The one musician Dave Grohl knew could play anything: “The best band ever”
There aren’t many hurdles left in rock and roll that Dave Grohl has yet to weather his way through.
He has gone through every single bit of band drama that anyone could possibly have in Foo Fighters, and even if he managed to recover from everything nicely, each one also served as a new learning opportunity for what he could do when he made a new record. But even by the standards of rock and roll, there are certain artists who seem to wipe the floor with virtually anything that Grohl has ever made.
But the frontman wasn’t about to say that he was one of the greatest rock and roll stars on the planet. The man can clearly play the drums with the same intensity as John Bonham, but even by the standards of every other rock and roll star, Grohl was just a kid who was happy to play his music for people night after night. That kind of high is easy to chase after, but Grohl was much more interested in seeing all of the famous people that he could collaborate with as well.
‘Famous’ might mean a lot of different things for Grohl, but that doesn’t mean that he’s taken any of his jams for granted. Playing with Paul McCartney would have had to be high on his priority list when jamming with him, but chances are that he gets the same kind of rush whenever he gets the chance to jam with someone like Bob Mould, whenever he finds time on tour. But right as Foo Fighters were peaking, nothing could have prepared him for playing with John Paul Jones.
Jones might look like the one person onstage not losing his mind when looking at old Led Zeppelin footage, but when you look at their records, he’s more dangerous than Jimmy Page. He was known for decorating the sound of every song he played on, and even when he wasn’t contributing riffs to tunes like ‘Black Dog’, he could still throw together the perfect part for anything that he worked on, whether it was getting behind the keyboard or playing the recorder part on ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
So when someone of that calibre wanted to work with Grohl on the Them Crooked Vultures project, he was only too happy to oblige, saying, “I remember thinking this is the best band I’ve ever been in. John is an incredibly gifted musician. Everything he picks up, he plays with feel and passion.”
“He’s a classically trained musician, but he rips on anything. He’ll pick up a mandolin and blow your head off. And everyone knows what he can do with a bass guitar.”
Dave Grohl on John Paul Jones
It might not look like Jones is the most badass musician that has ever picked up a guitar, but a lot about being a professional musician is knowing when to come out of the spotlight. Jonesy never needed to grandstand when he had Jimmy Page standing right beside him, and even when he took a back seat to whatever band he was working with, a song like ‘Nightswimming’ by REM sounds absolutely beautiful with his arrangements behind it.
But no one was really coming to Them Crooked Vultures for subtlety, either. This was a band that sounded like it was being blasted out of some shitty station wagon in 1976, for every kid who was waiting for Zeppelin to perform, and had they formed back in the day, they could have easily given Page a run for his money when listening to the more savage riffs on ‘Mind Eraser No Chaser’.
Grohl is one to throw out the genius label more than a few times, but Jones is one of the few who manages to earn every single bit of that accolade. If anything, he’s only become better over time, and there are hardly any bass players who could claim to cover as much of the low end as he has over the years.
