This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  Given the three musicians’ impeccable CVs, and the fact that Grohl and Homme’s previous collaboration, Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf, had been roundly acclaimed as the finest hard rock album of the decade, expectations for Them Crooked Vultures were sky high. Early reviews only added to the hype. ‘Them CrookedVultures flouts the supergroup manual,’ wrote MOJO. ‘It doesn’t sound like the work of rich men on holiday, but rather three serious individuals looking to prove themselves over again.’ The Sunday Times hailed the album as ‘thrillingly, breathtakingly odd’. The Washington Post was equally captivated. ‘When rock bands swarmed Earth 40 years ago, they seemed otherworldly – hirsute tribes clad in kaleidoscopic garb, brandishing their guitars like medieval weapons,’ wrote Chris Richards. ‘But over time, these mongrel hordes and their misshapen songs assimilated into American culture so seamlessly, they practically vanished into the normalcy of popular music. Today, our guitar heroes reside mostly in video games. In that sense, supergroup Them Crooked Vultures makes for an evocative throwback, recalling an era when riff-hurling rock troupes felt dangerous. And bizarre. And totally worth listening to.’

  The key reference points for Them CrookedVultures are Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, Cream, Foghat, Masters of Reality and, perhaps most significantly, the stress-free, narcotics-friendly Desert Sessions collaborations Josh Homme has presided over at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, California since 1997. Like The White Stripes’ superb 2003 collection Elephant, Them Crooked Vultures reeks of sin, sweat, sex and bad-ass braggadocio: swinging and swaggering, it’s very much the (dirty) work of grown men old enough to know better, but stubborn enough not to give a rat’s ass. Opening with the lewd, lascivious, cowbell-accented stomp of ‘No One Loves Me’ (‘I told her I was trash, she winked and laughed and said, “I already know, I got a beautiful place to put your face”’), the trio invoke the unholy trinity of sex (on the steamy Southern Gothic swamp-blues ‘No Fang’), drugs (on the nightmarish, woozy, wonky, acid-trip-gone-horribly-wrong ‘Interlude with Ludes’) and violence (almost everything else), with the drawling Homme portraying his renegade posse as ‘unwanted strangers, exploited and dangerous’ on the cock-and-balls strut of ‘Elephants’. This desperado gang vibe seeps through every move TCV make, which might seem a tad silly if the trio didn’t have a fearsome arsenal of white-knuckle riffs to back up their lairy, priapic strut: the occasions where Homme, Jones and Grohl lock telepathically, and thrillingly, into extended driving grooves are reminiscent of Zeppelin at their most testosterone driven. Them Crooked Vultures might not be breaking new ground, but few bands shake the foundations with such muscle and majesty.

  One week into the band’s début US tour, I caught up with Dave Grohl backstage at Boston’s House of Blues. Them Crooked Vultures’ hard-hitting drummer was in playful mood, describing the tour as ‘awesome’.

  ‘We did the Austin City Limits festival and melted a few faces down there,’ he beamed. ‘Then we kicked Nashville in the balls. Then we went to Columbus, and beat them up for a little while, then went to Detroit and smacked them around a little bit. Then we went to Canada, and held them upside down by their feet. It’s been fun, really good.’

  On 17 December the TCV bandwagon rolled into London for the first of two sold-out nights at the famous Hammersmith Apollo, formerly known as Hammersmith Odeon, and one of the capital’s most storied venues. In July 1973 David Bowie killed off Ziggy Stardust on the stage of the Odeon, in November 1976 a chunk of Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous album – arguably the greatest live rock album of all time – was recorded in the same venue. In the mid-1960s The Beatles sold out no less than 38 shows over 21 nights in the 5,000-capacity room, and on 18 December 2009 Paul McCartney returned to the venue to show his support for Grohl, with whom he had become firm friends in the wake of their onstage collaborations at McCartney’s 2008 Liverpool Sound concert and at the Grammys in 2009. Discreetly tucked away on the left-hand side of the stage, McCartney and his girlfriend Nancy Shevell stood smiling and bopping as rock’s latest fab four delivered a thunderous masterclass in elemental grooving, controlled power and wall-shaking volume, a display which marked out Them Crooked Vultures as a vital force in their own right.

