The album Dave Grohl has listened to “thousands of times”
These days, most people think of Dave Grohl as the bloke leading Foo Fighters. And fair play – he is. But that’s only scratching the surface, really.
Grohl actually first started out behind the drum kit, combining disco swing with punk rock and spending four years hitting the hi-hats for a little-known band called Nirvana. Grohl was fierce and ferocious and had a deadly discipline in keeping in time and experimenting with rhythm.
By many, he’s branded a genius on the drums. In the same way that society is newly obsessed with our favourite musicians’ new musical obsession (don’t tell me you haven’t seen the huge load of copycat newsletters that promise to send recommendations from your favourite celeb right to your email inbox?), one might learn to heed the interests of Grohl with an intense interest.
And there was one album above all that Grohl couldn’t get enough of. Consume something enough and you’ll start echoing the key characteristics of the art, whether you intend to or not. So this album of Dave’s choosing isn’t just a great recommendation for when you don’t know what to pop on Spotify, but it’s also a way into his musical outputs, another key to unlock the Grohl genius.
Grohl has spoken plenty about influences on his sound, and it isn’t recognised enough that the man has a vast and varied list. He’s even praised ‘Gangnam Style’ before, though that does sound like a stretch. For most, it was a glitchy annoyance you’d quickly flick past on the radio channel. For Grohl, it was his “favourite song of the year.” No, I’m not joking.
Thankfully, the album he has spun the most isn’t quite so left-field. Rather, Grohl once made the bold claim that “John Bonham is the greatest rock drummer of all time.”
Bonham, the late Led Zeppelin drummer, brought everything and more to his instrument. Grohl ruminated, “Bonham played directly from the heart. His drumming was by no means perfect, but when he hit a groove it was so deep it was like a heartbeat. He had this manic sense of cacophony, but he also had the ultimate feel. He could swing, he could get on top, or he could pull back.”
The Foo Fighters frontman has widely shared his adoration for the drummer, who passed away before Grohl had officially climbed up the ranks of fame. He even took his grief to the page and wrote the foreword for Bonham’s biography. What a great thing, to take your own limelight and parcel a portion of it over to one of your key inspirations so that their legacy lives on.
As such, the album he has listened to again and again in a delusional fervour was a project that posited Bonham’s unique drumming front and centre. Grohl admitted, “Led Zeppelin, and John Bonham’s drumming especially, opened up my ears. I didn’t truly discover Led Zeppelin until I was 16. I was into hardcore punk rock; reckless, powerful drumming, a beat that sounded like a shotgun firing in a cement cellar.”
Still, serendipitously, Grohl made his way to the band. “But when CDs first came out in the 1980s the first one I listened to was Houses Of The Holy. It changed everything. I played that CD thousands of times. I listened so hard I could hear the kick drum pedal squeaking!”
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