“Really bad”: the album that Dave Grohl severely messed up
Any musician will always have those moments when they’re self-critical of their performances. No one can claim to be a god behind their instrument, but it can get a bit disconcerting when listening to a record and knowing that things could have been much better had there been more time to work on it. Although Dave Grohl usually had all of the drum patterns in his head for a Nirvana or Foo Fighters album before he even let the tape roll back in the day, he would admit when he thought that things shouldn’t have been worked on for a little longer.
When Grohl had first started in Scream, though, he was the last one worried about things sounding perfect. The whole idea behind punk rock was to make a song that was heartfelt rather than massive scale exercises, and even on Nirvana’s greatest hits, he was used to making songs that were fairly rudimentary from a production standpoint, only throwing in a couple of drum fills when the time called for it.
Once he didn’t have a band any more, Grohl knew the next best thing was to make a record that he would be proud of. He never had major aspirations for what Foo Fighters were going to be when making that first record, but as soon as the public started paying attention to ‘that guy from Nirvana’ having a solo band, he knew that he had to take better care of what the mix of his record sounded like.
That’s probably why William Goldsmith was never meant to last long in the group once production began on The Colour and the Shape. Goldsmith was a fine drummer for what he was, but the minute that he was placed next to Grohl, it didn’t take the frontman long to know that he wasn’t the right person for the job, eventually going behind the kit himself and redoing every single track from the ground up without telling Goldsmith.
But that relentless perfectionism wasn’t strictly Grohl being an ass. He held himself up to those same standards whenever he made a record, and when he was out of his element working on the soundtrack to the film Touch, he admitted that many pieces of his performance could have used some work.
Despite working with some punk heavyweights like John Doe of X, Grohl felt that his performance on the record left a lot to be desired, saying, “There are [a few] songs in the movie that have vocals on them. There’s one that John Doe from the LA punk band X sings, and there’s another one that Louise Post from Veruca Salt sings on, but the rest of the music was weird. Whatever worked for the scene, I used. It took about two weeks to do in all, and I’ve just seen the movie for the first time! It’s hard for me to be objective – whenever I watch it, I just listen to the music and think that I fucked it up really bad!”
But since the majority of the record was intended to be incidental music, it’s clear why Grohl wasn’t as enthused about the final product. He was more interested in making records in the same way his heroes did, and while he could make an instrumental section sound great for whatever he was working on, telling him to make that kind of soundtrack would have made about as much sense as putting a horn in his hand and telling him to play some jazz.
While Touch is admittedly never going to be at the upper echelons of Grohl’s discography, it does at least show his affinity for working outside his comfort zone. And whereas most artists tend to find themselves in the same holding pattern whenever they make a record, it’s nice to have someone like Grohl willing to push himself at every opportunity.