  Later that night, the Vultures and various family and friends took over a charming Italian restaurant in West London for an end-of-tour party. Against a wholly incongruous soundtrack of Slayer, Metallica and Pantera, Grohl and Homme held court with grace and humour, occasionally breaking off from chatting to their guests to indulge in spontaneous, sporadic bursts of air guitar thrashing and/or air drumming. Grohl, temporarily relieved of the weight of carrying Foo Fighters, Inc., on his broad shoulders, had rarely looked more content or at ease.

  ‘I now have three loves,’ he told me as the party wound down. ‘My family, the Foos and the Vultures. Shit man, the position I’m in right now, where I get to be in this band with two of my favourite musicians of all time and then I get to be in a band with my friends and family and play festivals and stadiums? That’s a good thing, it’s fucking great. John is already asking me when we’re going to do a new Vultures record, and that will happen one day, and it’ll be amazing. But right now I think it’s time for me to return home.’

  In May 2008, one month prior to Foo Fighters’ brace of Wembley Stadium headline dates, Grohl was asked by Kerrang! magazine where he saw his band heading next.

  ‘How could it get any bigger or better than it is?’ he mused. ‘We’ve never had a Number One record in America, and I remember Pat [Smear] saying once, “I never want a Number One record because, after that, what do you do?” So thankfully we’ve never had a Number One record in America.’

  Three years later, on 20 April 2011, Foo Fighters’ seventh album Wasting Light débuted at Number 1 on the Billboard 200.

  Advance press on Wasting Light centred largely around the fact that the album had been recorded to analogue tape in Dave Grohl’s garage. That the process merited such attention speaks volumes about the sterile state of the music industry in 2011. In 1999 Foo Fighters had recorded There Is Nothing Left to Lose to tape in Dave Grohl’s basement in Virginia without Pro Tools technology and without any real fanfare, but by 2011 the idea that rock music should be pristine and polished was so endemic in the recording industry that the notion of making a record in any other way was considered heretical. On the same November evening that photographer Lisa Johnson and I dropped in upon Foo Fighters’ Wasting Light sessions at Grohl’s Encino home, I interviewed San Diego pop-punks Blink 182 at their North Hollywood studio as they toiled upon the creation of their sixth studio album; in conversation with the band’s vocalist/guitarist Tom DeLonge I mentioned the manner in which Dave Grohl’s band were working with Butch Vig elsewhere in the city. DeLonge looked dumbfounded.

  ‘Why would you do that?’ he gasped. ‘That would be like you carving your article into tablets of stone instead of using a computer!’

  In truth, this mindset had only recently been banished from Foo Fighters’ own sessions.

  ‘The first song we recorded, we get a drum take and Butch starts razor-splicing edits to tape,’ Grohl recalled to Electronic Musician magazine. ‘We rewind the tape and it starts shedding oxide. Butch says, “We should back everything up to digital.” I start screaming: “If I see one fucking computer hooked up to a piece of gear, you’re fucking fired! We’re making the record the way we want to make it, and if you can’t do it, then fuck you!” Nobody makes us do what we don’t want to do. “What if something happens to the tape?” “What did we do in 1991, Butch?” You play it again! God forbid you have to play your song one more time.’

  Sessions for Wasting Light actually began in a more traditional manner in the autumn of 2008, using state-of-the-art digital recording technology at Grandmaster Recorders studios in Hollywood, the same facility in which three-quarters of the original Foo Fighters line-up completed the recording of The Colour and the Shape in 1997. The band had been writing and rehearsing new material in s
oundchecks while touring Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, and Grohl’s original plan was that Foo Fighters should record a new album and release it quickly and quietly without committing to any touring, press interviews or promotional activity at all. With Butch Vig handling production, songs such as ‘Wheels’, ‘Word Forward’ and ‘Rope’ were laid down in a conventional fashion, but Grohl could see that his band were burnt out after a solid year’s touring, and in the back of his mind he knew the songs weren’t quite ready. Mindful of past mistakes, he called a halt to the session. Within three months he was back in the studio, but this time with John Paul Jones and Josh Homme.

