“The most insane drum beat”: the song Dave Grohl thought was impossible to play
Nothing is really out of the question for drumming when Dave Grohl is behind the drumkit. Even though he could easily play the same drum fills that John Bonham played in Led Zeppelin and hold his own, he was far more interested in seeing how he could blend every genre under the sun and still make it sound like the heaviest drumbeat anyone had ever heard. But when he got an equally talented partner in Josh Homme, Grohl admitted that he may have got overambitious when working with Them Crooked Vultures.
When they first decided to form a group, Them Crooked Vultures already had a lot of qualifiers to live up to. Grohl and Homme had already jammed together as part of Songs for the Deaf, but now, with John Paul Jones holding down bass duties, it felt like whatever came out was almost required to have some kind of punch to it.
It’s not really fair to hold a band to that high a standard, but their only record satisfies that niche to a tee. Tunes like ‘Dead End Friends’ have that same kind of primal stomp that all of Zeppelin’s greatest tunes had, and kicking things off with ‘Nobody Loves Me and Neither Do I’ reminded everyone that the man behind Queens of the Stone Age hadn’t lost that grit in his guitar tone.
But no part of this album was supposed to have any connective tissue to any of the members’ other outfits. None of these were destined to sound like Foo Fighters’ material or anything, and despite the massive arrangements that he brought to Zeppelin tunes, Jonesy’s showcases on the clavinet on certain songs feel like they should have turned up on one of his solo projects rather than anything associated with Robert Plant.
Grohl should have had no problem switching up his rhythmic flow or anything. He had worked with everyone from Nirvana to Tenacious D to Nine Inch Nails, but the song ‘Reptiles’ may have been his breaking point when he found a beat that was physically impossible for him to pull off.
When talking about the arrangement, Grohl said that Homme’s idea of translating a beat that he made in GarageBand was absolute murder to internalise, saying, “It was the most insane drum beat I’d ever heard; it sounded like a fax machine. And he said, ‘Here, learn this.’ It’s like if you asked me to read you a paragraph in Japanese or something, I just can’t do it. I can’t read music, so I have to memorise everything I play. I tried, and it was so bizarre, just arbitrary random bullshit, and I wanted to give up ten times, and then I got it.”
When he finally found his groove, Grohl was about as steady as the machine he talked about. The whole thing does sound like it’s in some convoluted time signature, but once Homme lays his vocal on top of everything, it seems to fall into place in the same way that a progressive rock song might tie itself together.
But Them Crooked Vultures never had aspirations to put together tracks with eight complex sections within the span of one song. It was about how the music moved them, and hearing ‘Reptiles’ was the moment when they realised they could find their groove even with the trickiest rhythms in front of them.
