“They kicked ass”: The band Dave Grohl said was miles better than Van Halen
The festival circuit can almost feel like a musical gauntlet whenever someone first takes the stage. The whole point behind any great rock and roll show is to leave the audience shellshocked, so if there are four other bands on a bill with you, it’s important to give the crowd the kind of experience that they’ll never be able to forget and leaves the other bands shaking in their boots before they walk onstage. Although Dave Grohl has since taken to treating every single stadium show like one enormous rock and roll party, he knew enough to realise when some bands went down in flames.
But when Grohl first started making music with Scream, it was never about the competitiveness of rock and roll. The whole spirit of punk rock was about having a ton of passion behind what everyone was playing, and as long as someone could see Grohl giving everything he could to his music, that was more than enough to endear him to Kurt Cobain when he finally got the call to join Nirvana.
As the band started to blow up, though, their outlook on performing was always a little bit different. Anyone would have been thrilled to see them live, but there was no telling when a show would be transcendent and when it would be an absolute trainwreck. It may have been a bit of a gamble not knowing what you were going to see, but that was always a part of the band’s charm as well.
In many ways, they were the anti-rock and roll outfit. There was no reason for them to be playing the same stages that housed bands like Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, so the only way for them to have fun was to take the piss out of rock and roll, whether that meant Cobain butchering songs he didn’t like playing or destroying his instruments like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Grohl was more than happy to go along with it, but he still had an appreciation for what a great rock and roll show could be. He always knelt at the altar of bands like Led Zeppelin, but once he started focusing on what hard rock bands could do, he remembered one of the greatest performances he ever saw came from Scorpions when they were playing the Monsters of Rock festival.
The German metal titans may have had stiff competition in Van Halen, but for Grohl, they wiped the floor with the ‘Van Hagar’ version of the band, saying, “I didn’t go to a proper ‘rock concert’ till I was like 19, it was the Monsters of Rock with Van Halen, The Scorpions, The Scorpions were pretty great they kicked ass but Van Halen were just kinda crusty.”
Then again, both bands operated on two completely different playing fields at the time. OU812 was one of the most fractured albums during the band’s stint with Sammy Hagar, and given the fact that Scorpions were about to join Roger Waters during his performance of The Wall in Berlin one year later, it was clear that they were battle-tested before they had even set foot on the stage that night.
Beyond their performance capabilities, Scorpions were much different from anything Van Halen put out. Eddie channelled all of his emotion into crafting the perfect guitar part on every tune, but when listening to albums like Blackout, Scorpions were a well-oiled machine before they even hit the stage every night.
