Dave Grohl on inspiration, Led Zeppelin, and “the best ever single”
Most rock stars aren’t normally concerned about which song will do major numbers on the charts. Any rock classic comes from the heart rather than the trends, and even if a tune goes along with the flavours of the day, what lasts are the ones that seem to have no timestamp on them at all. While Dave Grohl is no stranger to the charts with Foo Fighters, he admitted that this single hadn’t lost its lustre after 50 years in the public consciousness.
Then again, Grohl was never interested in being a pin-up star when he got started. It was all about capturing a feeling whenever he played, and when he hit the road with his band Scream for the first time, it wasn’t like they would be kicking Poison off the charts. This was hardcore punk, but Grohl had a melodic side waiting to emerge.
This was a guy who still considered The Beatles among his greatest influences, and going through his record collection, he was clearly a student of every flavour of music one could think of. Despite his credentials as one of the best drummers in grunge history, it wasn’t out of the question for him to be listening to the GAP Band one day, then go immediately to Slayer and then follow it up with 10cc by the end of the week.
And that kind of eclecticism is probably what made Led Zeppelin was of his all-time favourite bands. Considering their pedigree for being one of the titans of blues rock in their prime, Zeppelin was never happy staying in one spot for too long. There would still be blues in every one of their tunes, but there were also traces of everything from Eastern scales to soulful ballads to even the odd song where they tried something completely whacky like ‘The Crunge’.
Still, there are very few rock songs that could even touch what ‘Kashmir’ could do. Zeppelin may have already had massive epics under their belt like ‘Stairway to Heaven’, but now, with the permission to do whatever they wanted on Physical Graffiti, this felt like an audio trip into an unknown land, complete with Jimmy Page’s epic guitar riff and John Bonham playing in lockstep with the orchestra as they march through the desert Robert Plant is singing about.
While Grohl admitted that there may have been some more adventurous deep cuts from other bands, he felt that Zeppelin could have had one of the single cuts to their name had they released it separately, saying, “Was ‘Kashmir’ a single? I can’t imagine that it was. Well, it would’ve been the best ever single.”
That’s not how Zeppelin thought about their music, though. Looking through their body of work, every piece of their discography was supposed to be taken in as a part of the album, and no matter how hard someone might have wanted to make a cut for radio, it’s impossible to trim any of ‘Kashmir’ and not lose a vital part of the journey along the way.
And Grohl never forgot that kind of adventurousness, either, eventually working in some left turns into Foo Fighters’ career with In Your Honor, even with the help of John Paul Jones along the way. Whereas Grohl might have a specific idea for what Foo Fighters should sound like most of the time, Zeppelin remains the prime example of what a band can do when they loosen up and work outside the radio-rock format.
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