Moving on: the one concert that gave birth to Foo Fighters
Some of the best bands tend to come together almost by magic. While The Beatles and U2 may have gotten together when they were young and kept growing until they were one of the biggest acts in the world, a lot of groups tend to come from strangers who hardly have anything in common other than the desire to play the best music they can to anyone within earshot. Life can take you on a few dark paths, though, and one doomed show led to Dave Grohl having the first idea for Foo Fighters.
Once Nirvana dissolved, though, Grohl seriously questioned whether he should throw down his drumsticks for the last time. The shock of losing someone like Kurt Cobain wouldn’t be easy to recover from, and Grohl thought it would be better to leave town and get away from everything that reminded him of his old friend.
But grief isn’t something you can run away from… it’s something that you learn to live with, and Grohl figured that music might be the thing that helps him heal. Despite getting a call from Tom Petty to be his permanent drummer after the album Wildflowers, Grohl figured he would be better suited as the frontman of a new band.
He may have had a friend in ex-Nirvana and Germs guitarist Pat Smear, but it wasn’t until he saw Nate Mendel and William Goldsmith playing in the group Sunny Day Real Estate. While the band’s emo-adjacent sound wasn’t really all that similar to what Nirvana had been doing, Grohl saw potential…at the last possible second.
When talking about the band’s origins in the documentary Back and Forth, Grohl remembered that he thought Mendel and Goldsmith could work in his new outfit, saying, “Someone told me that Sunny Day Real Estate was going to be playing a show and that it was going to be their last show because they were breaking up. And I kept looking at the stage and thinking, ‘That’s a really great rhythm section.’”
For a rockstar of Grohl’s level, Mendel remembered the entire audition process being incredibly low-key, recalling, “I remember we were in my kitchen, and Dave just said, ‘You guys want to be in a band?’ and I was like, ‘Hell yeah.’” Grohl now had a lineup behind him…but that didn’t mean he had everything in place on the road.
When playing their first gigs, Mendel remembered the band getting stormed by the press wondering about the Nirvana connection, saying, “For me, it was always kind of a touchy subject. At this point, Kurt had only been dead for a year, and I didn’t want to talk about it. There were a lot of questions about Nirvana. You can imagine what they were. You know, ‘Is this song about Kurt?’. Take any song off the record: ‘Is that song about Kurt Cobain?’”.
I wouldn’t want to talk about my dead friend, either, but no amount of Nirvana questions would deter Grohl from carrying on. He was determined to move out of the shadow of grunge, and while Goldsmith wouldn’t stick around long enough to see their sophomore release, The Colour and the Shape, Grohl was bound to turn the band into an unstoppable force of nature. Funny how one of the greatest bands still going today was birthed from the fallout of two equally iconic acts.
