The 1983 album Dave Grohl will never get tired of: “I know every lick”
From the first time he started playing music, Dave Grohl has wanted to do anything and everything he can with as many musicians as he can.
There aren’t many pieces of his career that haven’t become legendary in their own right, but even if you take Foo Fighters out of the equation, being able to play with Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, Nirvana, and Nine Inch Nails would be good enough for any other musician to live with the rest of their lives. But Grohl felt that there were many bands that weren’t as legendary that took up a lot more space in his heart than anyone else.
Because even though Grohl is the epitome of that one genuine rock and roll fan that everyone loves to hang with, he isn’t known for talking only about Zeppelin and Rush every single time he plays one of his records. He had a great deal of respect for a lot of bands, but the way that he operated had a lot more to do with the kind of musicians that he grew up listening to when he was still a kid growing up in Virginia.
And since his home wasn’t all that far away from Washington DC, Grohl was immersed in everything that the hardcore punk scene was doing around that time. That was the kind of music that caught Nirvana’s attention when he was playing in the band Scream, but there weren’t many more people that Grohl saw as heroes that weren’t necessarily as big as your Jimmy Pages or Paul McCartneys.
These people were salt-of-the-earth players who were doing everything they could to stay above water, and for Grohl, that was all he could have wanted. If he could live his life being half the badass that Ian MacKaye was throughout his career, he would have been completely happy, but in terms of raw energy, nothing else seemed to have the kind of performance he was looking for as much as Bad Brains did.
They were already legends of the punk rock scene long before Grohl became one of the biggest names in the genre, but a lot of their music was a lot more sophisticated than everyone realised. HR seemed like he was about to spontaneously combust every single time he took to the stage, but when you looked at the back of the stage, you would have seen Earl Hudson behind the kit playing away like it was nothing.
Hudson had come from the same school as the true drum technicians, and Grohl was transfixed with every single lick that he played on Rock for Light, saying, “There weren’t too many kids in the punk rock scene that weren’t influenced by Rock for Light. You had to have that record. I know every drum lick off that record and I’ve known it since I was 14. Every single one of their songs, front to back, from listening to Earl. Earl didn’t flail around. He just played like it was nothing.”
And while Grohl is much more animated whenever he gets behind the drum kit, there is a bit of that technical proficiency in a lot of what he would do later. Nothing that Nirvana ever played was meant to be too terribly complicated, but compared to the rapid-fire drumming that Grohl had done in Scream, a lot of what he was doing on Nevermind was writing the arrangements from the back of the stage, just like Hudson had done.
It was never going to be easy for him to copy those licks, but once you have them in your DNA, it’s hard to really let them go. And for someone who valued the song over everything else, Grohl felt that there was no one who could possibly touch the kind of tunes that Bad Brains were doing when they had someone that technical behind them.
