The album Dave Grohl called his “all-time favourite record”
With drumming inspired by disco, a penchant for the Bee Gees, a love of Ry Cooder’s mystical guitar tones, and a dollop of AM radio affection thrown into the mix, there’s no real way of knowing exactly what sort of music Dave Grohl is going to go in for. In fact, the former Nirvana man even called PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ his favourite song of 2012 and avowed in the same statement that there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure.
All of that paints a pretty solid picture of a man with an eclectic mishmash of tastes wandering into the welter of his wellspring of inspiration. However, everyone has that one record that they hold dearest, the one that walloped their mind and affirmed something fresh. For Dave Grohl, that life-changing album came from the famed DC hardcore band Bad Brains.
As Henry Rollins once recalled, “We were walking down to the Bayou to see The Damned. And here come this opening band, the Bad Brains. We all went up to the front and had our minds completely blown. We walked out of there going, ‘The Damned: great. But the Bad Brains!” He went to see them again shortly after and wound up with HR pinning him to the floor and singing into his face, “and that was kind of the start of my life,” Rollins says.
They had this profound impact on many people. They were a band and a way of life. That slapped you across the face like a cold shower when you saw them live, but they also somehow transferred it onto vinyl, like canned nuclear energy, too. For Grohl, their finest recorded achievement was their 1983 LP, Rock For Light.
“This might be my all-time favourite record,” Grohl once opined. “It was the first time I’d heard a hardcore band that had that supreme musicianship, but kept it kind of simple – four black guys from Washington DC who laid every other hardcore punk rock band to waste. They were amazing. They were Rastafarians, so they’d throw in a little bit of reggae just to mellow out the punks or something. And they were the most amazing live band in the world. They’re just great. Really, really, really, really great.”
As Grohl recalled: “I was living in DC in the early ’80s, and got into the hardcore scene but nobody else blew me away as much as Bad Brains.” Adding: “I have never ever, ever, ever, ever seen a band do anything even close to what Bad Brains used to do live,” concluded the former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman. “They were the best fuckin’ band in the world.”
