‘He was the only person to say he didn’t like it,’ says Grohl. ‘He said, like, “I don’t know, it’s not your best.” And we were like, “Fuck you! What are you talking about?” But he was correct. And then of course we threw that in the trash can and fucking did it again.’
In truth, Pat Smear wasn’t the only one harbouring reservations. In his role as engineer on the project, Nick Raskulinecz hadn’t felt it his place to speak out loud regarding his concerns about the quality of the music Foo Fighters were recording, but such concerns did exist. Eventually, at Grohl’s prompting, his true feelings were brought out into the light.
‘I knew it wasn’t as good as it could have been,” says Raskulinecz, ‘but I wasn’t the producer at that point, so it wasn’t really my job in the recording to make those comments. My job was to make it sound good. But Dave called me up point blank one day and asked if I thought the record was as good as it could be and I said, “No, I thought it could be better …” And then he asked me if I thought I could produce it, and we went back to Virginia and tracked the whole album in two weeks.’
‘It took about four months to do those Million Dollar Demos, and that’s far too long for a rock record,’ says Hawkins. ‘Unless you’re doing A Night at the Opera. When we went back in, me and Dave had done some demos for five or six new songs, three of which – “Low”, “Times Like These” and “Disenchanted Lullaby” – made it on to the record. And fuck, if those songs weren’t on the record …
‘“All My Life” we had for a long time, not necessarily with all the lyrics, but the basic structure. The same with “Have It All”. But we ended up making them better when we re-recorded them, because we did it without all the technology and ProTools, and went for more of a real human feel, as opposed to this quantised Limp Bizkit version. So when we went back we were just planning on recording these five songs, and adding them to “Have It All” and “All My Life”. But we ended up rearranging a lot of them. “Come Back” is completely unrecognisable from the old version, “Lonely as You” is completely unrecognisable, “Overdrive” is … recognisable, but we put a big line of cocaine on top of it, we did it in an early Police record fashion, as opposed to the sterile “Learn to Fly” fashion that it was originally. And “Burn Away” was completely different. So basically we rearranged a lot of them.’
Even with the foundations for the album laid down in just thirteen days – a work rate that equalled a day for each month Foo Fighters had wasted on recordings that were deemed unfit for purpose – the sessions for the album that would become One by One were far from routine. For one thing, time was of the essence, with more Queens of the Stone Age shows crowding the horizon and the start of the summer festival season hovering into view. But necessity being the mother of invention appeared to light a spark that had previously been missing from Foo Fighters’ efforts to make music in the twenty-first century. From 6 to 18 May Grohl and Hawkins hammered out the nuts and bolts of their band’s fourth album with something approaching ease; later in the month, with Grohl back on the QOTSA tour bus, Mendel and Shiflett were trusted to lay down bass guitar and lead guitar parts with Nick Raskulinecz in the absence of their band leader. The recording process may have been unorthodox – Shiflett later described the experience as being a ‘weird, broken way of making a record’, while Hawkins admitted the process was ‘a little bit shoddy’ – but with the band now hundreds of thousands of dollars in hock to their record company the time had clearly arrived to paint in broad strokes rather than to obsess over finer details. And as unorthodox as the process may have been, ultimately it ensured the band’s survival.
‘There’s that cliché, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” and that absolutely applied,’ says Nate Mendel. ‘Stumbling on that record was tough: it was the first time it was hard and it frustrated us, to know that it wasn’t good enough. So what do you do? And then the record came out good and it really crystallised the idea of what we do, it made us realise that we had something valuable that we’d created for ourselves.’
