“These guys suck”: The indie sensations Taylor Hawkins and Dave Grohl took issue with
Rising out of the dismal mire that Kurt Cobain’s suicide stoked for those who knew him, Foo Fighters remain one of music’s greatest success stories. While such a lamentable end to a close friend in full view of the public eye would be enough for most artists to call it quits and withdraw to a cabin in the woods for the rest of their lives, all Dave Grohl knew was music. Although it might have taken him a while to realise it, he still had unfinished business after Nirvana.
After that fateful experience with the hitchhiker in Ireland, a time when he was out on the heath, aimlessly wandering, brooding over what to do next, Grohl knew he could not outrun Nirvana and their cultural legacy, nor the spectre of Cobain. He could, however, use music as a means of moving forward and attempt to at least sonically cauterise the lasting wounds that the death of the grunge icon tore open.
His first conduit for healing was the debut Foo Fighters album. After the demo tape made waves when passed around the industry, Grohl found himself signed and assembling a band of musicians talented enough to bring to life his crunching and emphatic alt-rock sound in the live setting. On its follow-up, 1997’s The Colour and The Shape – a record comprised of some of their best-loved efforts – he refined his craft, which saw the group become one of the most popular bands around. They have since maintained this position with a series of successful albums.
Despite Foo Fighters being the key to Grohl’s success as a songwriter and frontman, moving him ever further away from those dark days at the end of Nirvana, he has never been able to escape the ghosts of the past fully. While that became readily apparent during that consequential meeting with the hitchhiker in Ireland, he’s also continued to behold his old band’s influence across music, in the most life-affirming ways and others he’d rather forget.
That is the nature of being in such a culturally significant band. It both changes music for the better and also spawns an array of acolytes who water down the original sound, hollowing it out with their efforts to replicate their heroes like for like.
Grohl’s mixed views on Nirvana’s extensive influence became clear when he and late Foo Fighters drumming powerhouse Taylor Hawkins rounded up the singles of 2002 for Spin. Rating tracks by everyone from Nelly to The Hives, as well as Avril Lavigne and System of a Down, the pair were brutally honest about the cuts that defined that iconic year for music. It’s safe to say that the pair weren’t into some of the year’s newcomers at all, with one band attracting much of their ire, The Vines.
The Vines were one of the hottest guitar bands around in 2002. Regardless of what Grohl and Hawkins had to say, their debut from that year, Highly Evolved, is a classic featuring the likes of ‘Get Free’, ‘Outtathaway!’ and ‘Homesick’. The group had much more in common with Nirvana and alternative rock than with CBGB-loving groups such as The Strokes, with their angsty sound appealing to fans of heavier indie.
Discussing ‘Get Free’, Hawkins was the most cutting. He said: “I think these guys suck. This song is real fuckin’ boring.” Grohl then picked up and said Lavinge’s hit ‘Sk8er Boi’ was “more challenging”, a debatable point that Hawkins nevertheless agreed with, mentioning that the Australian outfit’s angry sound was hollow, which you could buy “at the local Kmart”.
Given the proliferation of bands so indebted to Nirvana in the early noughties, Grohl commented on whether their heavily replicated sound bugs him. In his typically democratic style, he noted that it didn’t bother him “that much”, yet it was clearly enough to make him consider what might have been if they had not ended so cataclysmically and been so heavily mythologised.
