The album Dave Grohl could never make again: “The coolest thing I’ve ever done”
Most of the best albums of all time tend to capture a specific moment in between the notes. Regardless of how well the record is mixed or whether it holds up 20 years after its release, there’s a certain power that comes from being able to let out raw emotion from a certain point in your life and manage to make it palatable for the rest of the world to hear. While Dave Grohl seemed to crack the code on making carefree rock and roll with Foo Fighters, he admitted that assembling the tracks for his record Probot would never happen again.
Throughout every phase of Grohl’s career, he always returned to his heavy side. He had begun life in the hardcore punk scene, and there was no doubt that he had listened to his fair share of thrash records to have come up with songs as heavy as ‘Weenie Beenie’ off the band’s debut or ‘Stacked Actors’.
As he rode the high of tracks like ‘Learn to Fly’, Grohl quickly realised that there was still a lot more that he hadn’t covered. That heavy metal itch that he had wasn’t going to be satisfied with just one song, and if he was going to put together an album of non-stop metallic rock, he would need some help bringing it to life.
As much as Grohl has made a name for himself as a musician who can play pretty much anything, he didn’t skimp out on hiring the right people for the job on vocals. While it was no big shocker to see Lemmy taking the vocals on a tune, Cronos from Venom was a definite surprise, and the inclusion of Max Cavalera from Sepultura showed that he was at least in tune with what was going on in the current metal scene.
And notice how there’s hardly any straight-ahead nu-metal on the album, either. Grohl may have been competing with the Limp Bizkits of the world, but this was his way of beating the supposed hardened badasses at their own game, especially since his scream is much better than the nasal whine that Fred Durst always attempted.
While Grohl fell into making the Probot by complete accident, he knew that the spontaneity of the sessions could never be replicated again, telling Time Out, “It wasn’t intended to be an album in the first place, and it’s turned into something so beautiful that I’d hate to taint it by trying to do it again. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
But when looking back on the way Grohl constructed everything, one can’t help but think of the same way that Josh Homme operated in Queens of the Stone Age. Considering every album up until that point featured Homme working with whoever he felt like to get the sound he wanted, it’s no shocker why Grohl went in the same direction and eventually became bandmates with Homme for Songs for the Deaf.
Even in the grand scheme of Foo Fighters releases, though, Probot stands as its own separate project that even hardened metal gods can’t touch. His main outfit had its trademark sound, but in terms of musical style, Probot proved that nothing was really off the table for Grohl to try out.