  ‘The Vultures did a lot more than I originally expected it to,’ he told me as we sat in the studio control room at his home in Encino in November 2010. ‘At first it was just an idea that Josh and I had to play together and not have to tour, and not have to do all the things that we were tired of doing with our other bands, and then I asked John to come jam with us and within five minutes I wanted it to be more than just a studio project. Because we were good – we were good in the room, we were good on tape, we were good onstage, we were just good. It was obvious within the first few weeks that it was going to be a good record and that we were going to be a fucking blazing live band. So it was just a series of challenges: write the first song, record the first song, record all the songs, release the album, perform in front of people, perform everywhere in front of people. And it just started snowballing …

  ‘We could have done much more, but by New Year’s I realised that if I waited any longer to do Foo Fighters’ thing, there’s going to be a really big gap between our last album and this one now. And, ultimately, this is where I belong. But it was a hard decision to make because I was in a band with John Paul Jones, who’s one of my heroes, and Josh, who’s one of my best friends, and I was playing better than I’ve ever played before and having the time of my life. But I wanted to be here in Foo Fighters at the same time. So in January I called Taylor and said, “Okay, let’s start working on some ideas.”’

  On 16 August 2010, just two weeks after Them Crooked Vultures closed out their world tour onstage at the Fuji Rock festival in Naeba, Japan, Foo Fighters regrouped to restart work upon their seventh studio album. Inspired by the purity of the Them Crooked Vultures experience, Grohl now had a new vision for the album: his band would record to analogue tape, in his garage, and have a documentary film crew record the process.

  ‘The process I think comes out in the music,’ he said. ‘When I listen to the second record [The Colour and the Shape], it’s kinda complicated: there’s some things that I like to listen to and some things that I don’t, because I know what was happening at the time and what I was singing about. And then there’s an album like the third album [There Is Nothing Left to Lose], which we made in my basement in Virginia which was just nothing but fucking good vibes, it was a pleasure to make that record, and when I listen to it, it sounds that way to me, just a nice, laid-back album because that’s the way we felt at the time. So I feel like this whole process, you can actually hear it in the album. And it’s been pretty fun.

  ‘I know that whenever I listen to these songs in 20 years from now I’ll remember recording “These Days” and having Violet tapping me on the shoulder the whole time I’m doing my guitar track. Or a song like “Miss the Misery” and I look down and Harper has got her pinkie in her mouth and she’s dancing along. The kids are part of the album in a way, they’re part of the memories for me.’

  As photographer Lisa Johnson and I drove away from Grohl’s home that November evening, the man of the house was already back at work, framed in the light in his studio control room, cradling a guitar. But before we said our goodbyes he had this to say about his band’s forthcoming album:

  ‘With the last album we were too concerned with being musical. When we went out and did that acoustic tour it made us feel like a band of musicians, like we were doing something a lot more than just turning on a fucking DAT machine and bouncing around to lasers, so that had a lot to do with the last album, making it more than just four-chord shit. But it seems like every album we’ve made is a result of the one that came before it, or a response to it. And we haven’t made a really heavy, full-on eleven-song rock record in a long time. There are a few bands that later in their career have made one album that kinda defines the band: it might not be their best album, but it’s the one people identify the band with the most, like [AC/DC’s] Back in Black or the Metallica record. It’s like you take all of the things that people consider your band’s signature characteristics and just amplify them and make one simple album with that. And that’s what I thought we could do with Butch, because Butch has a great way of trimming all the fat and making sense of it all. And I think that’s what he’s done with this shit. We have a tendency to over-complicate things. But now it’s time for us to go out and be a rock band again. Someone has to do it, right?’

  Wasting Light was released on 11 April 2011 in the UK and one day later in the US, emerging to the most enthusiastic reviews of the band’s career. ‘Most bands struggle to follow a Greatest Hits abum,’ noted Johnny Dee in his 8 out of 10 review for Classic Rock. ‘Foo Fighters have followed theirs with a record that sounds like another Greatest Hits album. They’re unstoppable.’ Q awarded the album 4 out of 5, and hailed the ‘indecently thrilling’ collection as a ‘career-defining return’. MOJO too considered Wasting Light worthy of a 4/5 review, with Stevie Chick applauding ‘high velocity thrills from the master of unreconstructed rock’. And Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote, ‘If you ever thought Foo Fighters were Nirvana-lite because Grohl lacked Cobain’s torment, get ready to apologise.’

  The record-buying public responded with enthusiasm. In topping the Billboard chart, Wasting Light racked up first-week sales of 235,000 units in the US, their second-highest sales week ever. The album also hit the No. 1 spot on a further eleven national charts, including those of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and Germany. In the months prior to the album’s release, after analysing chart figures worldwide, media organisations had devoted countless column inches to the idea that rock music is ‘dead’, with veteran US DJ Paul Gambaccini, the self-appointed ‘Professor of Pop’, declaring, ‘It is the end of the rock era. It’s over, in the same way the jazz era is over. That doesn’t mean there will be no more good rock musicians, but rock as a prevailing style is part of music history.’ Wasting Light stands as a rather robust, defiant rebuttal of such a foolish notion.

