This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘I’m biased,’ said Grohl, ‘but I think it’s one of the best Killing Joke records they’ve ever made. I listen to those songs and think, “Wow, you know, I bet you that someone who likes [nu-metal superstars] Linkin Park would like this record.” After a minute I thought, Oh my God, if every kid who likes Linkin Park bought a Killing Joke record the world would be a fucking scary place.’

  In February of that year Foo Fighters frontman joined Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and Steven Van Zandt onstage at the Grammys at Madison Square Garden for a breathless run through The Clash’s ‘London Calling’, a tribute to the late, great Joe Strummer who had died two months earlier. But if his night out at the music industry’s foremost awards ceremony primarily concerned itself with eulogising a punk rock hero – and there was also the small matter of picking up another Grammy, for Best Hard Rock Performance for ‘All My Life’, quite possibly the only song with a chorus about eating ‘pussy’ ever to receive a golden gramophone trophy – the greater part of Dave Grohl’s 2003 was devoted to the pursuit of another love: that of heavy metal.

  The gestation period of the project that would eventually become the Probot album was even longer than that for One by One. Back at 606 in Alexandria, in 2000 Dave Grohl had placed a call to Adam Kasper with an idea for a project: he would write and record a number of instrumental pieces that would be sent out to various vocalists from the world of underground metal, and these men would unleash Hell atop the backing tracks. The idea was not dissimilar to Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi’s 2000 solo album, Iommi, which featured contributions from artists including Ozzy Osbourne, Smashing Pumpkins’ mainman Billy Corgan, System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, Mr Brian May and Dave Grohl himself. But Grohl’s vision for Probot would feature the presence not of metal’s most famous voices, but its unsung heroes, men who had inspired Dave Grohl prior to his arrival in the mainstream with Nirvana. Work began on the album in the most relaxed of surroundings, with Grohl simply writing and playing riffs through a Peavey practice amp while elsewhere in the room the television relayed its images to no one in particular.

  The first decade of the twenty-first century was notable for the manner in which modern metal manoeuvred its way into the mainstream of popular culture. Dave Grohl himself played a vital role in this transition, both with Nirvana opening doors for ‘heavy’ bands to seep onto radio playlists, and also in his willingness to associate himself with acts who a generation earlier had belonged in a ghetto that was derided and even despised by most other musical subgenres. Foo Fighters frontman may have headlined festivals in the ‘noughties’ dressed in a Venom T-shirt, or spoken of the carnage that he witnessed at Slayer’s 4 December 1986 show at Washington’s ornate Warner Theatre on that band’s Reign in Pain tour (where the group’s fans gleefully destroyed the venue’s beautiful velvet-cushioned seats), but with few exceptions – the critical acclaim afforded to Metallica being the most notable – the 1980s were a period when the world of metal did not share house room with any other type of music. Instead, it lived in the doghouse. Even as a teenager Grohl instinctively understood that the music made by Voivod had much in common with that produced by Bad Brains – indeed, he would later speak of going to see both of these bands on consecutive weekends in the DC area – but for the public at large those that populated the community of underground and thrash metal lived in a neighbourhood that existed on the wrong, for which read ‘stupid’, side of the tracks. What’s more, in hitting the jackpot with Nirvana Dave Grohl was seen, by magazines with an anti-metal agenda of their own to push, as being a member of a group that not only had nothing in common with metal, but actually provided an antidote to this barely housetrained school of music. Speaking to Kerrang! magazine in 2003, Grohl gave such a notion the short shrift he felt it deserved, noting, ‘Nirvana were not just a punk band in the same way that Motörhead were not just a metal band.’

  But if metal itself in the 1980s was separated from the rest of the musical universe, there were also divisions in its own ranks, between those who simply wished to play as fast and as loudly as they possibly could, seemingly with no eye for commercial gain, and those who longed to exploit metal’s broad fanbase with what amounted to little more than bubblegum pop songs with manicured distortion. The damage Nirvana inflicted on metal and hard rock’s terrain occurred in the latter camp rather than the former.

