The one musician Dave Grohl said would never forgive him: “I know it”
In the greater context of rock and roll, Dave Grohl is everyone’s best friend. While he’s far from a perfect person and has seen his fair share of controversies over the years, there’s always been a certain charm that makes everyone love having him around whenever the festival circuit starts every year. Whether he’s looked at as the rock and roll man of the people or the everyone’s crazy rock and roll uncle, Grohl has had more than a few times where people wanted to chew him out.
Need I remind everyone of the prolonged legal battle that was happening between him and Courtney Love ever since Nirvana ended? While Love didn’t deserve to be treated like the Yoko Ono of the grunge icons or be the subject of theories created by nutjobs claiming that she had her husband killed, hearing about her trying to take control of every piece of Nirvana’s legacy was bound to be harsh for Grohl to watch from the sidelines.
But time heals all wounds, and even Grohl found a way to hug it out with Love once Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When someone loses one of their closest friends, there are bound to be a few hiccups in picking up the pieces, but Grohl made the whole thing look easy once he moved on with Foo Fighters. He was a new man who realised music was going to help him through the dark times, but that didn’t mean everything sounded right, either.
During the making of The Colour and the Shape, Grohl was already having trouble hearing the sounds in his head when William Goldsmith got behind the kit. Goldsmith was far from a bad drummer, but Grohl’s choice to redo every single track on the record behind Goldsmith’s back was far from the classiest move he could have made.
“It’s a tough thing to talk about, because I know that William will never forgive me for playing drums on that record. I know it.”
Dave Grohl
There might have been many people who have had a problem with Grohl’s attitude or technique, but Grohl felt guilty knowing that Goldsmith would never be able to reconcile with him, saying, “I really wanted him to stay in the band, but I was going to play drums on the record. It’s a tough thing to talk about, because I know that William will never forgive me for playing drums on that record. I know it, and I wish things had been different, but that was what we needed to do to make the album happen.”
It’s hard to think that nothing that Goldsmith did was salvageable for the record, but it was also a perfect storm of things happening all at once. Grohl was already expecting perfection right out of the gate, and since the band had Gil Norton as producer, Goldsmith wasn’t ready for the whip to be cracked that hard on his first commercial record, which didn’t help when Norton called him a member of the “rhythmless section”.
Then again, asking someone to drum the way Grohl did on the song ‘Everlong’ on a record isn’t even close to fair. That’s the kind of song that involves an athlete’s level of strength to pull off, and even if it comes naturally to Grohl and was nothing for Taylor Hawkins once he joined, Goldsmith could have definitely been given some more time to hone things down instead of being left by the wayside.
There’s no doubt that both Grohl and Hawkins were better drummers for Foo Fighters, but Goldsmith’s experience in the band was one of the biggest stabs in the back that Grohl ever made. The band were still figuring out what they were supposed to be, but things were always going to get worse before they got better when breaking everyone in.
