The 1995 album Dave Grohl wanted to record again: “We should do it”
Dave Grohl didn’t form Foo Fighters to be the same kind of rock and roll band he had already seen on MTV.
They weren’t quite the kind of artistic wonders that Nirvana were when they first started, but looking through their discography, Grohl at least wanted to try and take chances on every one of his albums, even if the end result didn’t exactly sound great when they were finished. But even if he could look back at his career with love, his band were quick to shoot him down when he began getting a little bit too nostalgic.
Because regardless of what they had made before, every Foo Fighters record was meant to be something that fans hadn’t heard before. They weren’t exactly the most eclectic band of all time, but the fact that they could still make something that sounded raw and honest all the way up to an album like But Here We Are is really commendable compared to other bands that spend the lion’s share of their career on autopilot.
Each album was a new creative endeavour for them, which is really saying something since the whole thing started in some random studio that Grohl rented out for a few days. Even though the band’s self-titled debut album is one of the best records in their catalogue, it technically isn’t supposed to exist. Grohl was only looking to make a demo of his songs and put a band together for the road, but when they began gaining traction, that first record was only the cassette recordings that he had made.
That’s half the reason why it sounds so great, though. You can feel the intimacy of Grohl being in the studio by himself hashing out the songs that he had written during his time in Nirvana. A lot of his songwriting lessons may have been refined by watching Kurt Cobain for all those years, but there’s also a bit more grit behind what Grohl was doing. You weren’t going to hear ‘Weenie Beenie’ on a Nirvana project, but while the album is perfect the way it is, Grohl felt that he could do better with everyone behind him.
His initial plan was to go back to that record and play the whole thing again with the full band behind him, but he eventually got talked down by his bandmates, saying, “At one point I thought, ‘You know what would be really funny? To re-record the first Foo Fighters record as the band we are now’ — ‘cos the first record isn’t the Foo Fighters, it’s just me. Taylor [Hawkins] was like, ‘Are you out of your f–king mind?! That’s the worst idea ever! People would f–king hate it!’ And Pat [Smear] said, ‘That’s exactly why we should do it!’”
Granted, it’s not like that’s an unfounded idea. You have to remember this was back when they had Hawkins behind the drumkit, and since he was one of the biggest powerhouses in rock, it would have made sense to give the album a bit more punch. At the same time, expecting Grohl to sound exactly the way he did when he was still in his 20s just wouldn’t have been fair, and the audience would have definitely noticed him sounding a bit more rough around the edges every time he sang ‘I’ll Stick Around’.
And without putting too fine a point on it, that solo recording is a lot more moody than anything he would make with the band. He was still processing a lot of the grief from losing his other band, and when looking through songs like ‘X-Static’ and ‘Exhausted’, you can hear the kind of sound that he was going for that had some connective tissue back to those initial sessions for songs like ‘You Know You’re Right’.
So even if the band did go through and record the entire album again, there was no way that they were repeating the kind of magic that Grohl had on his initial demo. Those were the recordings that made him pick up the phone and turn down Tom Petty’s offer to be his drummer, so they had to be working with something a little bit more than just a bunch of decent alt-rock riffs.
