of the Foo Fighters’ second album The Colour and the Shape were doled out to journalists, radio pluggers and other small but necessary cogs in the music industry machine in April 1997 as a cassette tape, glued inside a cheap portable player. Though the era of digital file-sharing was still in its infancy – 18-year-old tech geek Shawn Fanning’s revolutionary peer-to-peer sharing platform Napster would not be launched until 1998 – Dave Grohl and his record label were aware that the band’s follow-up to the two-million-selling Foo Fighters was one of the year’s more anticipated rock albums, and were wary of copies appearing online in advance of its scheduled mid-May release. There was also a more stubborn logic at the root of the decision to preview the album via this rather antiquated and unwieldy distribution channel: making the album had cost Dave Grohl his marriage, half his band and, on occasion, his sanity, so after all the arguments, tears, tantrums and sleepless nights bound up in the process, he figured that those graced with early copies of the album could damned well put in a bit of effort on the listening side too.

  Though he still had a clutch of unreleased solo compositions gathering dust on the shelves of Barrett Jones’s Laundry Rooms studios – ‘Butterflies’, the slow-burning ‘Mountain of You’ and the Cheap Trick-meets-Replacements buzz-saw pop of ‘Make a Bet’ among them – Grohl was determined that Foo Fighters’ second album should be a unified group affair, built from the ground up. From their earliest rehearsals in William Goldsmith’s basement in Seattle, the quartet had begun writing new material, songs that crackled with positive energy and bristled with taut post-punk power. These had been teased apart, retooled, honed and buffed during pre-gig soundchecks from Minneapolis to Manila across their fifteen-month touring schedule, and Grohl felt confident that his band had it in them to make an album both ambitious and liberating. Having taken on the world with a demo tape recorded in five days, the Foo Fighters’ frontman was now of a mind to push his band’s sound into more lavish and expansive territories.

  ‘I’ve made punk rock records,’ he explained, ‘and they’re fun and great and it’s quick and there’s passion. But I did that with the first record. I’ve never made a big, proper rock record before, so why not? People just don’t seem to do it any more, so we might as well take a shot.’

  To help realise his grand vision, Grohl called upon the services of the talented English producer Gil Norton. With his lush, widescreen production work on classic albums such as Echo and The Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain, Catherine Wheel’s Chrome and Throwing Muses’ self-titled 1986 début, Norton had a reputation as an innovative studio technician, but it was his masterful work with Pixies, specifically on their 1991 album Trompe Le Monde, which truly captured Grohl’s imagination. ‘I love it for the way you can hear the band falling apart, getting scattered, shooting off in a million different directions,’ he commented in 1997. ‘Because of that it’s their most extreme LP: the noisiest, the quietest, the poppiest, the weirdest.’ The album had a deep personal resonance for Grohl too: it was the soundtrack to the beginning of his romance with photographer Jennifer Youngblood.

  Norton was finishing up work on Counting Crows’ Recovering the Satellites album when Grohl approached him about working on the second Foo Fighters’ record. The producer was delighted to sign on for the project.

  ‘When I first heard the first Foo Fighters album I got the sense of a really accomplished songwriter, and I really liked the raw power of it,’ he told me in 2010. ‘And I loved the demos that Dave had done for the new album, so I knew we had a great batch of songs.’

  The first sessions for the second Foo Fighters album began on 18 November 1997 at Bear Creek Studios, a 1,750-square-foot converted dairy barn situated on a ten-acre horse farm in the sleepy, rural neighbourhood of Woodinville, Washington. As he was in the habit of doing with Black Francis prior to Pixies’ recording sessions, Norton spent several days alone with Grohl beforehand in a nearby hotel, stripping back his songs to their basic components, and challenging the songwriter to pinpoint the essential truths underpinning each one. Only then were Smear, Mendel and Goldsmith invited to join the sessions for two weeks of extensive pre-production, after which the process of tracking to tape began. Schooled in the art of punk rock, where attitude and aggression took priority over technique and timing, the quartet had no idea just how intense and challenging the sessions would be. Not all of them would make it through the other side.

  ‘Gil has a reputation as being a real taskmaster in the studio,’ says Grohl. ‘He cracks the fucking whip, and anyone who’s ever worked with him will say the same thing. He accepts nothing but absolute perfection in what you do – whether that means dissonant, noisy chaos or a perfect pitch, perfect performance pop song, he needs it to be the best. So working with him was Really. Fucking. Hard.’

  For a time it seemed that nothing the quartet laid down for Norton met the producer’s exacting standards. The Englishman demanded take after take from the young musicians, citing faults with tunings and tempos and intonation and harmonies, to the point where Grohl, Mendel, Smear and Goldsmith began to seriously question their own abilities. In the Back and Forth documentary, William Goldsmith says that Norton referred to Mendel and himself, the band’s acclaimed engine room, as ‘the rhythm-less section’ (‘which was encouraging,’ Goldsmith added in a voice dripping with sarcasm) and morale and confidence within the unit began to wilt. As the session became increasingly tense and fraught, Goldsmith began to feel that he was being unfairly singled out for criticism and he started to buckle under the pressure.

