“That feeling”: the one artist that renewed Dave Grohl’s faith in music
It was going to take a miracle to get Dave Grohl out of his self-imposed exile after Nirvana. Music has been like a salvation for him, and when Kurt Cobain left this Earth so suddenly in 1994, it felt like going back to music would be like tearing open a raw wound all over again. Although Foo Fighters’ debut was put together for Grohl’s own fun, he knew that he had a way forward when working with this punk legend.
Because punk was the one thing that Grohl could always rely on. He had already cut his teeth in the hardcore band Scream, so it wasn’t out of the question for him to be well-versed in everything from Melvins to Bad Brains to Iggy Pop material at the drop of a hat if the time called for it.
When he first started making waves in the underground scene with Foo Fighters, though, Grohl never expected to be greeted with open arms by the public. He was only starting a new band that everyone else would have done, which meant starting at the club circuit and working his way up one gig at a time.
If there was one person who knew that grind like the back of his hand, though, it was Mike Watt. After founding punk legends Minutemen, Watt was still gigging up and down the underground clubs when Grohl asked him if he would take Foo Fighters out on their first tour once the lineup was finalised.
And looking at the way that they played, this was practically a who’s who of talent across the punk scene. Outside of having Grohl and Pat Smear in Foo Fighters, it wasn’t out of the question for them to hop onstage with Watt during his show, practically serving as his backup band whenever he performed right after finishing their set.
Even though Grohl still had a lot of learning to do before embracing the role of being a frontman, he knew that learning from Watt was a godsend after going through the hell of losing Cobain, saying, “Being around [Minutemen’s] Mike Watt in the studio for just one day renewed that feeling of excitement. He started talking about putting a tour together. We had this red Dodge extended van that we called Big Red Delicious. That tour brought a lot of it back together. We were playing three sets a night for 12 days in a row, with a ten-hour drive every night.”
Grohl wasn’t the only one in need of a pick-me-up, either. Since Pearl Jam was going through internal shakeups and getting increasingly uncomfortable with fame, Eddie Vedder joined the tour with his side project Hovercraft, usually sharing CB radios with Grohl when touring through the middle of nowhere.
But for anyone who was interested, this was not supposed to be the lighter version of a grunge tour. No one in Seattle was ready for the kind of attention that their city got, and from the minute that Grohl or Vedder stepped out on that stage, it was never about trying to make millions of dollars. Everything revolved around playing music to the people directly, and with Watt leading the charge during every set, this tour could have easily been a recovery program for Grohl before jumping into the mainstream once again.
