The album Dave Grohl wished he could record: “Great melodic importance”
Dave Grohl grew up as a rock and roll student through most of his career. He never claimed to be the best academic in the world, but when he had teachers like John Lennon and Paul McCartney guiding him through the ins and outs of writing a song, he knew he could make something that no one else had ever thought of before. When looking at his more recent output, though, Grohl had turned to The Zombies as the model for how any of his records should sound.
But Grohl’s pedigree wasn’t just limited to pop-flavoured rock made famous in the 1960s. He was a punk at heart, and no matter how many melodic pieces he had in his DNA, he could create the nastiest riff known to man when he wanted to on tracks like ‘Low’ off of One by One or the stoner metal freakout ‘Weenie Beenie’ from Foo Fighters’ debut record.
It’s not that Grohl didn’t have the chops to pull it off, either. Before he had even signed on as the drummer for Nirvana, he had already started making waves in Scream, which took the same rock and roll swagger and paired it with the reckless abandon of hardcore punk, almost as if he was hyped up on caffeine every time he stepped behind the kit.
Around the time of In Your Honour, something started to change in Grohl. He was still the same songwriter we once knew, but the second half of the record was like night and day compared to the arena rock side. This was a mellow look into singer-songwriter territory, going so far as to use a handful of Americana instruments like mandolin and bring in people like Norah Jones to play on a track.
If they worked better in two halves, what would happen when they put it all together for Echoes Silence Patience and Grace? Although ‘The Pretender’ was a good proof of concept, having both styles on top of each other made for one of the more interesting records Foo Fighters ever made, but Grohl was still a student of Odyssey and Oracle at the time.
While nowhere near as enduring as the Fab Four, the Zombies’ magnus opus took the core pieces of pop rock and gave a melodic sheen to everything. From ‘She’s Not There’ to ‘This Will Be Our Year’, there’s hardly a note out of place on it, whether that’s a guitar line coming in at just the right moment or a vocal line that never gets old.
For Grohl, this was a record that needed to be studied and understood, saying, “The album I listened to most when recording Echoes was Odyssey And Oracle by The Zombies. I wish we could record an album that was as brilliant as that. You know, something that has great melodic importance.”
Then again, limiting Grohl to just that one sound probably wouldn’t be enough for him, either. Looking at where he’s gone since then with Sonic Highways and the harrowing journey it took to make But Here We Are, Grohl has never been satisfied with just one sound, and even though Odyssey and Oracle is a solid piece of his history, he has continued to evolve well beyond that one record.