  The key to unlocking the album is contained within ‘I Should Have Known’, the most nakedly emotional song Grohl has ever penned. Grohl can be a maddeningly oblique lyricist, comfortable only when dealing with universal themes which give little of his own heart away, but ‘I Should Have Known’ is a raw, haunting tale of personal loss so laden with guilt and regret that listening in almost feels like an intrusion. Given added pathos by mournful accordion and fuzzed-out bass riffs supplied by Grohl’s erstwhile Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic, the song will inevitably be interpreted as an elegy for Kurt Cobain, but while Grohl has acknowledged that it’s a tribute to those he has loved and lost, the true inspiration behind the track is his lifelong companion Jimmy Swanson, who passed away on 18 July 2008 as a result of a drug overdose. In Swanson, Grohl always saw himself, or rather a version of himself that would exist had fate not dealt him a different hand; just as ‘Word Forward’ on Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits collection opens with the poignant lyric ‘Goodbye Jimmy, farewell youth’, lines here such as ‘I should have known, I was inside of you’ and ‘I cannot forgive you yet, to leave my heart in debt’ carry an almost unbearable emotional charge.

  But in undertaking this painful soul-mining, and revisiting the memories he shared with Swanson, Grohl uncovered the source materials for the most life-affirming album of his career. The songs on Wasting Light, delivered with the same breathless intensity and hunger Grohl brought to his earliest band practices in Springfield garages and basements, can be
considered his ‘thank you’ notes to the artists that soundtracked the adolescence he shared with Swanson, and to the life experiences which blossomed as a consequence of that musical education. As such, there are nods to Grohl’s past dotted throughout the album. ‘I Should Have Known’ features the lyric ‘came without a warning’, a subtle allusion to the title of the opening track of Scream’s début album Still Screaming. ‘Bridge Burning’ references Revolution Summer’s definitive anthem ‘Dance Of Days’ and namechecks both Ian MacKaye’s Embrace and Alec MacKaye’s Faith. And in ‘Arlandria’, a song titled in tribute to the area of Virginia in which Grohl was raised, over bouncing, thrust-and-drag guitars the 42-year-old sings, ‘My sweet Virginia, I’m the same as I was in your heart,’ a proud boast that the teenage punk within him will never be silenced.

  At other points, links with Grohl’s past are musical rather than lyrical. ‘White Limo’ melds the red-eyed bruiser-punk of Queens of the Stone Age’s ‘Quick and to the Pointless’ with the kinetic fury of Refused’s ‘New Noise’ to deliver a rasping rave-up which Motörhead’s Lemmy could have proudly fathered, while ‘Rope’, with its angular, colliding art-punk guitar riffs, could have been lifted from an unreleased Dain Bramage demo tape.

  Wasting Light most explicitly acknowledges Grohl’s formative musical influences, however, with the appearance of Bob Mould on the Hüsker Dü-esque ‘Dear Rosemary’. Grohl met Hüsker Dü’s frontman for the first time at the 9:30 Club’s 30th Anniversary party in Washington DC on 31 May 2010, and was moved to tell his teenage hero that he’d been ripping him off musically for 15 years. The pair swapped phone numbers, and on 27 September Mould was invited to Grohl’s home to trade vocal lines on ‘Dear Rosemary’.

  ‘I think he’s known for a long time that I’m a huge Hüsker Dü fan, as is anybody from my musical generation,’ Grohl told me. ‘He’s a legend, an American hero. So I texted him and said, “Hey, I have this song I think you should come down and sing with me on.” And I’ve never done a duet, outside of the Norah Jones thing, and it turned into a duet and it works perfectly. He walked in and said, “Okay, well, where should I start?” and we said, “Well, why don’t you start just by doing harmonies?” And he has such a signature sense of melody and composition, and the sound of his voice is the same – it hasn’t changed whether it’s Copper Blue or Zen Arcade or whatever, his voice is his voice – so when he started singing our jaws just dropped, like, “Oh my God, that’s the voice!” And then I intentionally left the bridge unfinished so that the two of us could collaborate on a part, and it turned out so well that at one point he said, “Yeah, that’s basically Copper Blue right there.” It was so easy, he was a pleasure to work with and a pleasure to hang with.’