“It doesn’t get any better”: the best collaborator Dave Grohl ever worked with
The art behind any good rock song is that feeling of collaboration. It might be fun watching an original song come to fruition on your own, but the minute that other people start playing along to it, it’s like watching them breathe life into what you created. But even for someone who works so well with others, Dave Grohl is usually more than happy to do some stuff on his own if he feels he’s the right guy for the job.
Going back to the first Foo Fighters record, Grohl was content to play every single tune by himself, and the fact that he has a band helping him fill out the sound on the record is almost a courtesy to some of his friends. Over the years, though, the non-Grohl members have become as integral to the band as he has.
While the frontman is known to write all of the songs and arrange most of them in his head before he even walks into the studio, he seems to have his bandmates there as certain shades of colour that he could add to the mix. Sure, he could make a noisy guitar solo if he wanted to, but he probably couldn’t get it to sound as nasty as Pat Smear could, or make some lightning-fast lick sing the same way Chris Shiflett can. When talking about their greatest people in the studio, though, there are many honorary Foo Fighters in the mix as well.
Aside from having icons like Gil Norton and Greg Kurstin in the studio with them, Sonic Highways was the perfect opportunity for them to work with whomever they wanted to. Some faces were familiar to rock fans like Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick and David Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Visconti, but hearing someone like Zac Brown play a sweeping classical-style solo was a definite change of pace compared to what they had been working on.
“[When] John Paul Jones is coming in to jam with my band, it’s great to experience that ‘thing’ with other people.”
Dave Grohl
However, the true start of their collaboration with people began all the way at the start of the 2000s. Bringing in Brian May from Queen on 2002’s One By One was almost a power move, but by the time they worked on In Your Honour, the second disc gave them a lot more friends in high places, whether that was Norah Jones bringing a softer flair to their songs or Josh Homme accompanying them on ‘Razor’.
For any self-respecting rock fan, though, Grohl knew that nothing was ever going to beat working with John Paul Jones on the arrangements to his songs, saying, “[When] John Paul Jones is coming in to jam with my band, it’s great to experience that ‘thing’ with other people. And when you get someone like John Paul Jones coming into your studio to play on your song, and I’m sitting there showing him how to play a song I’ve written – it doesn’t get any better than that.”
Considering he had come from the session scene before Led Zeppelin, though, Jonesy had a great way of fitting into the band’s musical framework on the flipside of their double album. The whole thing was meant to be more low-key, and while Jones could play the heaviest music possible, it was also fun for him to break out the mandolin and make something that didn’t exactly fit into the equation work in the right way.
But that’s the mark of any great artist. Anyone can spend their lives trying to get great at any one genre, but looking at how Grohl has varied up his catalogue by working with everyone from Queens of the Stone Age to Tenacious D to jamming with boygenius, he’s more than happy to follow Jonesy’s lead by becoming a musical Swiss army knife outside of his main gig.