  ‘Those bands were something neither me nor my friends had anything to do with,’ Grohl explained to Kerrang! in 2003. ‘For one thing they weren’t any good. I never listened to the radio when I was young because I never liked the music that was played on it, even rock radio – especially rock radio. And I’d never watch MTV because you never saw anything on there that was any good. It was Metallica that opened doors for me, to bands like Possessed and Exodus. And it was a very grassroots thing, it was tape trading and digging and searching around for music in the underground. It was about community, about not having it handed to you on a plate. I didn’t want it and I didn’t want it comfortable. I didn’t see the point in liking music you were supposed to like and that it was safe to like.

  ‘In Nirvana we never made it our mission to be the poster boys of the alternative revolution or to make it our priority to destroy heavy metal. That was never something we were really concerned with. And I think the music that died when Nirvana became popular did prove itself to be unimportant, whereas bands like Slayer and Voivod continued to exist, because they came from a scene not unlike the underground punk scene, which is why it survived, just as the punk scene survived. It was built from something that mattered. But when you’re talking about bands like Winger and Warrant, well, that just wasn’t part of our world. It was too ridiculous to consider a reality, which is why it died. And I’m glad that it died. It stopped meaning something to people. But I think that’s why people looked to Nirvana, because they thought we were human beings, that we were real people. And it was time for that.’

  In this spirit, Probot was an album that was teeming with contributions from ‘real people’. Following the tour in support of Foo Fighters’ One by One album, Dave Grohl found the time to properly record the tracks he planned to send out to various leading lights from the metal underground of the 1980s. With the help of Zwan guitarist Matt Sweeney, a man who was able to act as the bridge between Probot’s creator and the artists he wished to enlist to provide vocals for the pieces he had created, Grohl contacted such figures as Lemmy from Motörhead (the one contributor whose profile was known to the mainstream music fan), Max Cavalera from Soulfly, Venom’s Cronos, D.R.I.’s Kurt Brecht, Trouble frontman Eric Wagner, Cathedral mainman Lee Dorrian, Corrosion of Conformity’s Mike Dean, Snake from Voivod and Maryland music legend Wino, then of Spirit Caravan, to name just a few.

  The recording sessions for the self-titled album were also unusual. With the exception of Lemmy’s track, ‘Shake Your Blood’, which was recorded in Los Angeles with Grohl present (with the party later decamping to a nearby strip club) the music for each of Probot’s eleven listed tracks reached each individual vocalist via the Federal Express courier service. In receipt of these tracks each performer would then record their own vocal, as they saw fit, before returning the completed song, or songs, to Dave Grohl. It has been reported that most of the album’s costs came in the form of payments to Federal Express.

  ‘When I started recording this stuff, and it was four years ago, remember, I didn’t think for a moment that it would become a record,’ Grohl said in November 2003. ‘I just wanted to record something for fun. But then it started to turn into something, and I decided to speak to people to take it further. But I was so nervous about contacting some of these guys. Wino is a god to me, as is Eric Wagner … And here I was calling up Eric Wagner in Chicago and saying, “Hi, I’m Dave from Foo Fighters – would you like to sing on a metal song that I’ve written?” What the fuck was he likely to say to that? But it turns out that he was excited by it, it turns out that everyone was excited by it. I can’t tell
you how much it means to me to have the luxury of this opportunity. Not only Probot, but all the opportunities that success allows me. It’s important to extend yourself to other types of music. It’s good for your fucking soul, for your fucking heart.’

  If Dave Grohl was honoured that the musical heroes of his noisy youth consented to involve themselves with his Probot enterprise, so too were the invitees honoured to have been asked.

  ‘I think it’s fucking amazing the way it turned out,’ is the opinion of Cronos, the bassist and vocalist with vastly influential Geordie black metallers Venom, who contributed vocals to the song ‘Centuries of Sin’. ‘I mean, I was sent just the raw music for pretty much all of the songs and it was kinda a bit of a nail-biter on which one was mine, because there was quite a lot of them where I was like, “I don’t know what to do with this,” because it was so not like what I’d done before. So when Dave actually said, “Track three is yours,” I was so relieved because that was the one I wanted. I was buzzing because that was my favourite one on the album anyway. I actually wrote three sets of lyrics: one was like a sleazy, red-light area, “going out for a whore” kinda song, another one was about young guys going out for a fight and drinking on the town, and then I also wrote the “Centuries of Sin” track, which was the Venomous one. But he went, “I just want you to do your thing on it. Don’t think about Dave Grohl, don’t think about Foo Fighters and Nirvana, think as if you were doing a Venom song.” And I was like “Brilliant!”

