The one record that changed how Dave Grohl played drums: “Starting from scratch”
Every artist is going to want to keep things fresh whenever they get into the studio. It’s no use putting together the same record again, and unless you’ve mathematically mapped out what perfection sounds like in the case of bands like AC/DC and Motörhead, there’s no chance that people are going to take your band seriously if all they hear is what’s been done before. Dave Grohl always thrived in switching up his style, but the most profound musical experiences tend to change how he thinks about music.
Granted, Grohl never had to worry about song construction when working in Nirvana. His goal there was always arranging these perfect melodies that Kurt Cobain was dreaming up, and if that meant throwing in minimal drum fills, that was all he could have done to make the track work. When working with Foo Fighters, though, Grohl was the epitome of a fish out of water at the front of the stage.
After all, he had only written one major Nirvana song, and being the leader of a group was completely alien to the guy who was used to playing like a madman and shutting the hell up while Cobain did most of the talking. Ever since their inception, though, Grohl has been able to pick up tricks on songwriting from everyone he worked with, whether that’s the jazz chords of Norah Jones or the expertise of working with someone like Paul McCartney during the Sound City documentary.
But with all that information in his brain, no one really thought that his drumming would suffer by any stretch. He was always going to be looked at as the 1990s answer to John Bonham, but when he started working with Josh Homme in Queens of the Stone Age, he got a major wake-up call when working with the frontman and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones in Them Crooked Vultures.
“The type of music we were making was different from anything else I had done before.”
dave grohl
Grohl may have known Zeppelin records like the back of his hand for years, but operating with that same aggression with Homme’s strange approach to riffs made for some of his most interesting fills. Oftentimes, songs wouldn’t have the traditional drumbeat that Grohl would typically incorporate, and considering how much he loved bands like Rush, this was about the closest thing to prog that he would ever get in the 2010s, especially when trying to figure out the drum part to ‘Reptiles’.
It was no walk in the park, but Grohl realised that this kind of challenge helped him re-evaluate what his role was behind the kit, saying, “The Vultures record was really nice because the type of music we were making was different from anything else I had done before. The closest thing was probably the QOTSA record. I hadn’t played drums on an album in a long time, so I was totally starting from scratch.”
Being a fish out of the water wasn’t a position Grohl had been in for a long time, but once he started working with those new styles, chances are it freed him to look for different sounds himself. Every previous Foo Fighters release sounded fantastic, but having the idea to reach outside his comfort zone on Sonic Highways may have been his way of pushing himself as he did with the supergroup.
Not every Foo Fighters album now has to have different time signatures or complex melodies to show that Grohl has grown, though. He was already a seasoned professional by the time he started working with Them Crooked Vultures, and even if not every song was radio-friendly, each marked a new adventure that taught Grohl a new lesson about how to approach his role as a timekeeper.
