Dave Grohl discusses the most musical band he ever worked with: “A really good one”
Dave Grohl isn’t someone who can just be confined to one group. He has always been hopping onstage with as many artists as he can whenever he gets the chance, and given his track record, he might announce that he’s joined another artist by the middle of next week. The man is known for making the most of his musical gifts with whomever he likes, but he thought that the most seasoned act that he ever joined was Them Crooked Vultures.
That’s before even getting into the amount of guest appearances that Grohl has made on records. While he has never been a fully-fledged member of any of these acts, he has turned in time behind the drums for the likes of Tenacious D and Nine Inch Nails, along with being at the right hand of Lemmy when putting together different charity causes.
But the seed for Them Crooked Vultures began the minute that Grohl started working with Josh Homme on Queens of The Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf. His drum fills across the album made him sound like a modern-day John Bonham, so why not try their hand at working with the second half of the legendary Led Zeppelin rhythm section?
After all, John Paul Jones had been working on the session scene and tending to his solo career when he got the call to work with Foo Fighters. Since they needed all the help they could get for In Your Honour, a number of the arrangements on the acoustic side came courtesy of Jonesy, including playing mandolin on the song ‘Miracle’.
Despite coming together on accident, Grohl knew that there was a special energy in the air the minute that he played with Jones and Homme, saying, “Only a few minutes passed before it felt like not only a band but a really good one. [It’s] the most musical band I’ve ever been in.”
And part of the reason why it works so well is because every member sees music from a completely different angle. While it’s easy to spot Homme’s influences since he’s responsible for most of the structures, Jones’s flair for arrangement rears its head across their only record, including breaking out the clavinet and electronic keyboards slightly reminiscent of some of Zeppelin’s later work like In Through the Out Door.
Grohl is more than capable of contributing to the writing of every song as well, but he feels the most at home behind the drumkit. Since he steers the ship of Foo Fighters just fine, leaving his frontman role on the shelf for a little while and rocking out like he did in his Nirvana days is probably a breath of fresh air.
If anything, this might be the closest thing that we have to a Led Zeppelin-style group for the modern age, if only from a musicianship perspective. When they arrived, Zeppelin were known as the greatest in their respective fields, and whereas most other supergroups have tried and failed to get sparks to ignite when they perform, Them Crooked Vultures made the whole thing look easy. So, for all of the Zeppelin copycats who ripped pages out of their playbook like Greta Van Fleet and Wolfmother, take notes on what Grohl and co. did.
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