The artist who inspired Dave Grohl to create Foo Fighters: “This is cool”
Death is not something anyone can shrug off. The idea of never seeing the most important people in your life is bound to wear on anyone, and especially for artists, it doesn’t get any better for their state of mind when the emotional rug has been pulled out from under them. Dave Grohl certainly wasn’t going to simply strike out on his own in an effort to outdo Nirvana, but he did have a bit of encouragement when listening to what Stewart Copeland was up to in his solo career.
Compared to every other member of Nirvana, Grohl was a bit of the oddball. Regardless of how outspoken he is now, being one of the most humble men in rock and roll, he was just the quiet, introverted guy who would somehow turn into this beast whenever the group went onstage, so it wasn’t like everyone was waiting to hear what he had to say after Kurt Cobain’s tragic passing.
No, he was looking to have some fun after the group ended, and half the reason Foo Fighters got together was for him to get out of the funk he had been trapped in for months. No one just waltzes into a studio convinced that they’d put together a band, though, and Grohl thought that the archetype he was looking for was what Stewart Copeland had done with his side project, Klark Kent.
While Copeland did have a hand in writing many Police records, it’s always clear that Sting wasn’t the composer of his tunes. Aside from the wild experiments, Andy Summers would do on tracks like ‘Mother,’ Copeland couldn’t even try to deny he was an inferior songwriter to Sting, even mentioning in his own song ‘On Any Other Day’ that the track was designed to be corny.
On the flip side, Klark Kent was an excuse for him to do whatever he wanted. Since everyone in the band would be playing different instruments and would wear masks on stage, Copeland’s mysterious alias was every mainstream musician’s dream, practically making an album with no real expectations on you.
That was the kind of freedom that Grohl needed if he wanted to break away from Nirvana, saying, telling The Washington Post, “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is cool. It kind of sounds like the Police.’ They said, ‘It’s Stewart Copeland.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, how cool that dude gets to be in the Police, but he’s also doing this other really cool thing.’ And that really was a big part of the inspiration behind the Foo Fighters.”
While Grohl didn’t have to answer to anyone since he played most of the instruments himself, Foo Fighters’ debut has a certain warmth which doesn’t come from any of their other records. Sure, each new album is still the same songwriter with a lot more musicians behind him, but only But Here We Are stands alongside the debut as one of the moments where you see the real Grohl front and centre.
Then again, Grohl probably didn’t anticipate it turning into a full-time career spanning over decades and turning into one of the leading voices in rock. It was just a side project, and as far as the former Nirvana drummer was concerned, becoming a rock legend twice over was the best bonus he could have asked for.
