How one party led to Them Crooked Vultures forming: “Oh God! What’s going to happen”
All good parties begin with that sinking feeling in your stomach. The social dread. The idea that staying on your couch with a herbal tea and a spliff would be much more healing for the soul. Plus, there’s no way to really know whether a party will be a hit. There are too many variables: Hold your breath and enter headfirst is the best way to approach any unknown social gathering of the hedonistic kind.
The most agency one might have over the life of a party is in the act of organising it. No one knew this better than Dave Grohl. For his extravagant 40th birthday bash, he set out to make it a success, sure. Street cred, right? But he also had his mind on something else: forming a supergroup. Bob Dylan had done it. Why couldn’t he?
As American rock supergroups go, Them Crooked Vultures are up there. The trio consists of Foo Fighters’ Grohl, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones. A formidable force if there were any. But the group wasn’t exactly pulled together by the magnetic forces of their virtuoso abilities: it was Dave Grohl’s idea, and the magic of a party, that led to one of the best collaborative projects in recent history.
Grohl’s birthday bash was to take place at a kitsch, 1,000-seat palace, adorned with a red-tile roof and palm trees. Tucked just off the Santa Ana freeway in Hollywood, the place was perfect for a meeting of minds, souls and a stage fit for medieval jousting. Sure enough, entering the mad little restaurant for the first time in 2009, on the night of Grohl’s celebrations, Jones was taken aback.
He recounted, “That place is surreal. By the time I got handed the paper crown and the dragon soup I was like: ‘Oh God! What’s going to happen here?’ I just got stuck in there next to Josh, who I hadn’t met before.”
Sneaky planning on Grohl’s part. Luckily, Jones and Hommes hit it off. “Well, as much as we could with knights and jousting going on in front of you,” conceded Jones. The star continued, “He was a bit embarrassed, I think. But then we all went into the studio the next day, had a bash around and thought, hmm, this could be really fun.”
They were all drawn into the new spirit of their supergroup. “As Josh has said before, you can’t actually see how it couldn’t work. You’d be doing something wrong if you couldn’t get some good music out of this bunch of people.”
Not many have used a milestone birthday party to tee up a group of some of the biggest names in alternative music that would go on to release a self-titled album that very same year. But then again, not many people are like Dave Grohl. I’d best get cooking up a suitable scheme for my next birthday.
