One Foo Fighters album cost them two band members: “Who’s in the band right now?”
If Dave Grohl really wanted to, Foo Fighters could have easily been a decent name for his solo outfit. Since he had played every instrument on the band’s debut record, it just felt natural for Grohl to step out of the shadow of Nirvana and into a songwriter in his own right. Then again, he had always wanted some sort of band behind him.
When Dave Grohl was forced to acknowledge the end of Nirvana, following the tragic suicide of Kurt Cobain, he was already writing his own songs. A few short months later, he was beginning to find a home for them in a new project dubbed Foo Fighters. Following the band’s debut record in 1995, the group have only found more and more praise, outstripping Grohl’s efforts with his previous grunge outfit. Such is the band’s meteoric rise, that they have been in the limelight for nearly two decades.
When talking about working on the first album, Grohl wanted to keep the mentality of the band throughout the recording, saying in Back and Forth, “I figured that I wouldn’t put my name on it. People will just think it’s a band, and they won’t know that it’s the guy from Nirvana.” Although Grohl had found another guitarist in former Nirvana man Pat Smear, he discovered the rest of the band on the Seattle underground scene.
After making the album, Grohl went to see the emo act Sunny Day Real Estate, recalling, “Someone told me that Sunny Day Real Estate was going to be playing a show, and it was going to be their last show because they were breaking up. And I went, and I remember thinking, ‘That’s a great rhythm section.'”
After the show, Grohl talked to Nate Mendel and William Goldsmith and got both of them in the early version of Foo Fighters. While everything seemed perfect, things came to a screeching halt when working on the album The Colour and the Shape.
With both Grohl and producer Gil Norton not being satisfied with the drum tracks, Grohl went and redid all of the songs behind Goldsmith’s back, with Smear recalling, “I remember getting calls saying, ‘We need you to play guitar’, and it would be like ‘I already played this song’, and it just kept happening like that, and I was thinking ‘what the fuck is going on here’. I remember asking someone, ‘Does William know?'”.
Smear could at least sympathise with Goldsmith’s problem, explaining, “You’re sitting behind the drums playing for one of the greatest drummers in the world as they wait for you to be as good as them. That’s just fucked-up pressure. And you must remember that William was a kid then.”
By the time the album was finished, Goldsmith had quit after being prohibited from contributing. Then again, Grohl had an ace in the hole, getting Taylor Hawkins from Alanis Morrissette’s band while also gaining a partner in crime on the touring circuit. Right before they left, though, Grohl got another surprise from Smear before they left.
Being tired of the rock and roll lifestyle, Smear quit right before the tour started, not wanting to commit to another run of shows of playing the same songs repeatedly. While the band eventually convinced him to commit to a few months, Smear’s replacement Franz Stahl had his issues, not gelling with the rest of the band and needing to be sacked before the next album, There Is Nothing Left to Lose.
Although Grohl always knew how to plough forward, he did admit that it would get heated at the time, explaining, “Most bands have to go through this stuff before anyone’s even heard of them. We, unfortunately, had to go through all of those birthing pains in public. I would end up doing interviews, and the guy would be like, ‘Fuck it, who’s in the band right now? Has anybody else left in the past few months?”.
Foo Fighters might be able to survive anything, but their growing pains made for one of the most tumultuous lineup changes of the 1990s.
