The riff that Dave Grohl says gave birth to metal: “The swamp from whence metal crawled”
He might be a globally successful rock and roll frontman, appearing on stages across the world and recording hugely influential albums with the Foo Fighters, but Dave Grohl is still a humble music obsessive at heart.
Over the years, the songwriter has taken every opportunity that presents itself to espouse the joys of his musical influences, a spectrum that incorporates everything from the new wave mastery of The B-52’s to the classic rock stylings of Rush. Unsurprisingly, given his career both with Foo Fighters and the grunge icons Nirvana, Grohl holds a particularly special place in his heart for the abrasive worlds of punk and heavy metal.
On the surface, punk and metal are very disparate genres. Indeed, punks and metalheads would tell you as much. Metal tends to be a lot longer, with much more of a focus on musical proficiency, complex riffs and melodic structures, in addition to an overarching theme of darkness. In contrast, punk places more importance on lyrical content and DIY music-making techniques than musical proficiency and complex guitar solos. Nevertheless, there are many sonic similarities between the two genres, as Dave Grohl would gladly tell you.
Grohl has his roots firmly in the punk camp, having risen to prominence within the grunge scene, which was the natural successor to the punk rock revolution of the 1970s. Nevertheless, he has often flirted with the metal genre through his work as the frontman of Foo Fighters and clearly has a natural affinity with the dark and brooding genre. At a young age, Grohl first discovered the abrasive sounds of metal, and it certainly helped him along his path to musical greatness.
Metal, as a genre, is as broad and varied as rock music itself. The early days of hard rock and proto-metal are pretty far removed from American nu-metal or Scandinavian death metal, for instance. Nevertheless, Grohl’s taste for metal encapsulates a lot of those seemingly disparate styles, though his tastes certainly lean towards the earlier sound of metal. For example, Grohl is a disciple of the hard rock stylings of Led Zeppelin, who he regularly lists as one of his all-time favourite groups. Zeppelin was partly responsible for popularising the hard rock style that would lay the foundations for metal alongside the likes of Black Sabbath.
The history of metal music cannot ignore the pioneering influence of Birmingham outfit Black Sabbath. The Ozzy Osbourne-fronted group are often hailed as the progenitors of heavy metal, and rightly so. It should come as no surprise, then, that they are a particular favourite of Dave Grohl. During a 2004 interview with Q Magazine, the songwriter compiled a list of his favourite metal tunes, which expectedly featured some Sabbath.
Specifically, Grohl picked out the 1975 track ‘Symptom of the Universe’ as a stand-out, arguing that it contains “One of the first fast heavy metal riffs,” adding, “Everyone would know that riff if you played it on any set list anywhere in the world. I don’t put Sabbath on much these days, but when you hear this, you realise that this is the swamp from whence much metal crawled”.
What Grohl is really describing is not just the birth of a genre, but the moment a vocabulary becomes available. ‘Symptom of the Universe’ does not simply hit hard, it moves with intent, like it is trying to outrun its own era. That is why his “swamp” image lands. You can trace whole family trees from that riff, the speed, the blunt force, the sense that heaviness could be a physical thing, and yet it never loses the looseness that made Sabbath feel human rather than mechanical.
And Grohl’s affection makes sense because he has always been drawn to that exact balance. Whether he is behind the kit or writing on guitar, his best work lives in the tension between discipline and abandon, between a song that is tightly built and a performance that still sounds like it could tip over. Sabbath showed that you could be primal without being simple, and Grohl has spent his whole career proving the inverse too, that you can be simple without being small.
Like much of Sabbath’s earlier material, ‘Symptom of the Universe’ has held up pretty well to the passing of time. The song still forms an obvious avenue of inspiration for countless guitarists and metal groups across the world. You can certainly hear the influence of its unforgettable riff within Grohl’s guitar compositions on various Foo Fighters tracks.
