The influential guitarist Dave Grohl called a “genius possessed”
Although Dave Grohl cut his teeth with the hardcore band Scream and then burst onto the scene with Nirvana, a group that held the punk ethos at the very heart of its operation, the musical polyglot always had a love of classic rock. This is, of course, quite a strange conflict.
It’s easy to argue that this is only natural, considering that during his childhood, guitar music dominated the scene, from the seminal sounds of the British invasion to the contemporary acts of the 1970s like Kiss, capturing the imaginations of children. Still, it’s ironic that someone so closely tied to punk would be so reverential to this era. Nonetheless, these bands were formative for Dave Grohl, helping him develop as a musician and paving the way for his later immersion in the punk subculture.
Yet, paradoxically, classic rock and its most prominent figures were those that punk explicitly had in its crosshairs when it emerged in the late 1970s. Furthermore, while Nirvana were known to cover Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’ in their early chapter, and frontman Kurt Cobain openly admitted to loving the British band and the likes of Aerosmith in his younger years, he recalled realising the error of his ways due to the perceived philosophical flaws, including “sexism”. He left this world for punk and never looked back.
Therefore, despite Nirvana’s immense success—which was similar to that of the classic rock acts—Grohl wasn’t necessarily in an environment where such groups would have been celebrated. However, he has consistently maintained his love of the era’s music over the years, with one band frequently praised for their impact on him and the world in general: Led Zeppelin.
Despite what the late Cobain might have said about such reverence, the British band’s drummer, John Bonham, was the clear progenitor of Grohl’s elemental style. Without him, it is likely that Nirvana’s best-loved and most vital tracks wouldn’t have been as resonant; the difference between the Chad Channing version of ‘In Bloom’ and Grohl’s is a significant one. His bass drum groove made the song, and it was straight out of Bonham’s playbook.
While Grohl’s drumming is where the connection can be found most explicitly, he also loves them because of their interminable dedication to pushing themselves artistically, a tact he has also utilised with many notable and differing projects to his name. When speaking to Rolling Stone, he once said: “Led Zeppelin were more than just a band — they were the perfect combination of the most intense elements: passion and mystery and expertise.”
He added: “They weren’t content being in one place, and they were always trying something new.”
Casting off the commonly held punk belief that Led Zeppelin was a rather one-dimensional classic rock act, Grohl maintained that in their early years, the quartet were never critically acclaimed because they were “too experimental” and resided on the fringes.
It is easy to dispute this, given that during the late 1960s, they toppled The Beatles as the most commercially successful act on earth with their pulsating form of rock. However, Grohl did make a compelling argument in his account of guitarist and band leader Jimmy Page. Famously, his influence can be heard clearly in the grunge sound outside the punk-leaning world of Nirvana. Their Seattle counterparts, such as Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, were always dubbed spiritual successors to his atmospheric dark blues through their guitars. This discrepancy was one reason Cobain was so vocally opposed to these acts, despite the media dubbing them brothers in arms due to emerging in Seattle.
To Grohl, Page wasn’t only the brains behind their innovation but also typified their substance and significance with his playing. When delivering his sonic sermons in the studio and live, Grohl described the guitar hero as “a genius possessed”. He even thinks his expansive sound was more outlandish than that of Jimi Hendrix.
Page said: “Zeppelin were the freakiest. I consider Jimmy Page freakier than Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix was a genius on fire, whereas Page was a genius possessed. Zeppelin concerts and albums were like exorcisms for them”.
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