The Beatles album Dave Grohl called “timeless”
Dave Grohl, the former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman, is a bonafide rock nerd. In interviews, he is the music equivalent of Quentin Tarantino, always keen to discuss bands of all sub-genres and degrees of obscurity. Whether it’s The Beatles or the Butthole Surfers, Grohl is always ready to pour his heart out.
While his most apparent inspiration pool resides in the classic heavy rock of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, Grohl was always an avid follower of The Beatles. As a child, he listened to his Beatles records on repeat and learned the drums by playing along to Ringo Starr’s beat. He’s also a big fan of 1980s pop icon Prince.
After the ‘Purple Rain’ singer covered Foo Fighters’ ‘Best of You’ at the 2007 Super Bowl, Grohl explained that he had been shocked. “As my tears hit the keyboard like the Miami rain that night, I realised that this was without a doubt my proudest musical achievement,” he wrote in Dave’s True Stories. “All of those years spent in my bedroom practising alone to Beatles records, sleeping in cold, infested squats on winter fan tours across Europe, battering my drums until my hands literally bled… it all paid off in this moment.”
Ostensibly, one of the Beatles records Grohl drummed along to in his youth was the epic double LP of 1968, The Beatles. More commonly known as “The White Album”, this release is divisive owing to its astonishing breadth. The record sweeps from the quaint beauty of ‘Blackbird’ to the bouncing oafishness of ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, and from George Harrison’s classy ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ to the abstract pastures of John Lennon’s ‘Revolution 9’. Grohl, like most of the album’s endorsers, was attracted to this unmitigated eclecticism.
Picking The Beatles out as one of his top ten favourite albums of all time in a 2000 interview with Melody Maker, the Foo Fighters singer said: “What year did this come out? I think I was a glimpse of hope in my parents’ eyes, but this has some of my favourite Beatles songs on it: ‘Blackbird’, ‘Revolution 9’, ‘Revolution’, ‘Helter Skelter’.”
Continuing, Grohl affectionately addressed the Fab Four, wondering how they evolved from such twee beginnings. “It’s funny to imagine those four cute little Beatles years later on LSD,” he said. “Where did they go wrong, writing something like ‘Helter Skelter’ and influencing Charles Manson? I’d call this timeless.”
‘Helter Skelter’, one of the tracks Grohl pulled aside for special praise, was written by Paul McCartney in reaction to The Who’s heavy rock sound. The classic track is often cited as a key moment in the genesis of the heavy metal and punk genres and was famously coerced by Siouxsie and the Banshees on their 1978 debut album, The Scream.
