The “powerful” 1983 album Dave Grohl knew was perfect
Perfect has always been a fairly subjective word when it comes to Dave Grohl.
He loved the idea of making music with his friends and trying to create that one magical song on record, but sometimes the greatest tunes of all time aren’t the ones where everything sounds aligned down to the letter. The point was whether or not you could hear the personalities of every player on the record, and Grohl felt that there are more than a few bands who could make their presence known in only a few notes.
There are countless bands that he played with in the hardcore scene that he could pick out without thinking about it, but Grohl’s drumming teachers always came back to the way that his heroes played. He could tell what a John Bonham groove was going to sound like within a nanosecond, and he was going to do the legwork to make sure that he had that signature footprint every time he played with Nirvana.
But a lot of the power behind Nirvana’s music was about more than just playing a bunch of catchy tunes. Kurt Cobain wrote the kind of songs that could have been played in a myriad of different ways, and if they had any other drummer behind the kit, it could have sounded closer to anything from alternative rock to the kind of underground tunes you would find on an early REM record.
If one thing was for sure, though, Cobain didn’t want it to sound like the average metal record. The biggest bands of the day were people like Guns N’ Roses and Warrant, and that kind of alpha male way of making music didn’t really appeal to him. But Grohl wasn’t about to forget all of his metal chops as soon as he counted off the opening to ‘Stay Away’ or blasted through ‘Territorial Pissings’.
Some of his biggest heroes came from the metal world, and when he formed Foo Fighters, Grohl had no problem launching Probot with a far heavier sheen to it. He was ready to give fans the kind of music that he had grown up on, and while hair metal was out of the question, Grohl did have a strong love for what Ronnie James Dio was doing in the 1980s. His time in Black Sabbath brought a new sound to their arsenal, but Grohl felt that nothing got better than a record like Holy Diver.
Dio was already a legend amongst singers, and this one album was the moment where Grohl felt that metal had peaked, saying, “Well, ‘Holy Diver’ is one of the best fucking albums of all time… When I listen to records, I don’t just listen to the vocals, I don’t just listen to the drums, I listen to it as a whole. An album like that, that’s kind of the perfect record.”
Adding, “The simplicity of something like that – that’s one of the things I’ve always loved about Dio’s music: it’s not overly complicated or orchestrated, it’s a sum of a few very simple parts. And it’s powerful, and I fucking grew up with that shit.”
If I’m being completely honest, some of the tunes can come off as a bit cheesy these days, but it’s the best kind of cheese. There are tunes that hold up to this day like ‘Rainbow in the Dark’ and ‘Stand Up and Shout’, but when listening to the more medieval sounds of the title track, it’s all of the cliched metal looks that made the genre so cool back in the day. As opposed to hair metal cheese, this is the kind of prime gouda that would be considered a rare delicacy.
And since Grohl wasn’t the kind of person to be ashamed of his taste, Dio was just scratching the surface of the kind of music that he liked. He could say that Dio, Rush, and ABBA were all some of the best bands of all time, and when you listen to him talk about their influence, it’s not like he’s necessarily wrong.
