The guitarist Foo Fighters said was out of their league: “Everyone’s jaws hit the floor”
When Foo Fighters first began, there’s a good chance Dave Grohl didn’t know what the hell he was in for.
The idea of continuing after the dissolution of Nirvana felt impossible, and even if there was a way for him to break free, who was going to be the one that shouted the praises of a singing drummer? He wasn’t exactly going to be Phil Collins once he stepped in front of the microphone, but it turned out that all he needed to do was show people the heart that he still had for music when that first record came out.
Because from the first time he picked up a drumstick, Grohl was transparent about not having any kind of formal musical training. He was great at playing with the right people, but when looking at the first handful of Foo Fighters records, it’s not like they’re jam packed with different progressive sections or strange time signatures. He was still looking to make straight ahead rock and roll, but every album needed to make sure that the guitars were as loud as possible right out of the gate.
Which is half the reason why Grohl and Taylor Hawkins used to fight every single time they went to mix a record. There was never any reason to silence one of the greatest drummers that rock had ever seen, but since Grohl likes to treat every guitar part like a drumset, he needed to make sure everyone could hear each section so that everything would work together. No one wants to hear only one guitar line in ‘The Pretender’, and all three of the six-string legends in the band bring their own spin to every track.
Grohl is great at playing rhythm guitar up the middle, but Chris Shiflett and Pat Smear are two sides of the same coin. Whereas Shiflett is the one known for making some of the cleanest leads on their records, Smear was always the punk in the group, and hearing his wall of noise every single time he plays is what gives albums like Wasting Light the edge that they need to hold together.
But if they held together as a unit, they were bound to be put through their paces when working on Sonic Highways. It’s one thing trying to internalise the sound of every city that they went to, but even when someone like Joe Walsh created the perfect atmospheric solo to a song like ‘Outside’, getting Gary Clark Jr to work with them during their trip to Austin was a lot more than they had bargained for.
The song ‘What Did I Do/God As My Witness’ is a decent Foo Fighters deep cut, but by the time that Clark showed up with no guitar, hearing him wail away was enough to humble every member of the band, with Grohl saying, “Pat, hands him a new Gibson SG he just bought. Gary picks it up, plays three takes, and everyone’s jaws hit the floor. He doesn’t even know the song. His soul is coming out of a guitar he’s never even met before. It was so mind-blowing that Pat handed him the guitar and said, ‘You know what, man? Just keep it. It’s never going to do that again.’”
Then again, Clark’s approach to all rock and roll was all about the passion behind every note he played. He was coming from the Stevie Ray Vaughan school of playing every single note like it’s the last thing you’ll ever get to play, and whether he playing his solo material, guesting with the Foos, or paying tribute to his other musical heroes, you’re never going to hear him reacting to everything the rest of the band is playing whenever he gets a guitar in his hands.
He may have been a few years younger than the other members of the Foos, but the kind of chemistry that they had was something that Clark had been working on ever since his teens. No one can fake that kind of passion, and even without his own guitar, Clark could bring his musical soul into just about anything he touched.
