The Foo Fighters member Dave Grohl resented for years
Dave Grohl always comes from a place of fun whenever making his classic records.
As much as the process may feel like work when scrounging for that last guitar riff that’s lying around, Grohl knows that the best way to process that frustration is by channelling it into the songs rather than sitting around and wondering when inspiration is going to strike. But that’s a lot easier said than done when you’re the person who has sole ownership of nearly everything that a band like Foo Fighters does.
Because if he really wanted to, Grohl could have easily called the band ‘The Dave Grohl Experience’ and no one would bat an eye. He was the star of the show who wrote all of the songs most of the time, and even if Taylor Hawkins or Pat Smear contributed some fantastic lines to his songs, the idea of him striking out on his own and making a solo album would just seem silly knowing that he could easily create something even more potent with his friends.
After all, that’s how he started. The whole point behind Foo Fighters in the beginning was for Grohl to get his songs out there, and once things started to gain some traction, he figured the next best thing was for him to assemble a band around him whenever they played live. Pat Smear was in, but after Sunny Day Real Estate broke up for the first time, Grohl had finally found his rhythm section.
Nate Mendel and William Goldsmith worked perfectly well live, but while the bassist was willing to put in the hours when tracking some of the band’s biggest songs, Goldsmith wasn’t so lucky. Grohl is clinically meticulous about how he wants some of his songs to sound, and even if a band is about compromise, he wasn’t going to roll over for the sake of Goldsmith playing the songs the way he wanted them to be played.
Even though Goldsmith was let go purely on a musical basis, Grohl had a lot more hostility towards Smear when he decided to quit. The pressures of being in a rock band had become too much for him, and as much as he loved playing with Grohl, the guitarist didn’t have it in him to commit to another worldwide tour and exhaust himself playing the same songs over and over again.
While Grohl eventually hired Franz Stahl for a few months before letting him go, the frontman did have some resentment sticking with him for years, saying in 2000, “Pat left the band…it wasn’t a musical decision at all – it didn’t have to do with the band, it had to do with my wife actually. The Pat thing was too fucked up. The last time we saw each other, we almost got into a fight. I almost…What do you do when you go through a divorce and one of your band members decides to quit the band because he likes your wife better than you? You start thinking, ‘OK, well, I think I wanna kick your ass.’”
Then again, Smear didn’t harbour hard feelings for that long. By the time he started seeing the band build their momentum, he made up with Grohl long enough to join them on acoustic guitar for the live album Skin and Bones and ultimately worked his way back into the band when working on the album Wasting Light.
Grohl may see the Foos as a family dynamic these days, but the entire reason why is because of all the scars he had to put on himself to get the band off the ground in the first place. It would never be a cakewalk living in the shadow of Nirvana, but bringing in some of his best friends to help him through those dark times is why he can still play music today.
