The drummer Dave Grohl said was out of his league: “There was no way on Earth”
The story of Dave Grohl has always been about him trying to get every single idea out of his head.
Although he could have easily remained the quiet one in Nirvana had Kurt Cobain not passed away, his second career as one of the greatest frontmen of the modern age made him look like a modern renaissance man in the music world. But as much as Grohl can have the time of his life strumming away on his guitar at every Foo Fighters gig, he’s never going to feel more at home than he did behind a drumset.
It’s not like Grohl would disagree with that assessment, either. Looking through all of his interviews, he always tried to approach songwriting in the same way that he would if he were behind the kit. The high strings may as well be cymbals, and when you listen to the way that a song like ‘Everlong’ unfolds in the beginning, it’s not that far off from a slightly intricate pattern on a kick and snare.
No, he wasn’t going to be strumming away on his guitar in the same way that Bob Dylan was, but Grohl didn’t really care. All that mattered to him was if he had a song in his heart, and while there are many fantastic songs where he delved into more serious subject matter, it was always going to come back around to the way that he played drums. And if you look at his favourite drummers, he had more than a few teachers showing him the way.
Although he wasn’t going to start making prog epics in the same way that Neil Peart did with Rush, it’s easy to see him taking the basis of that for many of his fills. He was able to serve the song like Ringo Starr whenever he got into the studio, but if it weren’t for John Bonham setting an example for him, he probably wouldn’t have had a quarter of the power that he has whenever he played.
Led Zeppelin was practically a religion for Grohl when he was a teenager, and while Led Zeppelin III may have been the album that got him through a lot of dark times, it was much more about Bonzo’s drumming than Jimmy Page’s guitar. Page could make anyone cry with how beautiful his solos could be, but whenever Bonham laid into the groove with Page’s guitar on ‘Kashmir’, all felt right with the world.
And even after becoming one of the greatest drummers of his generation, Grohl was the first to say that he was nowhere near Bonham’s level, saying, “I’d had this crazy dream since I was a kid that I would play drums for Led Zeppelin, I really thought I could do it. I know every song back to front, inside out. Then I put on Houses Of The Holy and just sat there, thinking there was no way on earth that I could possibly do it. It would be ridiculous to even try. No one has come close to Bonham in the last 25 years.”
But the greatest part about Bonham wasn’t always about him trying to hit the hardest out of every other drummer in the world. He could sound like a hurricane of percussion when he wanted to, but there were also moments where he knew the importance of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or where he started to push himself beyond the traditional rock and roll drumming, like on ‘Fool in the Rain’.
Would Grohl probably have a bias about a drummer that he had idolised before he even dropped out of high school? Absolutely, but the reverence put on Bonham’s name is 100% justified every single time he played. Each member of Zeppelin made them who they were, but the thought of them continuing without Bonzo was about more than losing a friend. Because if you take the drummer out of any iconic band, you’re removing its core heartbeat.
