“My bucket-list wish”: Dave Grohl on the dream of joining Them Crooked Vultures
Most musicians can only dream of having that one band with all of their favourite artists. Even if they manage to get all of their musical heroes in the same room for a jam session, there’s no telling whether they’re going to produce magic or go over like some average wedding band in the rehearsal room. Although Dave Grohl has somehow harnessed the power to work with pretty much anybody, he said that he wouldn’t have changed a thing when working alongside these legends of rock.
Then again, anyone who has ever heard rock music in the past 30 years would be more than happy to have Grohl behind the kit. Even if he’s considered one of the best frontmen of the past 20 years, Grohl has always felt more at home behind the kit, usually doing whatever he can to make a track jump, whether that was working in Nirvana or when contributing to other people’s records like Tenacious D or Nine Inch Nails.
But something strange happened when he hooked up with Queens of the Stone Age for the first time. Although his performance on the album Songs for the Deaf was supposed to be a one-time thing, there was a certain synergy that he had with Josh Homme that managed to work its magic perfectly. In fact, it might have been working a little bit too well once Grohl got back to the group.
Despite missing playing with Foo Fighters, Grohl’s absence led to one of the biggest fights that the group ever had, with Taylor Hawkins questioning whether he was really devoted to the group or not. While that tension became water under the bridge after working on the record One By One, that didn’t mean that Grohl was suddenly going to stop working alongside Homme from time to time.
On the next record, In Your Honor, Grohl already had a spot for Homme on the acoustic side of the song ‘Razor’. Once he started stretching out his taste in collaborators, the wheels started turning in his head once he hit it off with John Paul Jones when working on the arrangements. The makings of a power trio were all there, now it was a matter of getting Homme and Jonesy together with Grohl behind the kit.
While Them Crooked Vultures was treated as a side project from three of the biggest names in music, Grohl had no problem saying that it was the greatest band that he had ever played in, saying, “I mentioned it in an interview about four years ago, but I was totally joking. I mean, that was like my bucket-list wish; that was my dream band. For years people have asked me: ‘If you could have a dream line-up, what would it be?’ So this is actually it.”
And the strange beauty of the record is that it has a completely separate identity from any of the members’ projects. Grohl is hardly on vocals throughout the record, and despite the down-tuned guitars on some of the tracks, Homme is firmly in classic rock mode rather than digging into his stoner rock bag of tricks, usually turning tracks like ‘Dead End Friends’ into 1970s rock masterpieces that happened to be released 40 years too late.
It makes sense why Them Crooked Vultures haven’t found the time to make another record, but should they have the opportunity to settle down, another instalment of this group would help remind the classic rock upstarts like Greta Van Fleet how it’s truly done.