  ‘Dave had me do 96 takes of one song, and I had to do thirteen hours’ worth of takes on another one,’ the drummer told the Miami New Times in 1998. ‘It just seemed that everything I did wasn’t good enough for him, or anyone else. I think that everyone at the label wanted Dave to play dr
ums on the record. The producer wanted him to play drums on the record, and it felt like everyone was trying to get me to quit.’

  ‘When you’re a producer the aim of the game is to extract the best performances, the best songs and the best album at the end of the day,’ counters Norton calmly. ‘It’s not like I’m trying to be a hard taskmaster. I want them to be very proud of what they’ve done at the end of it. Doing any album is quite emotional, and with any artist recording new songs your nerve ends are out more than at any other time: in the creative process it can be hard work.

  ‘Me and William got on really well during the album,’ he adds. ‘We used to go out, and I love William: the problems were just in his own head really. He suddenly started over-thinking it and got insecure, and no matter what you did it wasn’t making him feel any better. From my point of view, you always want a musician to get through the recording process; it wasn’t ever that I was thinking, “I don’t want William playing on this.”’

  ‘I think William was intimidated by Gil,’ says Grohl, ‘and I’m sure that he probably felt weird about me being a drummer and being in the studio. It was a big deal and there was a lot of pressure to make it great. We were all trying really hard.’

  As if proceedings at Bear Creek were not already sufficiently tense, in mid-December Grohl was served with divorce papers at the studio. His marriage to Jennifer Youngblood had been on the rocks for some time, indeed their fracturing relationship had inspired much of the lyrical content of the album on which he was working, but the timing was unhelpful, to say the least. Calling upon the same reserves of stoicism which served his mother so well at the time of her own divorce, Grohl kept his focus upon his work – ‘He didn’t get overly emotional about it with me, and I didn’t see him crying or anything, but obviously it was a big part of his life and a concern at the time,’ says Norton – but with work at the studio falling far short of his lofty expectations, it soon became evident that pressing the ‘pause’ button on the session might be to everyone’s advantage. As he was given to do at times of stress, Grohl headed back home to Virginia to his mother’s house, perplexed as to where exactly his grand vision for the album was falling down.

  ‘I took the tape home and listened to it,’ he recalls, ‘and I remember having a conversation with Pat, saying, “You know, it has to be better than this, it really has to be better than what it is.’”

  Depressed, bored and lonely back in Virginia, Grohl sought refuge in Geoff Turner’s WGNS studio in Arlington, where he began playing around with two new riffs that he’d written at Bear Creek. Within an hour he had completed two new songs, bruised love songs both. The first, ‘Walking After You’, centred around a lyric about a ‘heart cracked in two’, is gossamer-fine and haunting: the second, ‘Everlong’, is the most pure, perfect love song Grohl has ever written. Based around a naggingly insistent riff Grohl initially considered a Sonic Youth rip-off, it builds and climbs towards a heart-stopping chorus that tumbles forth breathlessly, all innocent, lovesick and yearning. It remains Grohl’s most beautifully affecting universal love song.

  ‘I knew it was a cool song but I didn’t think it would be the one song by which most people recognise the band,’ Grohl admitted in 2006. ‘And I think it was the first time people had ever quoted lyrics to me, like, “That song is beautiful! That line where you say, ‘Breathe out, so I can breathe you in …’” Chicks would come up and recite that to me. That song’s basically about being connected to someone so much that not only do you love them physically and spiritually, but when you sing along with them you harmonise perfectly.

  ‘My marriage wasn’t going well and we’d just split up and I’d just got my divorce papers at the studio, and of course that’s when I started writing!’ he told me three years later. ‘I got married in 1994 to Jennifer: we’d been dating for two or three years and the day she moved out to Seattle I asked her to marry me. We were kids and honestly we just shouldn’t have done it; even in the time we were engaged I think we both realised that we probably shouldn’t get married. And then Kurt died and our whole world was turned upside down, and so in a way I think I clung to that engagement and the marriage as like my last piece of stability. It was something to hold on to. And then it was gone too …’

  ‘It wasn’t a surprise to me when Dave came back from Virginia with two good new songs,’ says Gil Norton. ‘We had a great bunch of songs for the record, but Dave never stops, his brain never switches off and he’s constantly trying to better the work that he’s got. But when I heard “Everlong” it was just like, “Oh …” It made the whole album whole. It was the catalyst that brought it all together.’

