“Happy for those guys”: The artist that gave Dave Grohl hope for the future
Rock and roll has never been read its last rites. Even though it might not be the biggest genre in the world like it used to be, it’s still important for bands to keep the spirit of the genre alive in whatever medium they’re working in, whether that’s featuring an electric guitar on a pop song or sprinkling a little bit of punk rock energy into a hip-hop beat. The only way for rock to survive is to become a bit more elastic, but nothing replaced the raw sound of guitars for Dave Grohl.
Before Grohl had even got behind the drum kit for the first time, he already had a healthy respect for what the legends of rock and roll were doing. Although there are times when everything wasn’t exactly perfect on a record, that human element of the music is what caught his ear before anything else. He had come from punk rock, and that meant having more to say than playing scales up and down the neck of the guitar.
That’s not to say that he couldn’t appreciate flashiness. This is the same drummer who looked up to Neil Peart as one of his heroes, so it wasn’t out of the question for him to start working on something extreme, but that wasn’t what rock and roll looked like when he started entering the stadiums of the world with Foo Fighters.
As much as fans didn’t want to admit it, the old guard of rock and roll had started to look more and more like dad rock as the years went on. The idea of someone playing organic instruments onstage hadn’t officially become a thing of the past by any stretch, but since many new bands like The Strokes were taking cues from the old guard of rock and roll, there was no need for anyone to branch out into different territory unless they wanted to embrace their nu-metal phase.
For a genre that had been all about loving music that pissed off one’s parents, this was the beginning of the generation concerned with pleasing their parents. There will always be some disgruntled uncle at every family reunion who complains that music was so much better back when he was 21, and that’s why people like Greta Van Fleet exist; they give those oldheads the kind of outlet to show people what “real” music is.
“Kings of Leon, I’m happy for those guys. When I hear live drums and real guitars and people singing on the radio, it makes me feel that there’s still hope for this world.”
Dave Grohl
And while Grohl always wanted to go beyond his classic rock influences, he admitted that bands like Kings of Leon were the ones with the right approach to rock and roll, saying, “I get happy for bands when they get really successful, because I remember what it was like. Like Kings of Leon, I’m happy for those guys. When I hear live drums and real guitars and people singing on the radio, it makes me feel that there’s still hope for this world.”
Then again, even Kings of Leon’s image has taken a few more dents in recent history than most people would have thought. Despite being known as one of the greatest indie bands for the first two years of their career, seeing them go from a Southern-fried version of garage rock straight through ‘Sex On Fire’ and ‘Use Somebody’ to the most morose music possible is the definition of backwards evolution.
It’s nice to see bands like them succeed on the charts, but in this case, Kings of Leon are the one group that got swallowed up the minute they started making the big bucks on the charts. It’s far from the worst thing in the world to see artists playing guitars filling stadiums on their own, but even with every modern band that came after Foo Fighters, Grohl remains one of the few that can pull off the stadium show without any backing tracks.
