The group Dave Grohl crowned the only band a kid needs: “The blueprint for the rock band”
Dave Grohl could probably be considered a walking encyclopedia of all things rock music nowadays.
He may have gotten his start trying to play the most abrasive music possible in the punk underground, but his penchant for massive hooks and working with nearly every band under the sun has given him the kind of rap sheet and experience of four different musicians in one person.
For every collaboration he has made with everyone from Nine Inch Nails to David Bowie to Queens of the Stone Age, Grohl said that all rock bands circle back to what The Beatles started.
If you were to listen to Grohl’s first band, Scream, this seems like the last band that would have seen the Fab Four as a legitimate inspiration. Hardcore punk was all about rebelling against the pretty sounds of rock and roll, so why not go for broke with pure adrenaline and play as loud as you can?
Whereas playing in Scream was enough for Grohl to get by for a while, Nirvana gave him a better outlet for the melodic side of his playing. It’s hard to really express yourself as a drummer when your mission is to just play fast. Still, Kurt Cobain’s love of John Lennon’s work opened up the grunge superstars to mainstream audiences, usually balancing out heart with aggression on ‘Come As You Are’ and ‘In Bloom’.
Before any of that had started, Grohl was still trying to flex his songwriting chops on his own. And when you look at some of those first songs that he eventually put out, like ‘Marigold’, you can see the folksier side of what The Beatles had done in its delivery, albeit with not nearly as many inventive chord changes or complex harmonies.
Even when working in Foo Fighters, Grohl admits that anything anyone needs to know about being in a rock band comes from The Beatles, telling Anderson Cooper, “The Beatles really created the blueprint for the rock band. They were four members, and each of them were brilliant musicians and songwriters. As a kid, that’s just how I learned how to be a musician. I had a guitar and a Beatles songbook. And still, to this day, I think that’s all a kid needs to learn how to play music.”
Grohl’s comments also underline how deeply embedded The Beatles remain within the DNA of modern rock music. For generations of musicians, their catalogue has functioned almost like a foundational textbook, teaching aspiring artists everything from chord progressions and melody writing to arrangement and harmony, regardless of what genre they eventually gravitate towards.
It’s not like Grohl is off the mark when announcing them to the first real rock band. Every act that had come before the Fab Four in the public eye had been a solo artist, so having four people in a row out on the stage gave fans sensory overload when seeing what they saw as four different versions of Elvis Presley.
The collaborative nature of The Beatles also helped establish the modern idea of what a rock band could be. Rather than revolving entirely around one dominant frontman, each member contributed a distinct personality and musical voice, creating a dynamic that countless groups, including Foo Fighters, would later attempt to emulate in their own way.
While the crux of Foo Fighters’ greatest songs tend to pull from every piece of rock’s past, some of their biggest hits are the ones that tend to pull from rock’s past. ‘Everlong’ does have that kind of hook-driven sensibility, and ‘Big Me’ from the first album is basically as if Paul McCartney’s trademark whimsy was all shoehorned into two minutes. But Grohl isn’t looking to just crib from The Beatles whenever he gets the chance. When you have artists that are that omnipresent in culture, you usually end up ripping them off without even trying.