  ‘I could see where he was coming from. This stuff was not Foo Fighters, this stuff was not Nirvana, this was Dave taking a chance: either he was going to alienate every single Foo Fighters fan in the world and absolutely destroy his career or people are going to understand it and put it in perspective, which is absolutely how it ended up.’

  ‘To me Dave Grohl is no different from a lot of guys I knew back in the 1980s,’ says Cathedral frontman Lee Dorrian, who sang on Probot’s ‘Ice Cold Man’. ‘He’s still got the same mentality, but obviously he’s a lot more famous now. Most kids who grew up in that punk scene, that was their education. Someone like John Peel was the teacher you never had at school, and the scene was your family. I think the punk scene was a really good grounding for anyone who’s young and getting into music and culture and is trying to figure the world out.’

  Probot finally saw the light of day in February 2004. The album was released through the underground record label Southern Lord, owned by Greg Anderson, the same Greg Anderson Grohl had met outside the International Motor Sports Garage back in 1990. Earlier in the process Grohl had meetings with various major labels, and at each meeting he would ask those present if they knew who Cronos was, or who King Diamond (another of the album’s personnel) was. When the answers came back negative, as invariably they did, the musician explained to the record company executives present that they were wasting one another’s time. Even a meeting with the metal record label Roadrunner – home to Slipknot and Machine Head, among many others – did not provide Probot’s creator with the impression that his labour of love would be going to the right home. And so it was, having exhausted the more obvious avenues of release, that Probot met its waiting public on the reassuringly obscure Southern Lord label.

  ‘I’d started the band Goatsnake with Pete Stahl so I’d run into Dave now and again, and every time I’d see him we’d sequester ourselves in a corner and talk about metal,’ says Anderson. ‘He was this giant pop star in my eyes but all he wanted to know about was what cool metal records he should go out and buy, and I thought that was cool. Dave would mention to me that he was putting together these songs and he mentioned Lemmy and Cronos, so it was just kinda talk, he never, ever mentioned business to me. And then the way I heard the story from Pete Stahl was that one day Dave was playing Pete songs from it and saying, “What the hell should I do with this stuff? I don’t feel like a major label will understand,” and Pete said, “Well, what about Anderson’s label?” I laughed about that and thought nothing would come of it, but then Dave called me and said, “Hey, I wanna talk about this Probot record.”’

  And, so it came to pass that, in one 52-minute swoop, Dave Grohl introduced some of underground metal’s leading lights – and the cult Southern Lord label itself – to a brand new audience.

  ‘I’ve been told by several people that Probot was their gateway to check out Wino’s band, or COC for the first time,’ says Anderson. ‘It was like an introduction to this music, like “Dave recommends …” We got a lot of attention and the label profile as a whole was really elevated. And having that record in our catalogue was a great foot in the door for us.’

  Towards the end of 2003, on the promotional trail for Probot, Grohl and Anderson found themselves in London, with both men desiring of a night out. Enlisting the services of Lee Dorrian as host for the evening, the party met in Kensington and headed north to Notting Hill Gate in order to visit the Death Disco club, run by Creation Records impresario Alan McGee, figuring that the instantly recognisable Grohl would be ignored by the club’s hipster clientele.

  ‘I thought, “Well, everyone is too cool for school there,”’ recalls Dorrian. ‘If Keith Richards walked in everyone would pretend not to notice, so I thought, “Dave won’t be hassled.” The doorman was being arsey, so we had to queue for 45 minutes to get in, and as soon as we got in literally everyone from the bar staff to the cloakroom attendant were all jumping on him. I was like, “Shit, sorry, man.” But he just stood there drinking Absinthe and having a good time. He just dealt with it and humoured everybody. I couldn’t deal with it; it’d weaken me. But he has such a good personality that he can handle it.’

