Pat Smear on his “oddest” session with Foo Fighters
It’s a built-in part of the Foo Fighters experience to record in odd ways. Dave Grohl has professed his desire to make each album from the band different, frequently flipping recording studios and locations from place to place in order to keep things fresh. While Grohl usually leads the charge in these instances, the rest of the band tends to follow along where Grohl takes them.
For 2014’s Sonic Highways, Grohl took the band on a cross-country trip to some of the biggest musical cities in the United States. Different songs were recorded in New York, New Orleans, Austin, and Grohl’s home city of Washington D.C. For guitarist Pat Smear, the New Orleans session was one of the strangest to handle.
“The Preservation Hall, which is this hundreds-of-years-old building, just this very small room that has been many different things over the years, and I can’t even describe it. It’s just so crazy,” Smear told Rolling Stone Australia in 2014. “They don’t even normally let electric instruments in there, there’s just a traditional jazz band playing traditional New Orleans jazz. And it’s like going into someone’s living room. It was more exciting than uncomfortable.”
Still, that wasn’t the weirdest recording experience that Smear ever had with the Foo Fighters. Following the recording of 1997’s The Colour and the Shape, Smear departed the band citing burnout. He resumed performing with the band as a touring member in 2005 but wasn’t officially reinstated until 2011’s Wasting Light. For 2007’s Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace, Smear only appeared on a single song, ‘Let It Die’.
“The oddest recording experience I had with Foo Fighters was on the Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace record [2007] where I just played on a couple of songs – I wasn’t part of the song, it was just me going in and playing on a song that was already written,” Smear said. “That’s a little odd. We love to hang out and practice together and work on songs, it’s not difficult at all for us.”
During tours around that time, Smear was a part of the band’s extended band, which included keyboardist Rami Jaffee and percussionist Drew Hester. He would perform on a short selection of songs, but otherwise wasn’t considered a full member of the band. Smear’s official status was changed in 2011, with Jaffee also becoming a full-time member in 2017 after more than a decade of recording and touring with the band.
Check out ‘Let It Die’ down below.
