Dave Grohl on the “best classic rock record ever”
Dave Grohl has lived and breathed rock and roll for longer than most of us have been alive. When he opened up that first Beatles songbook and started putting chords together for the first time, Grohl was on a mission to someday make music that affected people the way it affected him back in the day. While the Fab Four served as the real foundation for what Grohl would do, he thought that no other artist could possibly measure up to what Led Zeppelin had done on Physical Graffiti.
If The Beatles were responsible for opening people’s eyes up to the possibilities of rock and roll, Zeppelin were the ones that reminded us how dangerous it could get. Despite the group keeping much of their escapades backstage hidden away, their level of excess was the stuff of legend in the rock world, from trashing hotel rooms to playing the biggest shows known to man at that point.
Every album they made was also a radical departure from what they had done previously. A record like their debut might hold up as one of the great classics of the blues rock era, but what do you even classify ‘The Rain Song’ as, what with its ethereal guitar tuning and a ballad structure that sounds both relaxing and unsettling at the same time?
Although Grohl had been onboard ever since picking up Led Zeppelin III, Physical Graffiti is the one-stop shop for everything Zeppelin-related. Outside of the hard rockers like ‘Custard Pie’, there are pieces of world music on ‘Bron-Yr-Aur’, guttural blues on ‘In My Time of Dying’, and grand-scale epics that no one could match like ‘Kashmir’.
For Grohl, you couldn’t script a better record, saying, “It’s the best fucking classic rock record of all time – all the way down the line. Physical Graffiti has all the different Zeppelin personalities on one album. I mean, John Bonham could’ve given a shit about the conventional restraints of being a rock drummer. He influenced me and thousands of other drummers to play the drums with soul and feeling rather than with just proficiency.”
Whereas most drummers would be put on the side when it comes to the most important members of the band, Bonham was as much a songwriter with his drum parts as Jimmy Page was with guitar riffs. On a tune like ‘Kashmir’, hearing ‘Bonzo’ stay in 4/4 while the rest of the group plays the riff in waltz time adds to the foreboding atmosphere of the whole tune, almost like there’s some kind of tension that gets fully resolved.
While Grohl probably didn’t play in as many rough time signatures as Zeppelin, you can still hear its influence on everything he played. His time in Nirvana saw him breaking out the Bonham chops from behind the drumkit, and as much as Foo Fighters was about mainstream rock and roll, ‘Times Like These’ is still one of the most disorienting riffs that Grohl ever wrote for the group.
If Grohl couldn’t find a way to repay Zeppelin for the record, he could at least say thank you when he invited John Paul Jones and Page up onstage when the group played Wembley Stadium in the 2000s. Given the fact that he’s gotten to the point where rock giants want to work with him, it feels like Grohl is vicariously living out the rock star fantasies for the rest of us sometimes.
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