And in the midst of all this activity, to the outside eye at least Foo Fighters still exuded the easy-going confidence of one of the world’s coolest gangs. While just weeks previously the future of the group was very much in doubt, even to certain members within the group, Grohl’s habit of maintaining a unified front when it came to his band’s public face meant that no cracks were discernible to the naked eye. On the contrary, a look at the quartet’s summer itinerary pointed towards a group whose mobility still charted an upward trajectory. In Scotland and the Republic of Ireland Foo Fighters had climbed the bill at the T in the Park and Wittness festivals respectively, while on the last weekend of August the group headlined the prestigious sister festivals staged at Richfield Avenue Park in Reading and Temple Newsham Park in Leeds. Playing to 140,000 people and more, over two nights in Berkshire and West Yorkshire, the former date surely held a special resonance for Dave Grohl. A decade earlier this had been the site of Nirvana’s now legendary headline appearance at the Reading festival. Although with a different band, and playing a sixteen-song set that featured not a single Nirvana composition, the drummer turned frontman could hardly have looked out at the sea of faces before him and not feel assured that his standing in the musical present, and not just his place in musical history, was secure.
‘I was actually pretty excited, more excited than nervous, because it was really an honour to be at the top of the bill,’ he told me one week later, as we travelled together on a Eurostar train bound for Paris. ‘The other guys in the band were pretty nervous. I had to give them a pep talk, give them the “Hey ho, ra-ra, we should be at the top of the bill because we’ve been a band for eight years and we’re better than we ever have been and we can do this, we can fucking do it, I know we can.” Then we did it, just like I said we would.
‘I just felt like the whole evening was magic. I mean, for something that started with a fucking demo tape recorded at a studio down the street from my house to hearing 40,000 people scream the lyrics to my songs was a huge accomplishment, it was a huge emotional deal. My family was on the side of the stage crying, it was like I’d won a gold medal or something. It was really a lifetime achievement, it was fucking awesome, insane. I get choked up talking about it.
‘I had a profound revelation as I was staring at my mother and my sister on the side of the stage: that I wrote a song on the back of a fucking AM/PM receipt, and now 60,000 people are singing it. I honestly felt like the luckiest guy in the world.
‘It felt great, it felt like, you know, we’d arrived.’
But if on that weekend Dave Grohl finally emerged from Nirvana’s shadow, in the eyes of the alternative rock community at least, the smoke from that band’s embers continued to engulf him. In September 2001 Courtney Love had filed a suit in Los Angeles Superior Court against Grohl, former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and the group’s record label, the Universal Music Group, in an attempt to wrestle control of Nirvana’s master tapes. Along with this, the plaintiff also sought to dissolve the LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) she had founded with Grohl and Novoselic in 1997 in order to oversee the correct handling of all posthumous Nirvana releases.
Courtney Love’s contention with her business partners – what news journalists refer to as ‘the blood and guts’ of the story – concerned the unreleased Nirvana song ‘You Know You’re Right’, the composition recorded by the group at Robert Lang’s Seattle studio in January 1994. Grohl had previously described the song as ‘a trip’, as ‘weird’, as both ‘beautiful and disturbing’.
‘It doesn’t really give you a sense of closure,’ he stated. ‘In fact, it makes you feel worse about the whole situation.’
Although the warring parties were agreed on their desire that the song be made available to the public, the format on which ‘You Know You’re Right’ would appear was a source of contention. While Grohl and Novoselic were of the opinion that the song’s rightful place should be as part of a
Nirvana box set, Kurt Cobain’s widow desired that the track take pride of place on a more commercially enticing single-disc ‘greatest hits’ compilation.
The battle lines for this skirmish were initially drawn even earlier than the suit filed in California in September 2001, when on 11 June 2001 Courtney Love submitted a memorandum filed in the State of Washington, an addition to the case of Courtney Love Cobain, et al., versus David Grohl, et al.The document laid out the nature of the disagreement, the divide between those who wanted the song to emerge as part of a box set and those who wished it to appear on a more affordable one-disc release, and in one telling sentence surely revealed the true nature of the dispute. ‘All parties believe,’ came the revelation, ‘that the recording, which has never before been released, has the potential to be a significant hit.’
