The Slash song Dave Grohl refused to sing on: “He was adamant”
Dave Grohl seems like the kind of person who wants to work with any musician he sees. Even though he can be critical of what Foo Fighters are supposed to sound like, chances are if he likes another group, it won’t take him long to find himself either onstage or in the studio with them. While Slash was more than happy to get Grohl behind the drum kit for one of his songs, he was met with a flat no when he asked if the frontman would sing on the track ‘Watch This’.
Then again, anyone in the know probably knew how much baggage came along with former members of Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses working together for a track. The main problem might have been between Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain half the time, but Grohl’s mocking of the frontman at the end of the MTV Awards in the early 1990s was bound to rub members of the hard rock legends the wrong way.
But by the time Slash started work on his solo album, there were hardly any harsh feelings anymore. His time in Guns N’ Roses had been a distant memory, and now that Velvet Revolver had started falling apart, he wanted to make all his favourite musicians come to him instead of the other way around.
Outside of artists like Lemmy and Adam Levine working on a couple of tracks, Slash asked Grohl to come down to play drums on ‘Watch This’ with Duff McKagan coming in to play bass on the track. Just when Slash was writing to put the icing on the cake, Grohl said that he could never put any vocals on the tune.
Slash had tried to push him but ultimately had to cave to Grohl not singing, saying, “I didn’t want it to be epic; I wanted it to be three minutes long, and it came together very quickly with a very spontaneous, live kind of vibe. Actually, I tried to get Dave to sing it, but he wouldn’t sing it, so I just said f–k it, we’ll put guitars on it. He was adamant about not singing. He was like, I just wanna play drums, and he’s a f—ing phenomenal drummer.”
Granted, the song does work pretty well as an instrumental in the context of the rest of the album. Since every single track has a different singer to get used to before switching things up again, just having a track that’s nothing more than a loose jam between rockstars is actually a nice way to cleanse the palette before jumping into the more adventurous songs on the back end like ‘Starlight’ featuring Myles Kennedy.
Also, Grohl’s refusal might just come down to the fact that he thinks he’s better suited as a drummer. The whole reason why Foo Fighters got together in the first place had just stemmed from a goofy idea of the frontman wanting to try out some songs at a studio, so it’s no surprise that most of his “features” tend to focus on the drums, whether it’s sitting in with Queens of the Stone Age for a record or adding an organic feel to a Nine Inch Nails project.
As far as Grohl was concerned, all of those vocal ad-libs were reserved for the rockstars of the world. But the Foo Fighters frontman was a musician before anything else, and given the choice, he will always fall back on the gig that made him a star in the first place.
