“You sing it, I don’t want to learn the lyrics”: The song Dave Grohl never wanted to sing
Dave Grohl has always been one of the last people fans would think of as being a diva. Ever since leaving Nirvana and forming Foo Fighters, he is one of the few people who still manages to go above and beyond for his fans at every opportunity, even if it means someone carrying him back out onstage after he breaks his leg in the middle of the show. That being said, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t get testy every once in a while when he was dealing with a song that he didn’t enjoy.
Then again, there aren’t many Foo Fighters songs that don’t go through the Grohl Quality Inspection whenever they’re in the studio. He’s the one who started the band, and even if every member has a say in what the arrangements should be, Grohl is the one who makes the final call on whether a guitar part isn’t working or if what they’re playing is not capturing what he’s hearing in his head.
While Grohl eventually transformed himself into one of the greatest songwriters of the modern age, it was going to take a while for him to feel comfortable in the role of frontman. One of the biggest thrills about being a drummer in a band like Nirvana was the fact that Grohl could bang the shit out of his drums and then walk away completely anonymous compared to what Kurt Cobain was dealing with, so now that he was at the front, he only had a guitar to hide behind.
But Grohl was far from the only wild man onstage whenever they performed. With all due respect to what Chris Shiflett and Nate Mendel did in the 2000s, no one could take their eyes off the interplay between Grohl and Taylor Hawkins. Drummers are always joined at the hip, and until his untimely passing in 2022, Hawkins was as close to a blood brother that Grohl ever had on this Earth.
“I’d go into the control room, and I’d keep singing it over and over again and Dave’s like, ‘You sing it! You fucking asshole.”
Taylor Hawkins
Although the term ‘burnout’ doesn’t belong in Grohl’s vocabulary that often, he did admit to feeling completely spent when working on the band’s cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Have A Cigar’. Their penchant for rock and roll covers was always fairly strong, but compared to their take on a tune like Wings’ ‘Band on the Run’, hearing Hawkins take the lead vocal was the only way for them to make the song work.
According to Hawkins, the choice to get him behind the microphone came out of frustration when Grohl said he didn’t like singing the track, saying, “We did that for just a goof. It was funny. We started playing it first. We were going to cover it and we just started playing it first, and we just played it like they play it like a swamp rock version. I’d go into the control room, and I’d keep singing it over and over again and Dave’s like, ‘You sing it! You fucking asshole, I don’t want to learn the fucking lyrics.’”
Even if Grohl didn’t like singing the track, getting Hawkins behind it is actually appropriate, considering Pink Floyd’s original. David Gilmour and Roger Waters already handed vocal duties over to Roy Harper on Wish You Were Here, so hearing Hawkins’s throaty rasp coming in on this version is like the nasty version of paying tribute to their heroes.
If anything, the fact that the band made a goof sound this impressive is a feat in and of itself. The entire premise behind their later albums like In Your Honour was to release something epic, and even though the cover was relegated to becoming a B-side, it did at least show that they had ambitions beyond being a typical rock and roll outfit.