For the most part, the arguments that followed were conducted behind closed doors. In interviews Grohl was relatively tight-lipped on the dispute, not least because of the legal ramifications that would be triggered were he to freely express his feelings. It was a surprise then for this writer to see Grohl label Love an ‘ugly fucking bitch’ from the stage of Ireland’s Witnness festival in July 2002. When I expressed my surprise to Grohl two months later, Foo Fighters’ frontman was more circumspect.
‘It’s so easy to have the excuse of legalities so as not to talk about anything, but yeah there are times when you’re pissed off,’ he conceded. ‘It’s inevitable that there’ll be days you feel like you want to pop. It happens to the lawyers, it happens to Courtney, and it happens to Krist and I. I’ve been pretty reserved about my feelings towards all of this for years, but it popped out of my mouth a few times. You know, it’s only natural for someone to get to their boiling point.
‘But this lawsuit is not the end of the world to me,’ he added. ‘Fortunately I have something now that’s productive and positive. I’d probably be more concerned and more upset about this whole business if I didn’t have this band, but why focus so much on that when I have something like this?
‘When you’re onstage headlining the Reading festival you’re not wondering how the court case is going to settle, you’re revelling in the moment of one of the greatest nights of your life.’
Perhaps surprisingly, given the explosive nature of the argument, the two warring parties never faced a public day in court. Indeed the dispute ended with a whisper rather than a scream. After months of wrangling it was agreed that ‘You Know You’re Right’ be included on a single-disc compilation of Nirvana songs, simply titled Nirvana, while Kurt Cobain’s solo acoustic demo of the track was included on the With the Lights Out box set in 2004. You could say that, ultimately, music was the winner. But the smile on Courtney’s face might just have been a little broader.
Nirvana was released in the United Kingdom on 28 October 2002, and entered the national album chart at number 1. As coincidence would have it, the album that it replaced at the top of the charts was Foo Fighters’ One by One.
Preceded by the hit single, All My Life, and its blockbusting video, shot at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California, One by One landed like a bomb on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States the eleven-song collection, featuring a beautifully understated piece of artwork inked by the inimitable Raymond Pettibon, débuted on the Billboard album chart at number 3, while the CD-buying public in the Republic of Ireland and Australia joined listeners in the UK in bestowing upon Foo Fighters the honour of a number 1 album. One by One also earned itself a Top Ten first-week placing in six other countries. To date, the album has sold well in excess of a million copies in the United States, and an impressive 700,000 copies in the United Kingdom.
Along with emphatic commercial success came much critical kudos. NME wrote of the album that ‘everything [Foo Fighters] had, they still have – but now every note is ten times more focused and urgent’. MOJO hedged its bets slightly by reporting that although the Foos ‘may have just failed to make a Great Rock Album – though it has many moments of greatness – they have unquestionably become a Great Rock Band’. Meanwhile in the United States the trade bible Billboard wrote that ‘One By One, in all its thunderous angst and desperate expressions of hope, represents a full on exploration of the Foo’s ’70s influence’, while Rolling Stone was of the opinion that this was ‘rock that draws power from its determination to struggle onward’.
Not all of One by One’s notices were positive, however. Blender and Q both damned the album with faint criticism and even fainter praise. But it was Paul Rees, then Editor of Kerrang! – a title which up until that point had dedicated more pages to Foo Fighters than any publication in the world – who aimed, and landed, the most stinging rebuke. On the positive spin that claimed that the album’s hectic final recording push was the result of a creative burst, Rees observed that what appears on disc ‘sounds more like a desperate attempt to simply finish the damn thing …’ before going on to state his opinion that while ‘advance word from Planet Foo has also touted this as some sort of classic, the best Foo Fighters album yet. In reality, it’s not even the third best Foo Fighters album.’ The review concluded with the shortest of shrifts in the form of the claim that ‘One By One will do a job of providing perfectly acceptable background music for the masses. What it won’t do is excite, thrill or challenge anybody, least of all its creator. “Dead on the inside I’ve got nothing to prove,” sings Grohl on “Come Back”. He’s changed nothing here.’
