The album that made Dave Grohl want to play the drums: “It’s such a masterpiece”
Most musicians don’t just look at their craft as some fun career that they pick up for the hell of it. For the veterans of the business, this was a calling long before it was considered a full-time job, and even if it took years at a time to get there, they were going to fight tooth and nail to make sure they stayed true to what their hearts wanted. While Dave Grohl got his start behind the drumkit before he put Foo Fighters together, his real awakening moment came when listening to David Bowie on Let’s Dance.
Considering Grohl’s background in hardcore music, you’d think that Bowie’s pop-flavoured period would have been the exact opposite of what he wanted to do. His roots in the DC hardcore scene were about rebelling against everything that pop music stood for, so why would he want anything to do with the disco-fied version of ‘The Starman’?
Well, for starters, this wasn’t just another case of a rockstar selling out. Nothing that Bowie ever created was done by accident and many of his best works came from him absorbing a certain sound and then sewing it back out in his own warped vision. And since Nile Rodgers was going to be behind the board, it was bound to sound huge no matter what genre he went down.
Whereas most other rockstars crossing over to pop sounded unbelievably stiff like Rod Stewart and The Rolling Stones, Bowie never sounded more in his element. With the advent of MTV, his transition to music videos for the title track and ‘Modern Love’ made for the most stunning visuals of his later career, almost like he was becoming the art-rock version of Elvis Presley.
Despite sinking his teeth into bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath at this point, Grohl knew that the grooves on Let’s Dance were too good to ignore, saying, “I mean, most Bowie purists sort of lean on the early days, but I go to say my favourite Bowie album is Let’s Dance. It’s just such a masterpiece. As a drummer, that was one of the things that inspired me to play the drums. So, he was special because he could move back and forth from genre to sound.”
Grohl may have rock and roll flowing through his veins, but he was never afraid of taking some of those funky grooves into his own bands as well. Looking through Nirvana’s catalogue, Grohl would cite fellow funk acts like The Gap Band for influencing the opening drum fill of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and someone having the musical guts to make a project like The Dee Gees has definitely heard a few soulful breaks in their time.
Then again, genre parameters weren’t really limitations for Grohl. For the album Sonic Highways, the idea of working in different locations across the US led Grohl to infuse pieces of country, alternative, and even jazzy textures into his music, as if he were using each interview as a funnel for inspiration.
And that’s what Bowie was all about as well. He could hop between any genre that he wanted to and still be intact, but when the window dressing was stripped away, he was still the same songwriting genius that he always was.