  With the dawning of the new year it was decided that the Foos needed a fresh start on the record. Leaving behind the tranquillity of Bear Creek, operations shifted to Los Angeles, to Grandmaster Recorders in Hollywood, a plush facility located in the old Bijou silent movie theatre on Cahuenga Boulevard, which had hosted sessions by everyone from Stevie Wonder and David Bowie to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Black Crowes in days past. After listening anew to takes recorded in Washington, Norton encouraged Grohl to think about re-tracking certain songs. As an experiment, Grohl recorded a new drum track for one of the album’s key cuts, the driving ‘Monkey Wrench’: the result, according to Norton, was a take ‘ten times better’ than the version of the song captured at Bear Creek. It made sense, then, to put some of the other recordings under the microscope too. In the days that followed, Pat Smear and Nate Mendel were summoned to Grandmaster to redo their parts on track after track: they quickly realised that they were, in fact, remaking the album from top to bottom. Equally obvious was the fact that in this process the presence of William Goldsmith was not required. Unsure as to what this meant for the future of the unit, Mendel and Smear opted to say nothing. When Goldsmith found out, the shit hit the fan.

  ‘I had this idea that I was going to play drums because we were running out of time and William was having difficulty recording,’ says Grohl. ‘So I thought, “Okay, well, just to save time, I’m going to record these new songs, I’ll do the drums and stuff on this, and then we’ll have Will redo the other stuff.” And then Will caught wind that I was going to do drums and basically just said, “Well, I don’t agree and I don’t want to be in the band.” And I begged Will to stay in the band. I went up to Seattle and sat with him and said, “Please, stay,” but he said, “No.” Most people are under the impression that I kicked him out of the band, but he absolutely quit. And I absolutely sat with him and said, “Dude, I want you to stay in the band, what do I do? Do you want me to help you with drumming? Whatever I can do, let’s do it, so you can stay in the band.” And he just said “No.”’

  ‘We talked,’ Goldsmith told Back and Forth director James Moll in 2010, ‘and Dave said, “You know, I still want you to tour the record you know.” And I was just like, “Dude, as it is now I have to rebuild my soul, refind it … So thanks but no thanks.”’

  ‘I know that William will never forgive me for playing drums on that record,’ Grohl admitted to Moll. ‘I know it. And I wish things were different. But I felt like this was what I had to do in order to make this album happen.’

  In Back and Forth Dave Grohl is asked to re-examine his treatment of William Goldsmith in the weeks which saw The Colour and the Shape put to bed. It’s an awkward moment for the Foo’s frontman, who visibly squirms as he searches for the right words. ‘It was a really weird time and I was young … What the fuck …’ he finally mumbles, then his voice tails off, his head droops and his eyes lower to the floor. James Moll’s camera remains trained on him for a few seconds longer, but Grohl has nothing more to say.

  While the original Foo Fighters line-up was slowly disintegrating behind closed doors in Hollywood, two new albums bearing Dave Grohl’s name emerged with little fanfare.

  Released on Barrett Jones’s own Laundry Room Records imprint, Harlingtox Angel Divine is the sole fruit of a one-off 1990 studio project involving Grohl, Jones,
Scream’s Dutch booking agent Tos Nieuwenhuizen (also the guitarist/vocalist in heavyweight Dutch punk/ metal trio God) and Bruce Merkle, frontman of Washington DC’s wired post-punk troupe 9353.

  ‘How did this occur?’ read the liner notes to the album. ‘The Harlingtox story was hatched in Washington, DC in the spring and summer of 1990. It’s very 1990-like. It reeks of Bush/Quayle annoyances and growing pains in general. Harlingtox was never a band, there has never been a Harlingtox show. It was musically arranged by Dave and Tos, probably first conceptualised in Europe during a Scream/God tour the previous year.’

  Existing midway between the unhinged death rattle of Unsane, the thudding claustrophobia of Barkmarket and the low-slung, stream-of-consciousness psychosis of early Clutch, Harlingtox Angel Divine is splendidly queasy listening, but not for the faint-hearted. With Merkle gabbling and babbling in tongues, adopting a variety of deranged voices from ‘oleaginous game show host’ to ‘faeces-caked serial killer choking upon wok-fried human entrails’, the quartet lurch and lunge around the fringes of punk, metal and industrial noise, offering a nightmarish vision of a society teetering on the brink of collapse. Opening with the unnerving ‘Treason Daddy Brother in Crime Real Patriots Type Stuff ’, a two-minute public service announcement from the messed-up and marginalised (‘We’re all gonna score. Fuck your drug war!’), the five-track album never deviates from the wrong side of the tracks, slamming through bleak art-metal (‘Orbiting Prisons in Space’), creepy, churning sludge-rock (‘Recycled Children Never to Be Grown’) and stuttering post-hardcore (‘Obtaining a Bachelors Degree’, wherein Merkle gleefully drools ‘I have always been a stupid fucker.’) before concluding in the marginally more accessible, though still relentlessly unpleasant, ‘Open Straightedge Arms’. For the sake of the sanity of all involved, it is perhaps best that Harlingtox Angel Divine was strictly a one-shot deal.