The most damning criticism that can be aimed at the shoulders of One by One is that rather too much of it is mediocre and unremarkable. Although Dave Grohl at the time talked the album up positively, as Dave Grohl is wont to do, it wasn’t too long after the release of his group’s fourth album that he was admitting that the album contained, in his opinion, only four good songs.
‘We rushed into it and we rushed out of it,’ he admitted. ‘Too many of the songs on that record just weren’t good enough. It was just a question of getting it done and getting it out … I don’t consider it to be our proudest moment.’
Hardcore Foo Fighters fans may find reasons to disagree with Grohl’s brutal assessment of the album, but the tracks he nominates as its ‘four good songs’ are pretty easy to identify. In 2011 only the singles ‘All My Life’ and ‘Times Like These’ remain constant in Foo Fighters’ epic live sets, and indeed just one year after the release of One by One the filthy, down-tuned ‘Low’ and the rather beautiful ‘Tired of You’, which featured delicate, soaring guitar harmonies from Queen’s Brian May, were the only other cuts which could be considered staples of the show.
In the Back and Forth documentary Chris Shiflett nominates ‘All My Life’ as being his favourite Foo Fighters song to play live, a number capable of pushing a good show to greater heights and rescuing even the most disappointing of nights. From the moment Dave Grohl’s throttled guitar opens the track, this is a song that has ‘fan favourite’ stamped through it from front to last. Charged with dynamism and a febrile sonic energy, it sparks with an energy that seems to suggest its creators, stymied by months of tension and creative inertia, had in one exhilarating rush finally released the pressure that had been building within them. Had the rest of the album from which ‘All My Life’ emerged followed this pattern then all the positive spin emanating from the mouth of Dave Grohl may have amounted to more than wishful thinking. ‘Times Like These’, meanwhile, is an effervescent slice of power pop that arrives as breezy and carefree as a holiday weekend, its seemingly effortless nature informed by a charming lightness of touch. Elsewhere ‘Have It All’, the album’s fourth and final single, almost qualifies as an underrated gem, its fizzing and bouncing rhythms underscoring a melody that manages to be neither obvious nor anonymous. Most striking of all is ‘Come Back’, the 7 minute and 49 second song that closes the album in a manner that is both restrained yet commanding, the work of musicians who understand the truth in the cliché that power is nothing without control.
Too often, though, the work containe
d on One by One is anonymous and unengaging, not least because its creators seemed themselves to be unengaged with the music. It may be that the tales of struggle that surrounded the Foo Fighters’ camp in 2001 and 2002 have bestowed upon this album a sense that the music itself is mired in difficulties, but either way much of the album is informed by a sense of joylessness and frustration; ironically a leaked clip of a much more energised early version of the listless ‘Lonely As You’ suggested that perhaps the original ‘Million Dollar Demos’ may not have been quite the disaster Grohl believed it to be in spring 2002. Whatever, at a time when the group as a unit lacked cohesion, it seems unsurprising that the album to which they put their name would be similarly lacking in direction.
But if One by One carried with it an air of compromise, and the sense that, at least in part, these were songs fashioned for a job of work rather than a labour of love, elsewhere Dave Grohl was able to stretch his limbs in the pursuit of making music purely for the joy of doing so. As well as recording the bold and brilliant Songs for the Deaf with Queens of the Stone Age, 2002 also saw Grohl play guitar on the David Bowie song ‘I’ve Been Waiting for You’, from the Thin White Duke’s Heathen set. The following year he provided backing vocals for The Bangles’ comeback album Doll Revolution, played drums on the Garbage track ‘Bad Boyfriend’ from their album Bleed Like Me (produced by Butch Vig, also Garbage’s drummer) and, perhaps most memorably, fulfilled drum duties on Killing Joke’s largely terrifying twelfth album, which, like that band’s fabulously toxic 1980 début, was a self-titled set.
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