Sunny Day Real Estate: the band that almost ended Foo Fighters
Toward the end of 1994, Dave Grohl had seen his entire musical world fall apart. Although he may have started the year a part of the biggest bands in the world with Nirvana, the death of Kurt Cobain snuffed out any chance he had of becoming one of the biggest stars on the planet. Grohl was back at zero, but things slowly started to change when he put together the first pieces of Foo Fighters.
Recording every song on the band’s debut album by himself, Grohl eventually assembled a band to play with him on the road, hashing out the songs. While Pat Smear of The Germs and Nirvana fame was on board, Grohl found the rest of the band when catching the group Sunny Day Real Estate, recalling in Back and Forth, “Someone told me Sunny Day Real Estate was playing a show, and it was going to be their last show because they were breaking up. And I kept thinking to myself, ‘That’s a really good rhythm section.’”
Drafting in Nate Mendel on bass and William Goldsmith on drums, the band soldiered on during the band’s first club tour. Although it seemed like everything was working out, Grohl hit a stumbling block when recording The Colour and the Shape, having to rerecord every one of Goldsmith’s drum parts because they weren’t working with what he heard in his head.
Quitting on the spot, Goldsmith left and was swiftly replaced by Taylor Hawkins. Although Grohl found a way to soldier on after losing Goldsmith, things took a turn for the worse when Smear quit the band, with Franz Stahl taking over on guitar before also being asked to leave when things didn’t gel.
While Mandel always stayed in the fold, there was one moment when his old band called back to him, remembering, “Sunny Day Real Estate had gotten back together, and I had a sort-of weird high school crush feeling towards that project”. Not wanting to deal with the drama of Foo Fighters, Mendel initially called Grohl to tell him that he was leaving for his old band.
This turned out to be the last straw, with Grohl saying, “At this point when hearing someone tell me they had to leave the band, my response was, ‘okay, why?’. I was fucking pissed. I told him, ‘You know what? You tell everybody that you quit the band. I’m going to get drunk.’” After having some time to think it over, though, Mendel realised he made a terrible mistake, eventually calling Grohl up the next day to say that he had changed his mind.
As Grohl remembers: “I stumbled home into the bed that I slept in when I was a kid and woke up at seven in the morning to my mom saying, ‘David, Nate’s on the phone’. He’s like, ‘I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know what I was thinking’. I was still wasted, too, I was just saying, ‘I love you, man. I’m glad you don’t want to quit.”
Since then, Mendel has become a senior member of Foo Fighters, being the longest-lasting member of the band outside of Grohl. Although everything about the band could have ended instantly with that phone call, Mendel knew that working with an artist of Grohl’s stature was too good an opportunity to pass up.
