Dave Grohl on the most brilliant musician he worked with: “Genius at everything”
Rock and roll doesn’t necessarily have to be perfect. In fact, if every rock band recorded everything to where it sounded absolutely flawless, chances are it would lose half of its mojo because there’s no real tension behind it. Dave Grohl has always thrived on having that kind of naivety whenever he gets in front of a microphone, but he admitted that working with John Paul Jones was like working with a classically trained musician compared to every member of Foo Fighters.
Out of every member of Led Zeppelin, Jones may have been the one with the most musical miles under his belt. Every one of them could have justifiably been called a virtuoso at what they do, but the vast array of instruments that Jonesy could play alongside his incredible arrangement skills could give Jimmy Page a run for his money on tracks like ‘Kashmir’.
Even when Zeppelin broke up, Jones wasn’t exactly hurting for finding work afterwards or anything. His time as a studio musician was always his calling card, and that meant getting calls from artists like R.E.M to orchestrate pieces of their album Automatic for the People or joining forces or working on tracks for The Rolling Stones before he even got Zeppelin off the ground.
Whereas Jones knew the mechanics behind a great melody, Grohl had a slightly different approach to rock and roll. He was more of a John Bonham type when it came to music, and that meant trying to squeeze as much energy out of every song as he could, to the point where he started to look at a guitar as if it were a drumset when making Foo Fighters songs.
When sculpting the acoustic disc for In Your Honour, though, Grohl had said that he had never seen someone like Jones before in the studio, telling Sam Jones, “John Paul Jones is without a doubt the most brilliant musician I’ve ever worked with in my entire life. He’s just fucking genius at everything. It doesn’t matter if he’s sitting at a harpsichord or ripping a mandolin or whatever it is. He will pick up an instrument and master it like that.”
While it’s incredibly funny to get one of the greatest bassists in the world on a record only for him to play the mandolin, that was never how Jones looked at it. Whenever he went into the studio, it was to serve the song, and if that meant putting the bass down and picking up an acoustic instrument, then so be it.
Grohl wasn’t about to pass up a chance to work with Jones again, though. Throughout the next few years, the frontman would come to know Jones as a friend, working with him in the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures with Josh Homme and even bringing him and Jimmy Page out onstage when they played Wembley Stadium for a version of ‘Rock and Roll’ with Taylor Hawkins playing drums.
So for any casual Zeppelin fans, just remember that Jones wasn’t just looked at as a bass player who played everything right up the middle. The rock gods had a musical Swiss army knife at their disposal, and without him, everything from ‘Black Dog’ to ‘All My Love’ would have sounded very different.
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