“I’m not physically capable”: The one band Dave Grohl thought he could never join
It’s usually any musician’s dream to be onstage with their favourite band. No matter how many times they claim to want to carve out their own place in rock and roll music, no musician would shake a stick at the idea of one of their idols asking them to come onstage with them to play a handful of tunes. Although Dave Grohl has had the opportunity to play with more artists than most people can count, he thought the idea of him filling in for Neil Peart for an entire show would absolutely destroy him.
This is strange, considering how much power Grohl has without anyone else behind the kit. Certain moments are definitely more indebted to simple drumming in Nirvana songs, but even when he was recording The Colour and the Shape with Foo Fighters, hearing him play those intricate fills in the middle of ‘Everlong’ tells you everything you need to know about who was behind the kit. The age of classic rock was over, but there was already a new John Bonham.
But while Bonzo has his place in rock history, Peart was the equivalent of Bonham, and Keith Moon manifested himself as one person. Throughout Rush’s tenure, Peart played as if he was trying to break down every piece of his kit by the end of the song, usually adding on extensions to everything when the power trio got to making albums like A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres.
Whereas Moon and Bonzo played on instinct, though, Peart was almost mathematically precise in everything he did. There was no piece of the kit that didn’t get touched at least once during a gig, and despite their songs ballooning into 12-minute exercises, each of his drum fills became rhythmic hooks just as much as any of Alex Lifeson’s guitar fills.
That’s before you even get into the group’s keyboard phase, where Peart gave working machinery a run for its money on projects like Signals and Power Windows. Even if he were still around today, chances are that any drum machine or percussion AI software couldn’t keep up with what he was doing when tearing through ‘2112’ or ‘La Villa Strangiato’.
And as much as Grohl practised his chops in his bedroom to Rush records, he knew his limits well enough to know that he couldn’t fill Peart’s shoes. When asked about if Geddy Lee or Lifeson would ask him to join them, Grohl said he would give a firm no, telling Rolling Stone, “I would say, ‘I’m not physically or musically capable, but thanks for the offer.’ Neil Peart, that’s a whole other animal, another species of drummer. I know the arrangements, but I’m like Meg White to Neil Peart.”
Then again, it might just be that Grohl sees the instrument in a much different way. Regardless of whether he’s behind the kit or working on writing the next anthem, Grohl always came at music from a place of fun, so it’s understandable why he wouldn’t want his job to be an endurance test every night.
Still, the fact that someone would entertain that conversation with Grohl is a testament to how well-rounded a musician he is. He could still pound out a drumbeat just as well as he did in his Nirvana days, but no percussionist is going to have the gall to say they can compete with God.