  ‘Each person had their own story about what a certain band or a certain song meant to them,’ remembers Greg Anderson. ‘And I’d be like “Fuck man!” I was getting worn out. But Dave would sit with every single person until they were done talking. And I asked him, I said, “Dude, does this bother you?” And he said, “No man, I actually really love doing this, it’s part of the whole thing. And I just like talking to people.” I was blown away. He’s the real deal.’

  If Dave Grohl is the real deal, then so too is Probot, a treacherously heavy collection instantly identifiable as a genuine labour of love. Probot has about it a heft and a greasy gravitational pull that is nothing if not authentic, that is nothing if not the sound of a kind of music made simply for its own sake. It is also something that cannot be bluffed. The point of underground metal, or of thrash and hardcore punk, was that its tonality and totality was such that it discouraged the attentions of the poseur. This was a world populated by people who genuinely loved the music, and the love of this music fostered a community that amounted to much more than a mere ‘scene’.

  More than anything, Probot’s most striking characteristic is that it is able to bring this notion of community, of fraternity, to life on a five-inch CD. Despite its number of different vocalists, this is an album that stands proud as a single body of work, of a celebration of an artistic mindset that spares no thought for commercial ends. Cronos might be over-egging the pudding slightly with his belief that this project might prove sufficiently extreme to ‘destroy’ Dave Grohl’s career – in truth, most Foo Fighters fans politely ignored this raw, savage and only moderately successful outing – but as an addition to Grohl’s CV this is an album that has no thought for long-term consequences, just like the genres it celebrates. Whether it takes the form of the hectic aggro-punk of the 1 minute 24 second ‘Access Babylon’ (sung by Corrosion of Conformity’s Mike Dean), the super-heavy sludge of ‘Ice Cold Man’, the deathlesss rattle ’n’ roll of Lemmy’s ‘Shake Your Blood’ or the relentlessly ominous thud that propels the Max Cavalera-helmed ‘Red War’, this is a set that throughout sounds deliciously unclean and mili-taristically committed to its cause. It is the work of men who know what it is like to taste blood, and to find themselves with puke on their shoes. But in truth Probot came and went with little noise or ceremony. It was noticed by those who care about s
uch music – and given approving looks from those who believe it is their job to judge the authenticity of underground metal – while the rest of Foo Fighters’ constituency waited patiently for the band to return to active service. Which soon enough they would do.

  As it was the purchase of D.R.I.’s eponymous 22-track seven-inch single on 3 July 1983 that propelled Dave Grohl into this musical netherworld, it seems only appropriate that the last word on this chapter of Grohl’s life should be given over to that band’s vocalist Kurt Brecht, who guests on the rumbling ‘Silent Spring’. When I spoke to Brecht in 2010, his verdict on the Probot album, and indeed Grohl’s career to date, was simple and perceptive:

  ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that Dave Grohl has got what every musician wants: freedom.’

  When Grohl returned to his day job, and the creation of Foo Fighters’ album number five, his aim would be to demonstrate exactly that.

  Home

  I want to be a band that can do fucking anything. Because we can do fucking anything …

  Dave Grohl

  The date of 7 July 2007 was an occasion when the well-fed and well-paid members of the world’s musical communities were given cause to feel pleased with themselves. Just shy of five months earlier, failed US Presidential candidate Al Gore and promoter Kevin Wall staged a press conference in Los Angeles in order to announce a series of worldwide summer concerts organised to raise awareness of the issue of global climate change. Fashioned after the Live Aid concerts of 1985 (organised to raise money to combat famine in Ethiopia) and the Live 8 spectaculars of twenty years later (an octet of open-air shows staged to highlight the issue of Third World debt) this upcoming stable of musical events would be known as Live Earth. Happenings were set to take place at such locations as Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the Coca Cola Dome near Johannesburg and the Makuhari Messe in the Tokyo suburb of Chiba; there was to be a free show held on Rio’s iconic Copacabana Beach too.