“Wicked”: the Foo Fighters member Dave Grohl called their “secret weapon”
There isn’t a single person who goes to a Foo Fighters show who doesn’t realise Dave Grohl is the leader of the group.
If the band had gone any differently, there’s a good chance that Grohl could have named the band after himself, Van Halen-style, but since he was walking out of Nirvana’s shadow at the time, he knew that it was better to put a placeholder band name on top of everything and build the band around it. But even with a revolving door lineup throughout the first part of their career, there were always going to be the bandmates who stuck by him no matter what happened.
Then again, going on the road all over again wasn’t going to be easy for Grohl to take. The idea of getting a few different heckles from the audience asking him to play Nirvana songs was bound to be a little bit awkward, and when tearing through some of his original tunes, there were always going to be a few tunes that didn’t click with people like they were supposed to. But the real problem had more to do with the people who were in the band when The Colour and the Shape started.
It’s hard to really call their second outing the hardest record they ever made because of what would come later, but losing two members in the process was bound to be a body blow. William Goldsmith’s departure may have left the door wide open for Taylor Hawkins, but Pat Smear stepping away from the fold was a much harder obstacle. He and Grohl felt like brothers after working in Nirvana, and being relegated to a trio for There Is Nothing Left to Lose definitely felt different.
But Nate Mendel was always the one providing the anchor to Grohl’s ideas. His time in Sunny Day Real Estate already showed Grohl that he had the right chops that he was looking for, but even after getting put through his paces by Gil Norton, Mendel was willing to stick by Grohl’s side whenever he could. Then again, Grohl did have a few moments where he felt like even Mendel was going to leave him by himself.
The idea of Sunny Day Real Estate getting back together did cause Mendel to quit the band for about 24 hours, but after calling Grohl back and telling him that he had changed his mind, the frontman knew that he wasn’t dealing with some fly-by-night guy. Mendel was part of the family now, and he could hear what he was bringing to the table a lot more when he started filling out the songs on their following records.
In Your Honor wasn’t going to be easy for anyone in the band to tackle, but having Mendel there made Grohl realise that everything was going to be okay, saying, “Nate is a wicked bass player. He’s the secret weapon in this band. He’s straightened out his playing a lot. He’s downstroking now and actually following the root note. But before, if you left Nate alone in a room to put a bass track down, when you came back, his bass lines would sound like some avant-garde solo.”
Which really says a lot considering he was part of “the rhythmless section” back on their second record. Mendel knew that there was room for improvement and that he had to keep getting better, and while it’s hard to really pick out his lines in the mix half the time, his presence is something that’s more felt than heard whenever he’s performing, usually adding that extra level of thickness to a song like ‘The Pretender’.
He’s not going to be ripping some crazy John Paul Jones line or make the same Geddy Lee bass break, but that’s because he knew his place in the band better than anyone. He realised that there was a lot of ground that needed to be covered on the low end, and if Grohl was setting up every single guitar on a track, Mendel’s job was to make sure that everything had a firm foundation underneath.
