The one Foo Fighters song Dave Grohl struggled to record: “I was ready to smash my guitar”
In the world of punk, rock and grunge, the need to be straight down the line perfect has rarely come into view. Because of that, and so many other reasons, Dave Grohl hasn’t historically been a note-perfect kind of musician.
The legendary Foo Fighters frontman has made some of the most beloved rock music of the last 30 years, and his powerful approach to both drums and songwriting can be exacting when the time calls for it. So to suggest he hasn’t made songs or records that are perfect with their imperfections is, of course, off the mark.
But this is also the guy who recorded the entire first Foo Fighters album in a week, who spent a large time making sure he sounded raggedy on those records and has genuinely championed emotion over technique. In truth, perfectionism rarely makes a great final project, and Grohl is a wonderful example of letting things happen.
For the band’s seventh studio album, Wasting Light, Grohl wanted a back-to-basics approach that mostly involved recording in his house. Specifically, most of the drum tracks were recorded in Grohl’s garage. The intimacy felt in the album’s creation also comes through in the lyrical content. For ‘I Should Have Known’, Grohl brought in former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, something that hit close to home during the song’s recording.
“One of the things about the expanded Nirvana family, it doesn’t matter how much time has passed when you see each other, you’re immediately connected by that, by the good and bad things,” Grohl told Q Magazine after the album’s release. “When I see Krist, I hug him to celebrate our lives, but I also hug him to console him. There’s a song called ‘I Should Have Known’ that I thought would sound great with his bass-playing and accordion-playing. It’s probably the darkest song on the album.”
“We had Krist Novoselic come in and play bass [on the song], and I’m not exactly sure what the song’s about, but to me, it seems there’s definitely some references about Kurt Cobain, and it’s one of the most primal, raw things the Foo Fighters have ever done, and I think it’s one of the best tracks on the record,” producer Butch Vig told MTV News. “It’s distorted and raw, and Dave, the take on the vocals is like the first take he did at the end of the song. He’s just blowing his lungs out. We played the record for some people yesterday, and the whole record is great, but that song, God, it’s quite an emotional roller-coaster ride when you hear it.”
Grohl put pressure on himself to make sure that the track came out the way he wanted it. That led to more time spent recording ‘I Should Have Known’ than any other song on the album. The intricate rhythm guitar part, in particular, frustrated Grohl during the sessions, as captured on video while documentary crews were capturing footage of the album’s recording for the film Foo Fighters: Back and Forth.
“There were moments of frustration when I was ready to smash my fucking guitar,” Grohl said in a deleted scene from the documentary. “The opening riff to ‘I Should Have Known’: I tried really hard to make it sound great. And I don’t usually want things to sound perfect. I don’t like it when things sound really perfect, but sometimes you want things to be just right.”
Grohl’s time with punk bands, grunge bands, or with Foo Fighters has made him understanding of the world of music. Very rarely does it require a completely straight line. More often than not, it is in the meandering that we find most value. But he wanted one song to be completely perfect, and it was perhaps this pursuit that he found most difficult of all.
Watch Grohl work through the recording of ‘I Should Have Known’ down below.
