Credit: Alamy

Dave Grohl discusses his favourite guitarist

Tue 21 March 2023 17:00, UK

Any instrument that comes into the orbit of Dave Grohl gets some kind of recognition. He’s obviously known for his time as the drummer in grunge greats Nirvana, and Grohl managed to keep some steady basslines on the first Foo Fighters record. But for the past three decades, Grohl has predominantly been a guitarist, slashing out chords and coming up with riffs that have made the Foo Fighters one of rock’s most successful bands.

Grohl’s approach to guitar is novel: he looks at it like a drum kit. Although he technically picked up the guitar first, Grohl became a drummer before he ever got proficient at guitar. It makes sense, then, that Grohl’s musical home base is on the drums.

“I like to play guitar like a drummer,” Grohl claimed in an interview. “When I look at a guitar, I almost look at it like a drum set where your low E string is the kick drum, your A and D are the snares, and so when you’re writing riffs, I use the lower notes as kick and snare and the higher notes as cymbals.”

So when it comes to his favourite guitar lines, it’s no surprise that the more rhythmic that part is, the better in Grohl’s mind. Anyone who has heard the Foo Fighters frontman speak knows that one of his all-time favourite bands is Led Zeppelin, and when Q Magazine polled a host of iconic guitarists to find their favourite guitar parts, Grohl decided to plug into a Zeppelin classic.

“My favourite guitar player of all time is Jimmy Page,” Grohl effused. “He played everything with such passion, from the heaviest riffs to the most beautiful acoustic music. I mean, some of his acoustic instrumentals were so gorgeous, and some of his riffs were just so brutal. My favourite guitar riff of all time has gotta be ‘Black Dog’.”

“It has these wicked turnarounds where John Bonham stays in 4/4 time, but John Paul Jones and Jimmy turn the riff over,” he adds. “Jimmy played his guitar with swagger; it was in his shoulders. ‘Black Dog’ just drips, it’s so smooth. It has groove and a pulse, and it sounds easy enough, but when you actually wrap your hands around a guitar, you realise that it takes a little more than what you got.”

Grohl hasn’t gotten around to performing ‘Black Dog’ onstage, but he’s busted out his fair share of Zeppelin covers over the years. Check him out blasting out ‘Rock and Roll’ with Page and Jones, plus the late-great Taylor Hawkins on lead vocals, down below.