The guitarist Dave Grohl thought always belonged in Foo Fighters: “Should be in the band”
Dave Grohl didn’t ever want to bother with having a bunch of hired guns in Foo Fighters.
No matter how much he wrote for the band and how he was the all-star frontman, it still needed to feel like a band of brothers every time he played, and you can feel that through every single iteration of the group. And even if not everyone stuck around for that long, Grohl knew that there were going to be a few friends that he could never manage to replace, no matter how long they spent away from the band.
Because when looking through every single lineup, Grohl wanted the chance for every one of them to work. Some of them didn’t live up to the standards that he wanted, and it did get more than a little bit uncomfortable having to play drums in the place of William Goldsmith or ask Franz Stahl to leave the band. As long as he had Nate Mendel by his side, though, that was all that he could hope for.
Mendel had put in the most hours out of anyone else in the band, and while Taylor Hawkins was one of the biggest performers in the band during his lifetime, it was all about the collective sound that they made together. Which probably explains why the band eventually ballooned into this massive project when they had people like Rami Jaffee join the group to help fill out the sound a little bit more.
But one of the things that the Foos should be proud of is being able to have a massive three-guitar assault without sounding too cluttered… Most other bands would have sounded like they were doing too much every single time they performed, but with Grohl being the rock-solid rhythm player, Pat Smear and Chris Shiflett could show off their different strengths every single time they worked on one of their songs.
Granted, that kind of partnership only happened over time. Smear had had enough by the time that they finished their second record, and while his decision to leave the band eventually landed Shiflett in the guitarist slot, it was a bit uncomfortable when the Germs guitarist came back. As Shiflett remembered, Smear seemed to be vying for his position at every turn, saying, “There were a few times when Pat almost came back. As far as I could tell, Pat was just some guy that wanted my job.”
And while Smear did everything that he could to make everything sound good when he came back to the band, Grohl wasn’t going to turn down one of his musical heroes if he wanted back in the group, saying, “Pat is a Foo Fighter. Whether he’s in the band or not, he and I have been through a lot together. Pat should be in the band.” As it turned out, there was more than enough room for everyone in the band as well.
When you listen to both of their playing styles, Shiflett and Smear actually complement each other perfectly. Wasting Light was the first time where they all meshed together for the first time, and whereas Shiftlett could play the clean arpeggios on their albums absolutely perfectly, Smear was normally the person that you came to when you wanted a guitar to sound like one big wall of noise whenever a song needed to kick into high gear.
So while any other band would have had way too much drama trying to keep everyone happy, Grohl made the whole thing look like one big musical family. Smear didn’t have to be in Foo Fighters if he didn’t want to, but when you listen to his guitar tone on all of their records, he had the DNA of the group laced throughout every single note he played whether or not anyone wanted him in the group.
